People’s Theatre on Character Strengths Development with Youth

Theatre is an art form making use of our competence on different aspects include but not limited to physical, cognitive, emotional, interpersonal and spiritual aspects. Through participation in theatre, people developed themselves to be capable for performing, interacting, improvising, and to reacting. The idea of ‘Theatre of The Oppressed’ developed in Brazil suggests that the audience should have the rights to obtain active roles – from a ‘spectator’ to a ‘spect-actor’ or even creators and performers in theatre by experiencing theatre training so as to devise interactive plays in community related to their life and social issues in order to achieve ‘rehearsal of life/ revolution’ - means personal and social development. Including Theatre of The Oppressed, a lot of theatre approaches which encourage people’s participation and the empowerment/ education process – are known as approaches under ‘People’s Theatre’, ‘Applied Theatre’ or ‘Community Theatre’. These Theatre Aesthetics, and their ideologies and approaches had been widely spread all over the world in the past half century. Such an interpersonal and artistic experience is certainly a great opportunity to develop character strengths. In theatre, youth is definitely an important target group we should work with, a lot of successful example had already been discovered. The chapter is going to introduce the basic idea, process with some methodology, and achievement of people’s theatre on developing character strengths of young people. A simple overview of People’s Theatre Practice with the youth in an international perspective will be discussed, highlighting the experience of FM Theatre Power – a Hong Kong based Theatre Group with strong youth participation developed in the past 2 decades, which is implementing ‘People’s Theatre’ learnt from experienced from different theatre models from different cultural contexts.