Download TYA and Perceptions of the Contemporary Child May 28, 2014

TYA and Perceptions of the Contemporary Child
May 28, 2014, Warsaw Poland
1:30-3:30
Seminar I
Facilitator: Geesche Wartemann, University of Hildesheim
Dr Tom Maguire
University of Ulster
[email protected]
Regulation, research and the creative gap: the context and practice of TYA in
contemporary Northern Ireland
A significant legacy of the period of violent conflict in Northern Ireland and the
subsequent peace process is that children and childhood have been the focus of much
academic research. This research has been focused largely on concerns about the
reproduction of sectarianism by children and its impact on them, particularly through
schooling and the influence of the media (Connolly and Maginn 1999; Ewart,
Schubotz et al 2004; Messenger Davies 2006; Young NCB Northern Ireland 2013).
There has been almost no equivalent research into children's engagement with the
arts in general and theatre specifically, even within the narrow focus of how they
might contribute to a society free from sectarianism. Since 2008, an annual Kids Life
and Times Survey, for example, has gathered children's experiences of childhood.
None of its questions address children's experience of the arts or live theatre. A new
Children’s Research Network for Ireland and Northern Ireland was established in
2012. While hitherto engaged in methodological concerns of research into children,
in December 2013, its conference will focus on children's mental health and wellbeing, However, the measures of well-being (such as the Laeken Indicators used by
the European Union) focus exclusively on factors relating to poverty such as income,
unemployment and access to housing. Access to the arts is not mentioned at all.
Alongside these gaps in research, both the UK government and Northern Ireland's
devolved Assembly have made significant interventions in the legislative structures
that regulate childhood, including in the areas of Children's Rights, through the
appointment of a Children's Commissioner; in Child Protection; and in proposed
changes to the schooling structure. Again, there is a focus here on protecting children
from harm, discrimination and social exclusion in line with The UN Convention on
the Rights of the Child. However, Article 31 of the convention that specifies that,
'Children have the right to relax and play, and to join in a wide range of cultural, artistic
and other recreational activities' is rarely mentioned in any legal structure or social
care provision. Such research and regulation suggest that in Northern Ireland
children are the focus of anxiety and that childhood is perceived as fraught with
dangers. These are, then a continuation in these different spheres of the recurrent
motifs noted by Gilligan (2008) in the representations of children that focus on hope,
innocence and above all else vulnerability.
In the same period, within a growing sector of performances for young audiences,
TYA productions generated from within Northern Ireland have only engaged
intermittently with these issues (though there have been a plethora of participatory
projects in applied theatre). Instead, performances have largely focused on
celebrating children's resilience and developing the imaginative engagement of
spectators with performance. This paper explores the reasons for the gap between
the research and regulatory context and the artistic practice of Northern Ireland's
TYA artists. It argues that this creative practice is filling the gaps left by research and
regulation. The creativity of this practice eschews instrumentalist approaches to
making performance, yet, paradoxically, may also be directly engaging with the
development of the kinds of experiences that will build a shared future for Northern
Ireland's citizens.
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Dr. Stephani Etheridge Woodson
Arizona State University
[email protected]
Building Third Space in US Theatre for Youth
Theatre for Young Audiences is an inherently conservative field in the United
States drawing heavily from educational practices as well as performance traditions.
Much of the literature and research in theatre for youth pulls from one of two
dominant streams:
1. Work exploring theories, concerns and questions of presentation to
young people—children as audience; and
2. Work revolving around theatre education and social theories, concerns
and questions—children as learners. Even work that emphasizes
children and youth as performers tends to privilege the benefits
accrued to the individual child because of and/or through engagement
with mimesis.
In no other theatre practice is the primary audience as distant from the production
processes as in US TYA. Few professional theatre for youth companies even have
child/youth advisory boards, let alone child playwrights, directors, designers and
performers. Economically, children and youth rarely purchase their own tickets to
theatre shows. Contextually, US America is the only United Nation member nation—
with the exception of Somalia—not signed onto the UN Declaration on the Rights of
the Child—we literally do not guarantee young people’s right to culture in the United
States. At the policy level we have a schizophrenic relationship to children and youth
legally based in property rights or future economic status above collective freedoms.
In addition, as a culture we are uncomfortable with children’s entertainment for the
sake of entertainment—art for fun, or what James Thompson (2009: 9) would call
the “affective range.” Children’s art (television, film, theatre, music) is expected to
inform and educate and only secondarily to entertain.
Expanding the “children/youth as audience” and “children/youth as learners” US
literature, this paper offers
 children/youth as citizens/publics
 and children/youth as community/civic assets.
Encompassing an expanded model of “childhood” and “youth,” facilitation and
relational strategies, and a particular focus on how art functions in public
environments (defined broadly), my shorthand label for the practices explored in this
paper is TYA third space. My use of the term, TYA third space—even offhandedly—
depends heavily on the scholarship of Homi Bhabha (1990, 2004), and an
understanding of cultural processes and performances as what political theorist
Harry Boyte calls “free-space.” My use of the term “third space” weaves these strands
together to:
 Redefine the cultural capacity of children and youth
 Build field theory grounded in positive youth development; deliberative
democratic principles and the politics of recognition; and community
cultural development
I argue for TYA practices intervening in the politics of human interaction and
sociality and understand action in terms of social power; not in order to TEACH
democratic principles to individual children and youth—as did early 20th century US
progressive—but rather to PARTICIPATE in democratic processes as collective
publics. In particular, this paper roots in Hannah Arendt’s term “web of relations”
along with sociologist David Studdert’s 2005 text, Conceptualizing Community: Beyond
the State and the Individual to argue for de-centered understandings of identity at
odds with the traditional theory of US American Exceptionalism and the cult of
rugged individualism built into US American conceptualizations of Theatre for Youth.
