In order to avoid a major deficit in 2025, Canberra Youth Theatre (CYT) has made the difficult decision to pause all productions next year. The company will also reduce its training programs and staffing numbers in order to ensure the viability and sustainability of the organisation in the future.
“For the last few years we’ve been trying to maintain a vibrant youth arts program here in Canberra, including workshops, productions, creative developments and professional pathways training programs for emerging artists,” explains Luke Rogers, CYT’s Artistic Director and CEO.
“But we’ve been self-subsidising a lot of those programs to make them affordable – and if not affordable, then free – and we can’t keep doing that and sustain the viability of the organisation going forward. Canberra Youth Theatre is 52 years old this year, and we’d like to see it get to a few more.”
Previously, CYT has staged an average of three major productions a year. The decision to pause all productions in 2025 will have a significant impact on performance opportunities for young people. It also means a major loss for the region’s theatre professionals, who have regularly been employed on CYT productions as directors, lighting designers, set designers, costume designers, sound designers, stage managers and other related roles.
“There are probably at least a dozen brilliant artists in the region that we won’t be able to offer any projects to next year. We are a significant employer of freelance theatre-makers in the region, and for a city that aspires to become an arts and cultural capital, there needs to be more opportunities for professional employment of local, ACT-based artists,” says Rogers.
Additionally, the organisation will also be introducing staffing cuts across all areas. “We are consolidating our core team. A lot of the awesome people who are our core staff are also artists, and so a lot of us will be increasing our delivery of artistic programs that would normally be offered to other casual, guest freelance artists in the region.”
CYT will also be suspending many of its specialised programs for 16- to 25-year-olds in 2025, which provide emerging artists in Canberra with training and pathways to professional careers in the arts, and will no longer be offering workshops in Belconnen and Queanbeyan, with all its 2025 programs run exclusively at Gorman Arts Centre.
“We aren’t going to shy away from our commitment and purpose to our young and emerging artists. We just have to do it a little bit differently and, in that process, explore more sustainable ways for youth arts organisations like ours to remain viable and continue to thrive,” Rogers tells ArtsHub.
Young people aged seven to 18 will still be able to enrol for CYT’s weekly drama classes and school holiday programs, as well as a new weekly program, Next Stage, for those in school years 8 to 10 who want to go further in developing their performance skills.
There will be additional opportunities over the course of the year for passionate young theatre-makers to get involved with the organisation, including a collaboration with puppetry company Erth for Enlighten Festival, and flexible opportunities and one-off masterclasses for young creatives aged 16 to 25.
“We are flexing a little bit in terms of how we engage with emerging artists,” Rogers explains. “We are being a lot more responsive to works that they might want to come to us with, in terms of more bespoke mentorships rather than structured training programs, so we’re going to meet people where they’re at.”
A deeper issue than just funding challenges
Canberra Youth Theatre is not the first organisation to announce it will be pausing all programming in 2025, with Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre announcing a similar strategy in March this year.
At the time, Caitlin Dullard, La Mama’s CEO and Director, said the temporary closure of the company’s two Carlton theatre spaces was a direct consequence of the organisation’s inability to secure organisational funding from Creative Australia for 2025-28, adding that the temporary hiatus was being treated by La Mama as “an opportunity to implement sustainable and necessary organisational change” by finding new funding and partners.
Read: La Mama to pause public performances in 2025 after unsuccessful funding bid
Rogers says the funding situation for CYT is a primary reason – but not the only reason – for the company making such drastic changes in 2025.
“Our core funding, our organisational funding, and the support we receive from our donors, partners and advocates – while incredibly appreciated – isn’t enough to comfortably cover core salaries, let alone all of our programs and productions. So we rely on trying to diversify our income sources as much as possible. We don’t receive organisational funding from Creative Australia; we haven’t done for the last 10 years,” he says.
While CYT welcomes inquiries from philanthropists and other benefactors who wish to help secure the company’s future, Rogers says the issue goes far beyond the paucity of arts funding available in Australia.
The youth arts sector includes companies that make theatre for young people and young audiences, and which engage professional adult artists to create such work; and also companies like Canberra Youth Theatre, which engage professional artists to create new works with young people, and in the process provide young people with agency and empower them to lead creatively. Such companies also engage emerging artists to run workshops and training programs for children and young people, often providing emerging artists with their first professional roles in the process.
“The arts sector needs to respect the youth arts sector more. We actually need the support from our peers, and from our major training institutions, for which youth arts is a feeder. And I think the acknowledgement of the major companies as well that they support the work that we create, and the recognition of the contributions we make to their own sustainability, by creating more tangible pathways for nurturing and investing in emerging arts workers.”
Is the youth arts sector undervalued?
