EUphoric Youth: a new major European project that gives young people real power in arts institutions

NTGent is participating in the four-year European collaboration project 'EUphoric Youth' (2026–2029), supported by the EU’s Creative Europe program. 

The project brings together leading performing arts institutions from across Europe, including prestigious theatre venues, independent performing arts organizations and large international festivals.

The project’s ambitions are vast, and its spirit is experimental. The network is very excited to see how the project develops across these diverse social and artistic contexts.

A European collaboration
The project is called EUphoric Youth and is coordinated by Rosendal Theatre in Norway. It is being carried out in collaboration with theatres, performing arts organizations and festivals in Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Ukraine.

Young people set the agenda
In 2027, NTGent will publish an open call for seven teenagers in Italy. 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.

Partners:
Festival d’Avignon, France
SPRING Festival, Utrecht, Netherlands
Rosendal International Theatre, Trondheim, Norway
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
Tanzfabrik Berlin, Berlin, Germany 
New Theatre Institute of Latvia, Riga, Latvia
Trafó House, Budapest, Hungary 
ART DOT, Kharkiv, Ukraine 
Lavanderia a Vapore, Turin, Italy 
NTGent, Gent, Belgium
Materiais Diversos Minde, Portugal