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Chaekyung Lee
Theater Troupe Georipae/ Korean Center of ASSITEJ
[email protected]
Theatre as a Play
Theatre is originally a play. According to Johan Huizinga’s classical book, <Homo
Ludens>, play requires structure and participants who're willing to create within
limits. Then there comes two requirements; rules and participants. In terms of
theatre, we are quickly losing our participants to other kinds of fancy rules; internet,
TVs, movies, etc..
I would say that the biggest rival is smartphones; its effect is incomparable with other
mediums as nothing can be as close to people as smarphones. We keep them
everywhere. They’re also all in one toy.
The strength of smartphones is its virtual reality. After experiencing falshy virtual
realities, the real world seems too dull. The palm-sized screen seems more realistic
than the actual theatre with live actors. Then what should we do to regain our
participants?
I suggest making ‘participants’ actual ‘participants’. Amongst Aristotle’s 3 elements of
theatre-plot, characters, spectacle-, people watch well made soap opera with delicate
plot everyday on TV, and watch unimaginable spectacle through movies. What’s left of
us is people. To make this dull-looking reality real, we have to seduce children to make
theatres, so that they can feel the joy of it by themselves.
I’d like to suggest a case study of Bandal. Bandal is a regional children’s musical
theater company made by Miryang Theater Village. Miryang is a conservative city in
the suburban area. At first, Miryang citizens were against making Miryang Theater
Village, and Bandal was one of theater makers’ effort to seduce Miryang citizens to
their part. It turned out to be a great success. At first, children were shy and clumsy,
but they soon become real actors. It’s been 13 years since Bandal was founded, and
Bandal has made its own system automatically- senior members training junior
members. It’s almost like a real troupe system. They care for the quality of their
performances, not just for themselves. Some of the earlier cycliers, who went already
to University, sometimes come down to Miryang to teach their juniors. Bandal has
won various kinds of awards at theater festivals, and has become Miryang’s treasure.
What's unique about Bandal is the way children started adopting technology to
theatre. Once the theatre making has become important to their lives, they’ve started
using smartphones for theatres. They share scripts and scores with smartphones,
they play music for theatres with smartphones, and they communicate with
smartphones and share files with smartphones when they’re back home. For them,
this theatre community is real. For children to feel theatre is real, we’ve got to make
them feel real, and do real. Once children participate in the theatre, they instantly
become huge fans of theatre.
The earlier children experience it, the better it is. Theatre is the most humane activity
in this technology oriented society. We should regain our playing culture, regardless of
in and out of theatre space. that’s what I suggest through this paper.
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Associate Professor Sandra Gattenhof
Queensland University of Technology
Creative Industries Faculty – Drama
email: [email protected]
More than just audiences: young people, participation and theatre in the digital age
For some audience members the art is secondary to engaging in a live and social
experience. As a report, now over ten years old, titled Australia Council Framework
for Youth and the Arts identified: “As consumers of art and culture, young people are
as diverse as other sectors of the Australian community. They participate in popular,
contemporary and traditional arts and culture, both eagerly and reluctantly, and
anywhere in between” (1999; pp. 17‐18). Research shows that the current
generation ‐ generation Z, millenials, generation next – are the most technologically
enabled generation of young people ever to live on the planet. They have never
known life without the web, social networking sites, online gaming and yet they are
the most socially isolated and lonely generation ever. They are connected through
Facebook, Twitter, Tweetdeck, Tumblr, Instagram and many other social networking
sites as they share their life experiences with each other live, but in a virtual space.
The term ‘screenager’ was coined fifteen years ago by the author Douglas Rushkoff in
his book Playing the Future (1999). He used the term to refer to young people reared
from infancy on a diet of TV, computers and other digital devices. ‘Screenager’, like
the term ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001), denotes the first generation that has never
known a world without the internet, and access to digital devices. As a result of this
ubiquitous technology-infused environment today’s children and young people think
and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. This
change has implications theatre participation young people.
Theatre engages young people in a way that television, tablets and smartphones never
quite can. Perhaps this is because it is a live, communal experience that is quite
unlike anything else. This paper will investigate the idea of liveness and how theatre
for young audiences can help to redress what Australian social commentator Hugh
Mackay has called a "new form of RSI ‐ Reduced Social Interaction syndrome"
(Mackay in Griffin, 2011) caused by the lack of the "emotional nutrition" of spending
time face to face with others. The paper will take the position that the live
performing arts have a role in developing social cohesion and wellbeing for
generation Y and generation Z, our lonely generations. The discussion will be
anchored around two theatre festivals held annually in Brisbane, Australia and an
analysis 40 performances for and by young people that showed 46% of the
productions explored issues around belonging, connectivity with people and
conversely being disconnected from people and human relationships. Live
performance as a social event is of course not a new phenomena. But given the
research about this current generation and their experience of loneliness, perhaps it
is time theatre-makers and performance venues investigate how they might ramp up
the live and analogue experience to contribute to social cohesion and wellbeing. I
believe young people crave the live experience because a good deal of their life is now
played out online. Humans are social creatures and require human contact but the
digital age has caused a seismic shift in how we experience life and engage with
others. Engagement in live arts events facilitate, for our young people, real time, faceto-face interaction thereby reducing the possibility of Reduced Social Interaction
syndrome. For this reason I believe the live performing arts and arts venues maybe
able to provide new platforms for young people’s social cohesion and wellbeing, now
and into the future.