Rogers believes that the work of companies like CYT, which help train and support future generations of creatives and empower young people, is largely undervalued and underappreciated by the wider arts sector.
“One of the challenges, I think, with youth arts, is that it is still always perceived as ‘less than’. And perhaps it’s because of that, that we don’t have dedicated ring-fenced funding for organisations that work with young people – because our metrics for success aren’t the same as the major performing arts companies or even our quote unquote ‘adult counterparts’ in the small to medium sector, because we sit in this intersection between not just arts, but also community engagement and youth participation and education,” he argues.
“And so many of our success stories [are] about some of the impacts of those things, which are sometimes a little bit harder to quantify, because they’re intrinsic. They’re about emotional wellbeing and empathy and creativity and collaboration and critical thinking. All of those things that empower young people, whether they want to pursue a career in the arts or not.”
Rogers expands on the latter point: “One of the things that I often say is that we didn’t all study science at school because we thought we were going to be scientists. We didn’t all do PE because we thought we were going to be athletes. But sometimes I think people think that arts is only for people who want to be artists, and that’s not the case.
“So many of our success stories as youth arts companies are the people who may not have gone and pursued a professional career in the creative industries, but because the skills and the connections and the worldviews that they have developed through an engagement with the arts as a young person, with other young people, are so formative, they’ve informed so much of their lives, so matter what direction they’ve taken,” he says.
Read: The power of youth arts
He also wants the broader arts industry to recognise that the youth arts sector is a legitimate destination for professional artists who want to work with young people on an ongoing basis, and not treat theatre for young people as a stepping stone from which one subsequently graduates to work with adult companies.
“Working in youth arts requires such a sophisticated level of skills. You need to be an experienced practitioner as an artist, but you also need to be a wonderful mentor and a leader, and understand duty of care and understand what it means to mentor and to inspire and to also elevate other artists… You need to be secure in who you are as an artist, because you then hand over a lot of that power and responsibility and the creative forces to young people,” says Rogers.
Another perspective
Fraser Corfield, Artistic Director of Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP), tells ArtsHub: “While I was deeply saddened to read the announcement from Canberra Youth Theatre, unfortunately it has not come as a surprise. I applaud Luke and the CYT Board for the decision to go public with the overwhelming financial challenges they have been navigating for a sustained period of time. Their experience is being shared by most companies within the national youth arts sector. In 2024, ATYP was forced to find its way through the lowest level of operational funding the company has experienced since 2008. This is a time of incredible hardship for the youth arts sector.
“The promise of a National Cultural Plan that prioritised engagement with young Australians has proven utterly impotent and ineffective. No new money was allocated to the youth arts sector.
“Those companies fortunate enough to receive four- or two-year funding are drastically underfunded and locked into a cycle of poverty and survival. Wages cannot rise, programs are contracting, costs are increasing. But because so many have received nothing, those that have something are remaining silent so as to not appear ungrateful to their peers whose circumstances are worse. Those that have no avenue for support, like CYT, become solely reliant on state or territory funding to deliver services to communities in their region. These companies engage professional artists to deliver quality programs, but are frequently funded as if they were volunteer community organisations,” he continues.
“Canberra Youth Theatre is a touchstone for a national industry that has little to hope for over the coming four years. This at a time when the social benefits of engaging young people in the performing arts are in such demand nationally.
“I hope this current call to action is finally heard within the Ministry for the Arts and Creative Australia,” Corfield concludes.
A whole of government approach is needed
Rogers believes that more needs to be done to support the youth arts sector, and not just by the arts ministries and arts departments that exist at all levels of government.
“When we are talking to government, it’s not just about saying we need more arts funding to do arts work. It’s about saying we need more government investment in the work that we do that transcends portfolios: the work that we do and its impact on civic engagement, on health and wellbeing, on education, on culture, on economic growth,” he tells ArtsHub.
“Art is the medium that we use to have the social impact that we achieve, but we also strive to create work that does challenge audiences’ expectations about what theatre made with young people can achieve, and is of a high professional quality, and is respected as a legitimate art form.”
Greater support for the youth theatre sector is also urgently required, Rogers says. “It’s been urgently needed for the last 10 years. When the then-government stripped funding from the then-Australia Council [in 2015], the Youth Arts Fund was one of the first things to have to go.
“We want to see an elevation of young people in the next round of the National Cultural Policy. We want to see a strategy for children and young people and for youth engagement in the arts. And we do want to see increased investment in young people, in youth arts, through the return of dedicated ring-fenced funding and investment,” he concludes.
Learn more about Canberra Youth Theatre and its programs. Individuals and organisations who would like to discuss ways to help Canberra Youth Theatre’s future are invited to reach out to Luke Rogers directly at luke@canberrayouththeatre.com.au or (02) 6248 5057.
