A hall of mirrors: do adults represent the world of GenZ, or does GenZ represent the world of adults?

Theater is social pact and delegation. Spectators accept that their individualities dissolve into the entity of the “audience” and give away their visibility/authority to those on stage. Those on stage, on the other hand, embrace this gift to grow in authority and “visibility”. It is an aggregating of identification that, like small rivulets of water that eventually form a river, flows from the multitude of the public to the performers.

This process is an essential tool for the healthy construction of young people's individuality.

It's essential that every young person have their moment in the spotlight. This teaches them to find in themselves their own voice, and not to feel indebted to politicians for what they graciously donate to us (in Italy, for example, Meloni cut funding to the Teatro della Pergola[1] in Florence and the Santarcangelo[2] Festival, revised the parameters for allocating cultural funds[3], and has publicly declared the uselessness of theater projects for social purposes, continually emphasizing, instead, everything her government has given to citizens).

It is profoundly democratic, civic, and formative process both to give away your voice by dispersing yourself within the collective/public, and to gather those voices by being a protagonist on stage, becoming the voice of a community.

Sociality is something you build. It is a cultural product. It is an ableist presumption to think it is a given. Theater and the performing arts foster a sociality based on mutual relationships among peers and teamwork. This is completely the opposite of devices, which, instead, foster a performative, disciplining, and exclusionary sociality.

The Forum's spectacles, discussions, and activities were therefore a valuable tool for understanding how Generation Z represents itself, how adults help GenZ represent itself, and how adults perceive GenZ.

Attending various spectacles, I had the clear impression that they were different moments of the same discourse. Themes, forms, and gestures repeated and echoed each other, creating echoes, ripples on the water, ultimately showing an accurate and painful image of the younger generations.

In spectacles like Jason & die Astronauten[4], Welten[5], or Die Welt den Träumern[6], I saw an episodic theater, made up of TikTok-like scenes and sketches, visually striking (but not always complex or profound) Instagram-like images, without structure, with an implicit dramaturgy rooted in the performers' lives that becomes aesthetic representation. Not an external drama/structure, but silent, internal drama. It was as if the common thread in these spectacles was the feelings of the performers/characters, rather than the unity of time/space.

In the finale of Welten, for example, from a cheerful music that finally unites the characters in a joyful shared dance, emerges a version of Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit”, a manifesto of psychedelic music, a dark hymn to sinking in the self through drugs. Also in Die Welt den Träumern, there was an underlying sonic dissonance and aggressiveness. The music, the sounds, the internal landscapes are of this kind. The surface is glittering, cheerful, seemingly happy. But underneath, a world is seething that you must be able to grasp. This is a highly sensitive and saturated generation, overwhelmed by the conflicts and problems that the adult world has unleashed upon them.

A theater of detachment, of freezing, in which performers often remain frozen by something, stuck in an emotion, a feeling. Social conventions and the adult world are a cage, an imposition, an implicit and potential violence (as in Und plötzlich war sie unerwünscht[7], when the characters quickly move from greeting each other politely to avoiding each other to marching in a military fashion).

The main opposition: the individual and the mass (the beginning of Welten, in which the group tries to take down the individual to see how she then returns to the ranks), with mechanical and repetitive movements (the scene in Und plötzlich war sie unerwünscht, in which the individual sitting in the center is slowly surrounded by all the other actors, each performing a different mechanical gesture—the world of society conventions).

The repetition of the 19th and 20th-century factory in the 21st century becomes a repetition of social models. Smiles to hide the anguish of living.

I was also struck by the return, in several spectacles, of the same gestures, beyond representative stereotypes or gestural tropes: the performers often stood like mannequins with their arms down; many movements were mechanical or exaggerated; or they acted like zombies (but this isn't a reference, but rather an overlay of an aesthetic form onto the adult world: it's the adults who are zombies, NOT them).

In many moments, you could perceive like an invisible wall between you and them, a distance from the world of “others”.

A theater for parents to see. Rather than representing themselves, the youngsters seemed to be showing adults the horrors of THEIR world. Perhaps the true target of this theater isn't the youth world, but rather should be the world of parents, of adults, who so often claim they don't understand their children, who, in their own way, shout their problems in their faces.

I found the dialogue with the other Forum participants very stimulating; the value of these events is precisely that they bring together people with the ability and desire to critically analyse the aesthetic materials presented.

For this reason, I would have liked the discussion sessions to have been even longer and I would have loved a better contact with those who conceived and directed these spectacles, to better understand how much of the represented issues came from the teachers/directors and how much from the students/performers.

I also believe it would be helpful for students to listen to the opinions of adult critics (in addition to the discussions they engage in among themselves), if presented in a constructive and positive spirit. In the Anglo-Saxon world, for example, in art schools is strong the tradition of “crits”, where each student presents their artwork and then has to defend it in front of their class. A brutal tradition, like the British tradition, but decidedly effective in developing students' critical thinking.

A fundamental element in using performative-theatrical languages ​​with young people/students is actually the way we convey positive or negative feedback. GenZ has great difficulty absorbing criticism, having an acute perception of the performativity of social, scholastic, and work life. For this reason, to avoid excessive discouragement and small tragedies, I believe it would be necessary to carefully reflect on the relational procedures with which to build the possibility of a profound critique of what we do. Perhaps, for the future, a focus might be useful on how to relate to a generation so different from those that preceded it.

[1] https://www.lacnews24.it/italia-mondo/cultura-indi...

[2] https://www.newsrimini.it/ultima-ora/il-governo-ta...

[3] https://lespresso.it/c/opinioni/2025/7/17/teatri-a...

[4] Jason & die Astronauten [Sachsen], Berufliches Gymnasium des BSZ für Elektrotechnik, Dresden: https://schul.theater/sdl-jahr/2025/2025/festival/...

[5] Welten [Brandenburg], Friedrich-Engels-Gymnasium, Senftenberg: https://schul.theater/sdl-jahr/2025/2025/festival/...

[6] Die Welt den Träumern [Niedersachsen], Gymnasium im Schloss + Peter-Räuber-Schule, Wolfenbüttel: https://schul.theater/sdl-jahr/2025/2025/festival/...

[7] Und plötzlich war sie unerwünscht [Baden-Württemberg], Hohenzollern-Gymnasium, Sigmaringen: https://schul.theater/sdl-jahr/2025/2025/festival/...