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Lorenzo Garcia
University of North Texas
[email protected]
Theatre for and with Children in North Texas:
The Valuing of Community Memory in the Face of Power
How to bring the voices of the excluded into a discussion of history is what
brings this discussion to cultural production aimed at Latina/o children at this
portentous moment when we in North Texas are debating the fate of millions of
undocumented immigrants in our midst. What theatre practices are utilized with
child participants and audiences to convey solidarity or belonging to a greater
collective? What are the lessons learned about injustice and then passed on within
communities and families through culturally rooted cuentos (stories) describing
dreams and rupture, as well as terror and triumph? What role(s) are children
supposed to play in the struggle for social justice and in the critique of systems of
domination? Although there are multiple ways of expressing sentiments of
community and belonging, I direct attention to the production Searching for the Six
Flags of Texas (Searching) aimed at children that acknowledges the necessity of
struggling with the intricacies of a highly mythologized Texas history and that
engages children through an interactive theatre experience in which they are asked
to participate. So goes the task of valuing community memory that reveals previously
occluded experiences but also frames those experiences from the perspectives of
subjects previously relegated to silence and passivity.
Little has been written that would place plays for children alongside cultural
revitalization projects. In this article, I follow the analytical lead offered by Delores
Delgado Bernal who employs the term “community memory” as an effort to recover
the hidden voices of Latina/o children thought long subdued and put out of sight.
While the reworking of ascribed identity formations has been the business of many
across time in North Texas, I argue that Searching may be seen to correspond with
efforts of valuing community memory—that is, of symbolically connecting to various
economies, temporalities and spaces as a means of giving youth the ideas and images
to expand their sense of community, inclusion, and belonging. In a very important
way, the production Searching became embroiled in a history of marginalization that
puts Latina/o youth in a subordinate position and within thinking that views them as
the perpetual foreigner. By extension, the “child” is a contested analytical term
circulating in this production at once evocative of potential and of the vulnerability of
the body politic.
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Dr Dominic Hingorani
University of East London
e-mail: [email protected]
Performing Difference: Ethnicity, ‘Race’ and Representation in TYA.
As an academic at the University of East London based in the London borough of
Newham one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the UK in which over fifty
percent of the population belong to an ethnic group other than white and has a
higher than national proportion of young people places the performance of
‘difference’ centre stage in TYA. This paper will examine how TYA responds to the
realties of a diverse young audience in relation to ethnicity and ‘race’ and in doing so
not only addresses issues of representation, authenticity and marginalization but also
recognizes how this engagement will not only lead to new audiences for TYA but can
also lead to innovation in practice and form and inscribe ‘difference’ into TYA.
The imbalance in engagement with the arts predicated on ethnicity has been
recognized by Arts Council England whose report ‘Encourage children today to build
audiences for tomorrow’ stated ‘girls and white children are more likely to receive
encouragement than boys and children who are not white’ (2009). Indeed, to frame
this discussion historically it was 1976 when Naseem Kahn’s ground breaking report
‘The Arts Britain Ignores’ for the first time officially recognized that ‘ethnic arts’
should not be regarded as an exotic extra outside of British theatre but should be
understood, funded and fostered as though they were part of British theatre. In the
contemporary moment the continuing imperative for TYA to actively address and
engage with the issue of diversity is clearly spelled out in the McMasters report
which was asked to consider how public subsidy may best support excellence in the
arts. The report highlighted the fact the fact that in the UK while we ‘live in one of the
most diverse societies the world has ever seen, yet that is not reflected in the culture
we produce, or in who is producing it’ (2008:11). I will discuss some of the key
initiatives, strategies and performance practices through which the TYA sector has
attempted to address representation over that time including casting initiatives,
performance praxis, and new writing in the attempt to engage with diverse new
audiences. This paper will contest notions of margin and ‘centre’ and the central
thrust of my argument is that if we engage theatrically with diversity it will not only
inscribe ‘difference’ on the stages of TYA but also contest homogeneous
constructions of national identity and performatively attempt to ‘disturb those
ideological manoeuvres through which “imagined communities” are given
essentialist identities. (Bhabha, 1994: 149)
Seminar II
Facilitator: Tulin Saglam, University of Ankara
Miranda Giles
Arizona State University
[email protected]
What We Have in Common Core: Performing cultural anxieties and cultural
difference in Arizona State University’s There Was and There Wasn’t.
Beginning in 2014 over ninety percent of states in the U.S. will implement the
new Common Core standards of education. Renamed in Arizona as College and Career
Ready Standards, this evaluation and assessment system is proudly touted as having
been developed in partnership with “business and community leaders” so as to give
students the tools they need to succeed in a “rapidly changing, globalized world.”
Scattered throughout the Language Arts standards is the mandate that students should
explore and actively seek to understand the stories myths, and traditional literature of
other cultures. Specifically these standards ask that students “recount stories” and
“determine their central message” or “compare and contrast” stories in search of
universal truths.
These, and the similar standards permeating curriculum in recent decades,
speak to American’s dread of being labeled bigoted or uncultured. Publishing these
standards, their primary authors, the leaders of American education policy, expose
their own anxieties about exploring cultural diversity while ignoring student’s own
cultural differences. Rather, they favor the easier assumption of cultural hegemony
with in the classroom. This anxiety may also be manifest in local elementary school
teachers, of whom in 2011 eighty-four percent were white females, and most of
whom were unlikely to have work or educational experience outside their chosen
field. Complicating these assumptions is the recent insistence that adhering to these
standards will create students who are educationally prepared to compete with their
international counterparts for economic dominance in an increasingly globalized
economy. The conflation of the other as the economic adversary risks reducing
cultural exploration to the adage of knowing your enemy.
