EUphoric Youth
Art Therapy Force is participating in the four-year European collaboration project EUphoric Youth (2026–2029), supported by the EU’s Creative Europe program.
The project’s ambitions are vast, and its spirit is experimental. It is coordinated by Rosendal Theatre in Norway and being carried out in collaboration with leading theatres, performing arts organizations and festivals in Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Ukraine.
Young people set the agenda
In late 2026, we will publish an open call for seven teenagers in Ukraine. Over a period of three years, the selected participants will collaborate with youth groups in other European countries, visit international festivals and develop their own artistic concepts.
The project will culminate in a series of events created by youth groups in partner countries, before the results are presented to an international audience at the Festival d’Avignon in the summer of 2029.
Democracy in practice
The format breaks with traditional forms of youth engagement in the arts by involving them from the outset. Instead of inviting young people into predefined projects, they set the agenda and influence the institutions’ structures and working methods over time.
The long-term goal of the project is to connect local young people to a broad European network and contribute to long-term competence development in the arts, democracy and participation. Teenagers often have a lot to say about what is the society they want to live in, but few platforms that would make their voices audible. They can’t vote yet, their opinion is often not considered by decision makers. While curating programmes in given locations and exchanging with peers transnationally, the young people will get agency over their own social context – and the way they want to shape it.
The result we are working towards consists of both the artistic projects that are produced and the competence that is strengthened, but also the research that is done on it. When the project ends in 2029, an open and freely available toolbox for youth-led curation will be published. The aim is for the experiences from all partner countries to be used by art institutions across Europe.
More information about the open call and participation will be published in late 2026.
NEWS
The kick-off meeting for the Euphoric Youth project took place in Trondheim, Norway. Here’s what we discussed
At the end of June, our team met the other project partners for the first time at Rosendal Theatre in Trondheim.
During two intensive days, we met teams from the other participating countries. The agenda focused on breaking the project’s overall vision down into practical steps and planning how to bring it to life.
The key topics we discussed included:
1. Developing the foundation for the project’s future ethical guidelines. One important point was to ensure that these guidelines remain open to young people’s ideas and suggestions, as we want them to lead the projects and decide how they should be developed.
2. Understanding the structure of the open call, including how it should be organised and what the selection criteria should be.
3. Beginning work on the project’s communication strategy, visual identity, and dissemination approach.
The next meeting will take place next year and will include our young participants.
Partners:
Festival d’Avignon (FDA), France
SPRING Festival (SF), Utrecht, Netherlands
Rosendal International Theatre (NO), Trondheim, Norway
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway
Tanzfabrik Berlin (TF), Berlin, Germany
New Theatre Institute of Latvia (NTIL), Riga, Latvia
Trafó House (TH), Budapest, Hungary
ART DOT (AD), Kharkiv, Ukraine
Lavanderia a Vapore (LV), Turin, Italy
NTGent (NT), Gent, Belgium
Materiais Diversos (MD) Minde, Portugal
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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