'What does Transformative Justice Look Like?'

Abstract

Clean Break Theatre Company is the longest-running prison theatre company in the United Kingdom. In this chapter, I examine the company’s work with young women and girls with a specific focus on their Young Artists Development Programme (YAD). I explore this programme as indicative of a wider move towards young companies across the UK theatre sector; then turn to reflect on the specificity of Clean Break’s work, identifying how YAD aligns with participatory youth justice initiatives that seek to reimagine the systems of punishment that children and young people encounter in the contemporary UK. Throughout, I draw on interviews conducted with the Young Artists and staff members at Clean Break to assert the importance of establishing layers of support in projects that aim to create inclusive routes into the theatre industry. Further, I examine how voice functions within the YAD in order to illuminate the ways in which performance might be a useful tool within participatory youth justice frameworks. Finally, I engage with two productions, Belong (2019) and Inside This Box (2020), created by the Young Artists in collaboration with Clean Break, identifying how these performance works advocate for intersectional understandings of crime and invites spectators to collectively imagine different possibilities for criminalised young people.