With a missionary zeal, teaching artists eager to locate arts in the American
classroom develop myriad offerings addressing cultural difference. Teaching artists
can use the promise of addressing Core standards, particularly those that may fall
outside the average teacher’s comfort zone, as a calling card to gain access to
student’s precious education time and space, and even funds. As a case study of these
struggles, I will examine my own work in 2013 on the original production There Was
and There Wasn’t, developed as part of a course with my fellow Theatre for Youth
graduate students at Arizona State University. Touring to several Phoenix area
primary schools, the play was solicited to school administrators, and eagerly
accepted, as addressing the cultural diversity requirements in the Arizona education
standards. Despite positive educational and artistic intentions, the reality of what we
delivered to students was quite different. There Was and There Wasn’t featured four
markedly un-diverse performers presented folktales appropriated from distant lands.
These tales had been told and retold, translated and retranslated, and finally adapted
for the stage until they existed only in tidy English with clear plot correlations to
popular Disneyfied fairy tales like Cinderella and Mulan. By telling the coming of age
stories of young people in places and times far removed from the audience the
production supported positivist notions that the other is accessible because really,
he’s a lot like me, and worked on the assumption that me is the voice of the creative
hegemony. This production failed to do more than wink at actual cultural difference,
and instead illuminated the familiar cultural anxiety of its privileged creators and
missed an opportunity to develop new definitions and methods for examining cultural
difference with young people.
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Paulo Merisio
CBTIJ / UNIRIO (Capes; CNPq; FAPERJ) / Trupe de Truões – Brasil
[email protected]
Breaking some eggs: experiences of reception in theatre for children in Brazil
In the parable “Mulberry Omelet”, Walter Benjamin tells the story of a king who
wished to experience once again the flavor of an omelet that he had eaten in his
childhood, which was made by an old woman who sheltered him, and his father, when
they were running away from the enemy troops. If the cook accomplished the recipe,
he would become the king’s son-in-law, but if he failed, he would be sentenced to
death. The cook, then, put his head at his majesty’s service. He alleged to know all the
secrets of the recipe, but to be incapable of delivering the flavor of the experience:
“Despite all my efforts, my omelet would not taste right to you. For how could I spice
it on that occasion: the dangers of battle, the vigilance of the pursued, the warmth of
the hearth and the sweetness of rest, the strange surroundings of the dark future?”
This image always comes back when I devote myself to analyze practices of
contemporary theatre for children. It is common in Brazil, in places that propose to
debate a certain play staged priority to children, to identify some kind of anachronism
in the appraisals. In times that we begin to relativize the post dramatic theatre
theories, great portion of the discussions on theatre for this segment has a tendency
to be grounded in old paradigms. Concepts such as collaborative work, acting,
polysemy and hybridity of languages seem to be reserved to a “more sophisticated”
theatre, directed to adults, as difficult to be understood by children. Therefore, the
little ones are, usually, faced as “future” audience and only receivers of information,
far away from a perspective which considers them fundamental agents in the
relationship expected between stage and audience.
Parallel to this sort of “time tunnel” of concepts connected to the theatre, there are
still some productions that have a tendency to build a wall between the universe of
children and adults, as if the children audience were living isolated in Rapunzel’s
tower, disconnected to the facts surrounding them, protected from subjects
considered complicated.
This work has the main goal to investigate aspects of reception in children’s theater
nowadays, having as a reference the play Simbá, o marujo (Simbad, the sailor) (Trupe
de Truões, 2008), which made, in 2013, a tour among 20 states in Brazil, with
workshops, presentations and debates, therefore nourishing the troupe with
innumerous issues concerning reception. The text was built in collaborative process,
stimulated through theater games, and has in its conception the desire to dialogue
with some concepts of the theatre so called contemporary, here outlined. The group
believes that, as in the same way in the scene for adults, the interpretation of a play
for children can be made in a polysemic and varied way, according to aspects such as
age, background formation and social context. And it has as a desire, from the
stimulation to engage in the proposed scenic game, to build some “mulberry omelets”
for its audience.
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J. Andrew “Andy” Wiginton, ABD MFA
PhD Candidate, The University of Wisconsin-Madison
Adjunct Professor, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey
Program Director, Savvy Theatre Works
[email protected]
Revolutionary Children in the Audience:
The perception of children in contemporary Mexican TYA
At a 2014 ITYARN seminar session of the XVIIIth ASSITEJ World Congress, I
would like to share the proposed paper, “Revolutionary Children in the Audience:
The perception of children in contemporary Mexican TYA.” In the paper I
communicate findings that illustrate how a “revolutionary ideology” continues to
shape and define the majority of contemporary theatre for young audiences1 in
México City, which in turn creates an idealized adult perception of the “revolutionary
child.” Presently I am completing a larger work that chronicles the history of theatre
1
The definition of theatre for young audiences in México is complicated and will be
defined in more detail in the full paper. However, for purposes of the proposal, theatre for young
audiences (TYA) is defined as professional or amateur theatre made or facilitated by adults for
children and young people (ages 5-18).
for youth in México City immediately before, during and after the Mexican Revolution
of 1910. The larger study compares pre-‐ and post-‐revolution themes and aesthetics
performed for youth in the context of the particular ideological concerns about
children, childhood, and performance in the historical moment. I argue that in the
aftermath of the Revolution of 1910, adults sought to create a privileged singular
“revolutionary” ideology that was imparted to children through an explosion of
educational and cultural activities, including TYA. Cultural scholar Beatriz Urías
Horcasitas argues from 1910 to 1960, this “ideological change” swept the nation
towards a “revolutionary” ideology that came to define the “scopes of education and
culture that are still seen today” (Cepeda 27).
Through and examination of general themes and aesthetics seen today in TYA
as well as those present in the revolutionary period, I will illustrate how “The
Revolution” and a “revolutionary ideology” are pervasive in contemporary Mexican
TYA. When taken together with a comparison of the stated “educational goals” of the
historical form to similarly stated objectives present in contemporary Mexican
discourse by those involved in the making and financing of Mexican TYA presently;
the predominant perception of the Mexican child in the audience is made plain. This
idealized, “revolutionary” child (should) superlatively champion the principles gleaned
from the revolutionary period.
