Abstrakt
Anglophone youth migration is privileged. For Anglophone children with migratory experience there are many opportunities to practice their parents' language and share their cultures with peers.
However, they live in-between the two cultures and are marked as others in Czech society. My paper describes the teenager's experience with one of the afterschool activities, the youth theatre.
I aim to explain why this afterschool activity seems to give the anglophone migrant teenagers such a strong feeling of belonging, and explain how the afterschool activity with others in similar in-between situation forms their sense of self. The paper is based on ten moths research conducted in anthropological tradition of ethnographic fieldwork; participatory observation of a teenagers class (age 15 - 18) of fifteen pupils during their rehearsals, performances and breaks in youth theatre, and semi-structured interviews with the teenagers, the youth theatre owner and their teachers.
Analysing the observations and interviews, I argue: That the youth with migratory experience feel excluded and they need to share their in-between experiences. They fulfil their needs in the youth theatre.
They can share their experience because they are all from different spaces and all feel other and because of the youth theatres' environment. With its British including tradition (Hughes, Wilson, 2007), youth theatre offer the anglophone migrant acceptance of otherness and therefore feeling of belonging.
The youth theatre brings together children from different in-between families, and at the same time, it offers knowledge that transcends these spaces. These teenagers articulate their appreciation of the place where their feelings of incomplete integration can be shared, a place where their in-between is normativity.