Dead Youth, or, the Leaks embodies a desire to intervene in the “disposibility” of people, cultures, and environments under the omni-extractivism of our present moment. Its pageant aesthetics are inspired by the agitprop theater of the 20th Century, which seeks to directly intervene in immediate injustices with the immediacy of pageants and spectacles, as if you could “counter-program” the present tense.

The resources below are gathered into two groups: those related to the Pageant of Paterson (1913) and to Langston Hughes's pageant-like Scotsboro Ltd, written in 1931 as a legal fundraiser for nine Black youth subject to unjust trial in Scotsboro, Alabama; and those documenting a 2017 performance of Dead Youth by Chicago's Runaways Lab Theater.