David Kennedy argues “adults tend to believe implicitly in the universality of
childhood” (8). In México, this “universal” perception of an “idealized revolutionary
child” raises many questions about the very nature of the field of Mexican TYA that
will guide the paper. First, what is the nature of the adult-child relationship in México
and how does it operate in TYA? Does this “universal” perception create aesthetic
and thematic limits on contemporary TYA? If so, how? What structures are in place to
uphold/enforce this perception? What happens when the revolutionary ideals that
created the perception in the first place are no longer relevant to the contemporary
real-time lived experience of Mexican children and youth? Finally, what might all of
this suggest about the future of TYA in México generally?
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Teresa Marrero
Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino/a Theatre
Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures
College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA
[email protected]
Foreign yet Familiar Topography: Mariachi Girl and Latina/o TYA
At the annual American Society for Theatre Research Conference in November 2013
held in Dallas, Texas (U.S.) –a predominantly Mexican and Mexican American state
and city—two firsts occurred: the inclusion of Hispanic theatre companies at the
Plenary session dedicated to the local Latino/a theatre and a dramatic reading of the
Latina TYA musical play Mariachi Girl, by University of Texas at Austin professor
Roxanne Schroeder-Arce. The reading took place with students from the theatre
department at the University of North Texas (Denton, TX) led by professor Lorenzo
Garcia in conjunction with Robyn Flatt, founder and artistic director of the Dallas
Children’s Theater Center (DCT), one of the oldest theatres in the area. I was happy to
have brokered both events as a member and co-facilitator (with Garcia) for the
Teatro Alianza of North Texas Organizations (TANTO). As such, this event marks my
entrance into what I call a foreign yet familiar terrain. What is foreign about TYA is
how little I know about it, in spite of the fact that I have been a scholar of Latino/a
theatre since the late 1980s, and was personally mentored by one of Latino TYA
playwrights/directors most seminal figure, José Cruz González, during the early
stages of his career. TYA has remained absent from my scholarly radar and from the
overall Latino/a theatre historiographies. Considering writing about Mariachi Girl
has brought me face to face with issues of representation, erasures, and
historiographic documentation within Latino/a theatre in general.
In an essay entitled “Under the Radar, Hispanic Theater in North Texas,” writing for a
global audience, I challenge the notion of the almost obligatory introduction to most
critical work on Latino/a writing: Sisyphus’s task (of which I have been a part) of
attempting to demarcate, fix, create defining discourses about Latino/a identity. In
that essay, I pose the following line of questioning: if critical inquiry of American
(meaning US) theatre works do not systematically begin with attempted definitions
of what an American play is, given that it too is quite hybrid, why must we, the socalled ‘Others,’ do so? Who needs these definitions and what purpose do they serve?
To what degree do we, Latino/a scholars, play into this type of cultural apartheid?
Roxanne Schroeder-Arce provides an interesting case, since she has grappled with
these issues and wears several hats: she is a scholar, a creative writer, and director.
She is also a musician, an Anglo, Spanish-speaking woman with a Hispanic spouse,
and mother of a young girl. In Mariachi Girl two important themes are highlighted:
traditions that do not evolve die and little girls can aspire to be anything they would
like to be. Cita, short for Carmencita, wants to follow her father’s footsteps as a
Mariachi singer and musician; her father forbids it because it goes against the
patriarchal family tradition. This presentation will examine the playwright’s
scholarship in TYA, notions of gender and identity within the Mexican musical
tradition of mariachi performance, and ways in which these intersect and generate
new avenues of inquiry in theatre histories in general.
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Gillian McNally
Associate Professor of Theatre Education
Head of Community Engagement and Programs for Youth
University of Northern Colorado
[email protected]
Dr. Mary Schuttler
Professor, Theatre Education
University of Northern Colorado
[email protected]
Finding Equal Ground:
The Marginalization of TYA in a University Setting
In this paper, the authors will use the production of Steven Dietz’s play Jackie
and Me as a case study on how to shift the perception of TYA from marginal to
mainstream in the eyes of the faculty and students in the theatre department at the
University of Northern Colorado (UNC). “As Peggy McIntosh describes it, privilege
exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply
because of the groups they belong to, rather than because of anything they’ve done
or failed to do” (Johnson 23). If TYA artists dedicate the same time, energy and artistry
to a production, why is their work often seen as substandard?
Last year, at the end of a successful production of A Year with Frog and Toad, a
graduating senior in the acting program reflected that people felt sorry for him
because he was “just cast in the children’s show.” Many other students in the TYA
course had similar experiences and passionately fought against these
misperceptions and wanted to know why this production had a low status in the
department how they could advocate for more support for TYA productions in the
future.
Two theatre professors at UNC, a prestigious pre-professional university
training program, have worked tirelessly to elevate the level of support and respect
given to the annual TYA production. In this paper, we will describe the efforts made
to elevate the status of TYA in a university program. Through focus group
conversations and surveys with students and faculty from all theatre disciplines, we
will investigate:
1. What are the perceptions of TYA in this university setting?
2. Why do people have these assumptions?
3. Why is theatre for young audiences often marginalized?
4. How can professionals in the TYA field be better advocates for the quality
and importance of this work?
In an effort to raise the status of TYA in the UNC theatre program, Schuttler
and McNally chose Steven Dietz’s TYA play, Jackie and Me. This will be the first time
that a TYA play will have a fully mounted production on the mainstage at UNC.
