Claim the Future

Site B group (Kostas Amoiropoulos (Greece and Norway), Adam Bethlenfalvy (Hungary), Chris Cooper (UK and China), David Davis (UK), and Cao Xi (China) are inviting you to sign up if you are interested in participating in a position webinar. The Statement is an invitation to join together in force to create a community of educators, drama teachers and teaching artists in general better prepared for the social world that is already here and the one that lies immediately ahead. We will be running seminars in each country in the language of that country to re-focus our drama and theatre education work. An aim will be to establish a newsletter which anyone who has joined us can contribute to and also establish an online
platform. The billionaires and soon to be trillionaires are shaping the future to their own disastrous ends. In Naomi Klein’s words, we are heading for ‘End Times Fascism’. That is a fascism that has no future but enslavement as providers of wealth for the super-rich. We say we must work with young people through our art form of drama to claim the future.

Feeling Our Way Forward: A Statement for Drama Education in an Age of Crisis

In an era marked by political extremism, ecological collapse, mass displacement, and technological encroachment, the human world is experiencing an unprecedented crisis of meaning and relationships. Affect – our capacity to feel, to be moved, to respond viscerally to the world – is being exploited, suppressed, misdirected, and replaced by mechanistic or commodified substitutes. Against this backdrop, this statement asserts the urgent necessity of reclaiming affect as the foundation of human consciousness, human agency, and human education, and especially of re-centring affect at the heart of educational drama and theatre.

Across the political sphere, affect is weaponised by far-right movements who understand its power to create belonging, unity, and identity – albeit in forms rooted in hatred and fear. “Lock her up!”, “Send them back!”, “Make America great again!”: these are affective interventions before they are ideological propositions. Likewise, the accelerating collapse of social and ecological systems evokes profound emotional states: panic, grief, rage, helplessness, that shape political consciousness before cognition can intervene.

Children and young people are growing up amid ecological anxiety, political volatility, economic precarity, and algorithmically mediated emotional life. Their affects are constantly stimulated, commodified, distorted, and steered by platforms that reward speed, fear, outrage, performance, and conformity. At the same time, spaces for slow, embodied, relational exploration of feeling are shrinking.

Thus, educational drama and theatre become not merely artforms or teaching tools, but political and ethical acts; a commitment to cultivating humanising consciousness at a moment when global systems encourage numbness, distraction, and dehumanisation. By engaging deeply with the emotional life of participants through a fictional context, drama can resist the flattening effects of neoliberal culture and AI-driven cognition, and hold open a space for authentic human presence and solidarity.

No one experiences the extremity of this time of breakdown, crisis, and possibility more than the children and young people whose future has been traded in return for the short-term extraction of profit and accumulation of colossal wealth by the elite 1%. We have a responsibility through our work to assist them with making sense of their situation. To do this we must reclaim the centrality of feeling: not as indulgence, but as resistance; not as fragility, but as the basis of consciousness; not as private sentiment, but as a foundation for collective action and social optimism. Educational drama and theatre, grounded in genuine
affective experience, stand as one of the most potent tools for renewing our humanity in a world that urgently needs it.

Drama and theatre educators are participants in the global struggle for a viable human future. By nurturing affective consciousness, drama contributes to the broader fight against nihilism, disconnection, hatred, and political manipulation. Against these developments, this statement positions educational drama and theatre as a crucial space for cultivating, deepening, and humanising affect. This statement declares:

• Affect is foundational to consciousness.
  Feeling precedes thought and grounds the possibility of ethical, reflective, and
  responsible human action.

• Drama must unapologetically foreground affect.
  Drama is the art of feeling thoughtfully – not thinking about feeling, but experiencing
  feeling in embodied, relational, and meaningful forms.

• Human emotional life is culturally shaped and must be ethically cultivated.
  Drama offers a rare pedagogical environment where social emotions – compassion,
  indignation, grief, solidarity – can be explored and expanded.

• The arts are essential for resisting the dehumanisation of contemporary society.
  Against the rise of AI-mediated cognition and the decline of expressive arts, drama
  asserts the necessity of human creative engagement.

To register an interest in receiving information about the position webinar and future
seminars and joint work please sign up here!