CONTEXT: 
This document describes systematic and iterative co-creation since the beginning of the project in April
2022 until now. We started exploring together what things young people consider important in
different types of residential areas and their living environment. We had weekly activities with
SDO Theatrum Olga lecture & arts and drama educator Lasse Kantola and 35 youth & community
education students. Later on, community activist Veijo Ruotanen who is specialized in video-
storytelling helped us. We also have had the privilege to collaborate with drama education professor
& founding co-director Allan Owens, RECAP, University of Chester, UK.

PARTNER: 
SDO Theatrum Olga and Lasse Kantola who is a drama and youth educator, lecturer, and
director of the Theatrum Olga. He has pioneered a unique multi-professional way of organizing arts
pedagogical learning processes, practices, and spaces.
https://www.instagram.com/theatrumolga/
https://www.facebook.com/TheatrumOlga/

The core of Theatrum Olga’s pedagogy is the idea that participatory arts pedagogy and democratic agency should travel hand in hand. By this, theater director and educator Lasse Kantola emphasizes that it is a process in which young people jointly construct an arts-based learning space and explore meaningful questions together in a way that emphasizes their learning strengths and positively supports their agency.
LUT University and the University of Chester RECAP research team collaborated intensively with
Theatrum Olga. Through this co-creation, a Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy (KP) was identified. It is a conceptual frame of an arts-based method applied to a discussion and collective imagining of democratic forms of being with young people, artists, arts and youth educators, and researchers.

Background of KP is a problem identified by one of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy, Henry
A. Giroux (Neoliberalism and the machinery of disposability.
Retrieved 24 September 2017 from;
https://philosophersforchange.org/2014/04/15/neoliberalism-and-the-machinery-of-disposability/ )
which is that democracy has been sullied as a concept – as a ´service` – and no longer offers the
promise of emancipation (Giroux, H, (2014b) Neoliberalism´s war on democracy.
Retrieved 24 September 2017 from; http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23306-neoliberalisms-war-on-
democracy ).

Theatrum Olga is about understanding democracy in the future: what it is what it might look like and how it would feel to be in it according to young people themselves.
One arts-based exploration combined music, dance, and video in the context of fears of the future and explored empowering spaces and marginalized territories in young people’s living environments.
Choreography and dance by activist Joonas Saarela, video and music by community activist Veijo Ruotanen. Joonas pointed out that “this is a way to articulate through dance, it is expressing and resonating with what we young people are passionate and outraged about.”