Additionally, Steven Dietz, a famous playwright for both adults and young people, will
come to UNC to conduct master classes and see the production. Schuttler and McNally
wonder if there will be a perception shift in the theatre department due to the
performance space and visiting playwright. Schuttler will direct Jackie and Me and
track the thoughts of students involved in the production. McNally will interview
students from other disciplines to measure the impact of this mainstage production.
Children are marginalized as citizens in the US, and therefore, often the work
for young people is marginalized. To analyze this marginalization, the authors will
look at the more global impact of how privilege, power, oppression and adultism
factor into the marginalization of TYA. How can academics work collaboratively with
students to elevate the status of TYA to benefit the contemporary audience of young
people?
************************************************************************************
Aracelia Guerrero Rodríguez
Assitej Mexico
[email protected]
Experiencing Theater in Violent Neighborhoods
As part of creative process aimed at putting on a performance where a group of girls,
boys and teenagers could talk about childhood with an adult audience, throughout a
three-year period I held theater workshops with young inhabitants of the downtown
area of Mexico City specifically of the historical neighborhoods of Tepito and La
Lagunilla. The objective was to collect testimonies regarding how vulnerable sectors
of the population experience childhood. Undoubtedly for this kids childhood is a
laboratory on the exercise of power where the strongest leader tends to humiliate
others most. Nonetheless, in spite of adverse conditions, children might find an ally in
theater that can help them understand these violent acts from other perspectives. To
disarticulate violence, it is necessary to know where it originates as well as the social
and individual mechanisms and tools that perpetuate violence. Each child who has
used theater to explore and come to an understanding that it is possible to find other
forms of relationship can become an agent of change in relation to their own
experience. It is necessary to stop taking ownership of theories that refer to bullying
as a contemporary phenomenon applying a moralizing discourse in which violent
children are directly blamed for being the origin of the problem, thus punishing the
consequences without looking at the causes. To prevent and eradicate these forms of
violence against children, we must spell out exactly what machism, sexism,
homophobia and racism mean as underpinnings of a core part of our culture: the real
causes of violence and mistreatment.
For kids who lack a family structure and a place in which they are respected and
listened to, theater can be both family and reference. Theater is a highly meaningful
life exercise that allows a glance into other possible realities, but also requires
firmness, studying and constancy in order to actually be able to have an impact on
change.
***********************************************************************************
Marina Petković Liker, assistant lecturer
Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb,
Zagreb, Croatia
e-mail: [email protected]
Iva Gruić, PhD, senior lecturer
Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb
Zagreb, Croatia
e-mail: [email protected]
Children’s Reception of a High-Pitched Voice of Reduced Expressive Power in Theatre
In TYA actors often create their characters by means of a particular vocal
performance, whereby they depart from their chest register and an appropriate
resonance, from what is usually considered pleasant voice. Instead, they opt for a
high pitched, even squeaky voice of reduced expressive power. Such choice of vocal
performance is unexpected at first sight, since high-pitched and squeaky voices are
frequently evaluated as relatively unpleasant, while reduced expressive power often
results in lacking of emotional subtlety.
The actors’ vocal performance is not the only aspect where the reduction of
the expressive power is seen in TYA. The omnipresent paternalistic attitude leads
towards all kinds of ‘protective’ simplifications, both in content and in form. And
since the complexity is an important part of the aesthetic experience, many
theoreticians and practitioners opt for more serious (and/or more artistic) approach
towards young audience in theatre, and criticize the dominant social construct of
childhood as the age of innocence with the picture of child that needs to be protected.
We believe that it is not always easy to draw a line between unnecessary
oversimplification and reasonable simplifications (because children have less
experience and know less about life and theatre). So, we address the problem of
simplifications on the example of the use of the actor’s vocal performance.
The investigation asks the question ho
w the reduced expressive power in actor’s vocal performance influences
children's perception and understanding. In order to approach the issue empirically,
an experiment was developed, whereby a short story is told by the same actor in two
versions: one with a modal (normal) voice, and the other with a high-pitched,
squeaky voice. In order to eliminate the influence of the content of the story, we use
gibberish, so that the voice becomes the major component of speech. Other aspects
of performance are intentionally minimized.
Each of the two versions of the story is performed for different groups of
children at the age of 5 to 6 (which means that in the subsequent analysis the
Saldana’s suggestions about stages of young interpretations, and Klein’s observations
about developmental differences in viewing theatre are taken into consideration).
During the experimental performance, the children's responses are observed, and
after the performance they are interviewed about the character (who tells the story),
her main characteristics and her emotions at chosen points of the experimental
performance.
The data is analysed in order to search for differences in children’s reception
related to different uses of actor’s voice. Special emphasis is placed on questions
about character’s emotions and on the analysis of differences in participants’
‘readings’ of those emotions. Conclusions will be discussed in relation to the
discussion about (over)simplification and its impact on young audiences.
***********************************************************************************
Nora Lía Sormani
University of Buenos Aires
[email protected]
The space of child spectator in theater for young audience
Despite its ephemeral nature, theater for young audience does not pass without trace
and invaluable contributions discipline because of an immediate and enjoyable
connects the child to the world of art and opened the doors of aesthetic sensibility of
reflection, the ability to get excited about, laugh and mourn and to understand
different views of life and the world. Have with respect to the "adult theater" features
of community and difference. That is, shared with the adult theater many elements
and, in turn, has certain operating rules and codes of its own. One of these specific
features is the way the theater spaces raises in theater for young audience. In my
paper I will try to think of the place of the contemporary child from the notion of
"theater space". As expressed Patrice Pavis, the notion of space in the theater applies
to many different aspects of the text and representation. The dramatic space is the
abstract space referred to the text and that the spectator should build with his
imagination. The stage, however, is the real space where the actors move either in
scene, an area within a room, or other unconventional spatial cut. The concept of
theatrical space corresponds place which puts the audience and the actors during the
performance (the theater building, street, square, etc.), sum of audience space and
the space of the actors. How does this distribution of space in theater for young
audiences? Are there the same spaces or they appear without limits? Do they vary
these spaces as the circuit to which the work belongs? Does it arise from the
aesthetic of the playwright? Do spontaneously generated from the child's behavior as
a spectator? These are some of the questions that involve my paper.
