School of Culture & Creative Arts

Lulu Fletcher, MLitt Playwriting and Dramaturgy 2025-26 

I had the amazing opportunity to take the PGT work placement course with the Participate team at the Citizens Theatre after completing the Applied Theatre: Contextual Practices and Critical Pedagogies course, delivered in partnership with the Citz and Director of Participate, Dr Catrin Evans. The placement involved contributing to their Navigate project, collaborating specifically with Glasgow-based refugee organisation, Refuweegee. As an Applied Theatre project, it aims to deliver two series of workshops at Refuweegee between May 2026 and March 2027 that explore creativity as a means of sustaining community and wellbeing while working with people whose experiences are frequently marginalised within mainstream cultural institutions, and culminating in a presentation or showcase of the work created and the group’s development. 

From the Applied Theatre course, I had already begun to think more deeply about the political nuance of whose stories get told, and to which audiences in order to develop a deeper understanding of how applied theatre functions within contexts of forced displacement and migration. 

Within the work placement context, my role included attending planning sessions, helping facilitate workshops and participating in the activities alongside the groups. It was important for me to participate alongside the group, rather than remaining in a solely facilitative role to beget a more relational approach, helping to establish a reciprocal atmosphere where creativity is shared rather than directed. And so while I attended all of the pre-workshop planning sessions, the real value for me lay in attending the actual workshops and engaging in the spontaneous problem solving that took place during the sessions. In so doing I also gained exposure to the team’s decades of experience in community theatre spaces.

On completion of the placement, I learnt that the efficacy of Applied Theatre cannot be measured through quantifiable artistic outcomes, but rather its virtue lies in the dialogue that it facilitates. The simplicity of activities on paper were not indicative of a lack of artistic ambition; rather, they functioned as a deliberate methodology that privileged accessibility and collective meaning-making over predetermined aesthetic outcomes. Applied Theatre is generally framed as a means of activism and social change - which can risk producing reductivist narrative arcs out of people’s real lived experiences. In the case of Navigate, however, communities facing forced displacement were afforded playfulness, an opportunity to connect, and to be confronted with their humanity and the humanity of others too.

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First published: 26 August 2026