The Asian Youth Theatre Festival was first conceived in 2016 as a vehicle of change, connecting Asia through performance, dialogue, workshops and exchange programmes.
The AYTF Movement comprises three key elements: Open Stage, a bi-weekly platform, to share artists skills digitally, Uniting Asia, an immersive arts residency programme and the Asian Youth Theatre Festival (AYTF).
The AYTF Movement’s main focus is to create an inclusive community that utilises theatre as a vehicle for change. The AYTF Movement targets youth artists and arts organisations with beneficiaries aged between 15 to 35. Current statistics suggest that the majority are graduates of University Theatre programmes with an average age of 22. It has engaged more than 520,769 youths from across the world to date.
The Asian Youth Theatre Festival was conceived in 2016 as a vehicle for change. The festival involves multiple youth artists and arts organisations from across the region. Held annually over a four-day period, hosted in a different Asian city every year. Each organisation presents a performance followed by a dialogue, hosted by youth emcees from different stakeholder groups, engaging audiences in discourse and allowing access to each group’s artistic process, interpretation of the theme and cultural practice. Each organisation also shares a workshop demonstrating their cultural or artistic practice. One representative from each organisation is nominated to be part of a multicultural and multilingual original devised performance, presented as part of the festival’s closing ceremony.
Uniting Asia was conceptualised late 2019 and was pencilled to be held in Cambodia. Owing to the pandemic it went online and proved vital to youth artists and arts organisations – facilitating community building, cross cultural exchange and supporting the emotional well-being of artists across Asia and beyond. Uniting Asia aims to equip youth arts leaders with theatrical knowledge and skills, enabling them to impact their own societies through art-invested projects.
Open Stage is presented bi-weekly to encourage a sharing culture and to offer integration for new Stakeholders and Beneficiaries throughout the year. Its main premise has been to unify, empathise and support artists throughout the pandemic. Since inception, it has offered leadership opportunities to a variety of youth artists through emceeing and management of bi-weekly programmes and as such becomes a training ground for future Youth Ambassadors.