Seminar III
Facilitator: Yvette Hardie, President Assitej
Teresa Simone
MFA student, Theatre for Youth
Arizona State University
[email protected]
Hear Me, See Me: Towards a Collaborative Theatre for Deaf and Blind Youth
How can theatre include deaf and/or blind audiences? How do theatre makers’
perceptions of disability impact their work? Can theatre move beyond including the
disabled, towards destabilizing the notion of disability? This essay explores a series of
performances made in collaboration between the Arizona School for Deaf and Blind
(ASDB) and Stories That Soar (STS). ASDB educates about 200 blind and/or deaf
youth ages 3-21 from throughout Arizona.
STS is a Theatre for Youth (TFY) company based in Tucson, Arizona. In the STS
model, a hungry, talking “Magic Box” visits a site, and invites youth to “feed” it stories.
The Magic Box stays for a few weeks, collecting stories. The STS ensemble reads each
story, and selects about 20 to develop into a full-length play. At the end of the process,
STS returns to the site for a performance. No one knows whose stories got chosen
until the show. At the end of the show, all authors are acknowledged onstage with a
confetti-filled celebration.
The ASDB shows are unique because they target a mixed audience of deaf, blind, and
deaf and blind youth. For the ASDB project, STS employed specialists in deaf and
blind education as consultants, multi-modal interpreters, and a deaf actor trained at
Gallaudet University. However, all core STS ensemble are non-disabled actors, and the
ASDB shows are the only work in which STS collaborates with disabled communities.
This essay explores the challenges, successes, and failures in creating theatre for deaf
and/or blind audiences. How did STS adapt their methodologies to suit this
particular audience? Can the project serve as a model for collaboration between
distinct communities? Was STS able to “face the audience” at ASDB?
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Ben Fletcher-Watson
The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland / University of St Andrews
[email protected]
The Impossible Audience? New Developments in Theatre for Unborn Children
Conceptually, childhood begins with babies and toddlers, and Theatre for Early Years
(TEY) has expanded enormously in the past three decades to cater for the very
young. However, there is an audience who have been overlooked by theatre-makers,
even those within TEY – foetuses.
Performance experiences for unborn children may seem impossible, yet artists are
beginning to explore the possibility of engaging with this most unlikely audience.
This paper will explore recent developments in performing arts for foetuses in the UK,
placing them alongside new evidence from developmental psychology, art therapy,
biomedical science and in utero imaging techniques. These advances suggest that the
arts can play an important role in mental health, family bonding, positive body images
and good birth experiences.
Traditionally, the womb was viewed as a dark, silent place, with foetuses cut off from
the outside world. Improvements in fMRI imaging and biological data-capturing now
permit a more nuanced understanding of both the foetal environment and their
sensory capabilities. Theatrical interventions could employ light, sound, touch, taste
and kinaesthetics in a rich tapestry, to which babies in the womb respond with
surprising skill and delicacy.
This paper examines three recent performance experiments for foetuses: Blooming
Voices (Welsh National Opera, Wales 2012); Lullaby (Polka Theatre, England 2013);
and Bump (Imaginate, Scotland 2013). In particular, Bump is used as a case study to
scrutinize artists’ ethical, developmental and aesthetic considerations when making a
performance for unborn children and their families. Performing arts for foetuses may
be pushing the bounds of possibility at present, and there can be no doubt that their
capabilities are extremely limited even compared with a toddler, but there is a strong
case to be made for arts experiences aimed not wholly at the womb, but also at the
expectant mother and father. The benefits to mental health and well-being of a calm,
pleasant but stimulating environment, not to mention the social possibilities offered
by participating in an event with other future parents, should not be underestimated.
While foetal abilities extend to hearing, reaction to changes in temperature, pressure
and light, and some physical or motor responses, their parents are fully aware of
their surroundings, if not perhaps as mobile as in the first months of pregnancy.
This paper aims to highlight the opportunities offered to artists, scholars and the
public by the reconceptualization of the unborn as a potential audience. The
challenge to medical and aesthetic orthodoxies should not be underestimated, but
foetal theatre may provide a new direction for artistic creation in TEY.
************************************************************************************
HWANG Ha Young
Assistant Professor in Drama/Theatre for the Young
School of Drama
Korea National University of Arts
[email protected]
Here Somewhere Far Remote: 『The Yellow Moon』 and Contemporary Korean
Young Audience
The impact of globalisation for the last few decades has been generating significant
phenomenon in the field of contemporary theatre practice and Theatre for Young
Audiences (TYA) forms part of such a phenomenon. It is observed that a growing
number of TYA travels from one culture to another not only as touring productions,
but also as plays produced through translations and adaptations. When Theatre for
Young Audiences travel across different cultures, what are the issues arising from its
encounter with the audiences who inhabit different cultural environments?
Considering that TYA keeps audience at its central concern, what are the ways of
finding connections with the audiences who do not have the same relationship to the
culture from which the TYA comes? This paper attempts to look into these questions
through 『The Yellow Moon』 produced in Seoul in 2012 and 2013.
