National Festival of Youth Theatres 2024

National Festival of Youth Theatres 2024 Kilkenny College Monday 1^st July to Friday 5^th July 2024

The National Festival of Youth Theatres is an annual event for Irish youth theatres and is organised by Youth Theatre Ireland. This year, twelve youth theatres from all over the country part. Eight youth theatre members from RCYT took part in the residential festival. Participants spent their days in workshops exploring different aspects of drama and developing new skills. Social activities were also organised for each evening. It was a great opportunity for youth theatre members to meet like-minded young people from other groups all over the country, with the emphasis on enjoyment and learning.

I did “Streets ahead”, which was a street theatre workshop with some focus on improv and audience interaction. The performance on Friday was an alien-based parade we’d just started working on on Thursday!

Alex Richardson

I really enjoyed the Streets Ahead workshop, and we looked into street performances, improv and creating songs for performances, and on Friday we used all of these skills. The festival really helped me see how many people have interests in the same things I do, and enjoy and care about theatre. My favourite memory from the festival was definetly at night time when people were playing guitars and singing

Chloe Gannon

I learn so much in such little time. I’ve made more friends and bond with my friends more. My favourite memory is the verity night because I saw people put on display their talents

Emily Hough

Personally I really enjoy the workshops we did. I did “Having your own back” which focused on improv. I enjoyed it because it was fun but also challenging. It challenged me to step out of my comfort zone and be brave which I really liked.

Keira Gardner

I enjoyed every part of the festival but my favourite part was probably the free time. Meeting people from the other youth theatres and casually singing together or doing some sort of activity was really fun and made the whole experience so much easier and fun

Aby Arthur

This festival has made me much more confident in myself and more confident talking to others. And I feel it’s made me more creative because I got to see other people’s ways of expressing themselves which was an eyeopener.

Isabelle Lucas