EUphoric Youth: Young People get a say in programming

SPRING is participating in a major new European project that gives young people a real say in arts institutions. Over the next four years, we will be collaborating with ten major European arts institutions to involve young people more in programming.

SPRING Festival is participating in the four-year European collaborative project EUphoric Youth (2026–2029), supported by the Creative Europe program. The project brings together leading performing arts institutions from across Europe, including national theaters and prestigious international performing arts platforms.

The project’s ambitions are vast, and its spirit is bold and experimental. It will be very exciting to see how the project develops within all these diverse social and artistic contexts.

A European Collaboration

The project is called EUphoric Youth and is coordinated by the Norwegian Rosendal Teater. It is being carried out in collaboration with theaters, performing arts institutions, and festivals in the Netherlands, France, Latvia, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal—including SPRING Festival—before the results are presented at the Festival d’Avignon in the summer of 2029.

Young People Set the Agenda

In 2027, SPRING Festival will issue a call for seven teenagers in Utrecht. The selected participants will collaborate with youth groups in other European countries for three years, visit international festivals, and develop their own artistic concepts.

The project culminates in a series of events created by youth groups in all participating countries, after which the results will be presented to an international audience during the Festival d’Avignon in the summer of 2029.

Democracy in Practice

The format breaks with traditional forms of youth engagement in the arts sector by involving young people from the very beginning. Instead of inviting young people to participate in predefined projects, they set the agenda themselves and, over time, influence the structures and working methods of the institutions.

The long-term goal of the project is to connect local young people with a broad European network and to contribute to long-term skills development in the fields of art, democracy, and participation.

The project’s results are threefold: the artistic projects themselves, the skills developed through them, and the research documenting this process. Upon the project’s completion in 2029, an open and freely accessible toolkit for youth-led curation will be published, enabling art institutions across Europe to build on the experiences of all participating countries.

More information about the call for proposals and participation will be published in the course of 2026.

 

Project period: January 1, 2026 – December 31, 2029 Full title: EUphoric Youth – European Forum for Open-source Researching, Instituting, and Curating with Youth (2026–2029)

 

SPRING Festival (SF), Utrecht, Nederland
Rosendal International Theatre (NO), Trondheim, Norway
New Theatre Institute of Latvia (NTIL), Riga, Latvia
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Tanzfabrik Berlin (TF), Tyskland
Trafó House (TH), Budapest, Ungarn
Festival d’Avignon (FDA), Frankrike
ART DOT (AD), Kharkiv, Ukraine
Lavanderia a Vapore (LV), Torino, Italia
NTGent (NT), Gent, Belgia
Materiais Diversos (MD) Minde, Portugal