『The Yellow Moon』, a play written by a Scottish playwright David Greig in 2006,
centres around two teenagers on the run, which entails their dramatic journey from a
small Scottish town called Inverkeithing up to the Highlands. It was produced by
Korea National University of Arts in 2012 and the National Theatre Company of
Korea in 2013, both directed by a British director Tony Graham. The play was
translated from English to Korean and, while it was not an adaptation, it pertained to
the scope of translation of the play both as a text and a culture. It was particularly
because the play generates rich cultural references through the images of the
characters, the landscapes and the banal reality of daily living that the characters
portray and thus the theatrical world suggested by the play is predicated on the
complex workings of such cultural references. In this context, to what extent can the
production stay faithful to the original and to what degree can it accustom itself to the
targeting culture? Also, for what purposes are such choices made? In the process of
preparing to meet contemporary Korean young audience, the productions generated
interesting points of observations and discussions.
The productions of 『The Yellow Moon』 attend to certain principles of translating
and directing as it straddles two different cultures, which involves creating an
‘ambiguous’ space that the audiences are invited to inhabit. By carefully leaving
visible the chasm between the original and the targeting culture, the translation
attempts to create a vague space in which such a chasm can work as a creative
impetus for the audiences to imagine a world that is far from where they live. The
directorial choices are also predicated on creating theatrical presence that the actors
can embody through their speech/actions on minimalistic stage. By looking at how
such an ‘ambiguous’ space created through these principles allow an imaginative
space to be expanded in the audiences’ theatrical encounters, this paper attempts to
examine how the audiences may come to actively inhabit and experience somewhere
far remote in their very Here and Now. It also discusses the implications of such a
cultural crossing in contemporary TYA and its relationship with contemporary young
audience.
************************************************************************************
Anastasia Kolesnikova
Saratov Academic Kiselev Youth Theater, Russia
(international cooperation and literature departments)
[email protected]
The Story of an Experiment: International Collaboration in Theater for the Very
Young
Greetings! Being a beginner researcher in the field of Theater for Young Audiences
(before I have studied playwrighting and Russian language and literature) I’m
presenting a report about one particular project that consists mostly from
observations rather than theory. I’m working in the Saratov Academic Kiselev Youth
Theater (Russia) and during last three years our theater had a unique collaboration
project with tjg.Theater Junge Generation from Dresden (Germany) dedicated to the
theater for the very little spectators. The project was funded by the German Federal
Cultural Foundation (Wanderlust Fund). In frames of the project exchange tours,
workshops and master-classes were held with the participation of both Russian and
German theater’s actors, the focus of the project was the perception of art by children
from 2 years old. In conclusion a new production for the very little spectators
appeared in both theaters’ repertoires — “… and all the stars above us”. The
performance tells stories of time between day and night, when we’re not fully awake
but not yet asleep, it appeals to the little audience by trying to present them the
feelings and mysteries everyone is familiar with – the secrets that twilight holds. It
was staged by the Russian-German creative team: director – Ania Michaelis,
production-designer – Mikhail Gavrushov, video – Andrey Lapshin, composer – Bernd
Sikora, dramaturg – Dagmar Domrös, educator – Bettina Seiler. This performance is a
very interesting theater experiment where music, visual metaphors, and interactive
acting were combined to create a special world rather than to tell a special story. The
goal of the collaboration of two theaters was the development of new universal
theatre language and aesthetic principles for spectators from two years old. And
during this project a very interesting dialogue of post dramatic and Russian
psychological theater traditions took place and my report will focus on the results of
this dialogue seen in the performance “… and all the stars above us”. I’m observing it
from different perspectives — stage and costumes design, working with poetical
concept and using actors’ own memories of their childhood as a dramatic material
and of course type of acting and interaction with the audience. I’m only beginning my
research; in October 2013 my first article about this project was presented on the
“Art and Authorities” conference in Saratov. Very interesting interviews and
workshops videos were taken during the project, so I was able to base my
observations both on the performance itself and also on the backstage activities.
During this project I’ve learned about tjg.Theater Junge Generation and other
European theater approach towards education in theater and drama methods in
education. The ideas this approach is based on are unheard of in Russia and this
performance became a first step for Saratov Youth Theater into a completely new
territory just like this show is for its little spectators — for most of them it’s their first
time in the theater. In future I’m planning to continue this research as a post-graduate
student to get Russian theaters acquainted with new concept of cooperation between
theater and education.
************************************************************************************
Mary McAvoy
Instructor
Roosevelt University
Love rock revolution girl style now: Pussy Riot and Riot Grrl as Performative Girl
Resistance
“When she talks, I hear the revolution
In her hips, there's revolutions
When she walks, the revolution's coming
In her kiss, I taste the revolution”
-Bikini Kill: “Rebel Girl”
In this trans-historic and trans-cultural study, I examine punk performance as an
embodied radical feminist youth culture, exploring how the young performative body
engages in radical reinterpretations of the world via music performance and opens
new spaces for young women, from Riot Grrrls to Pussy Riot, to challenge structures
of dominance even within often-hypermasculine paradigms of punk. I draw on
theories of the theatrical and political avant-gardes to suggest that punk performance
is both inherently theatrical and grounded in the tradition of radical resistance. Using
this discussion about punk as a performed and embodied resistance, I turn my
analysis to youth culture with a particular focus on young women in the United States
and Russia in order to examine how punk reflects young women’s political and
ideological negotiations of an otherwise adult-centered world. I argue that punk, with
its do-it-yourself spirit and unapologetic rejection of objectivism and “civilized
blandness” functions as important, if not vital, role in many young women’s lives as
they carve out space for themselves as members of a society.
By virtue of the way in which young artists create punk for similarly young
spectators, the genre carves out a unique space for young people to respond to the
world and the dominant adult ideologies privileged within in an atypical context as
compared with other youth theatre performance paradigms. In most other instances
of youth theatre, adult actors, directors, and producers create and perform theatre
for young people, producing a theatre that excludes the intended audience from the
process of creation. In instances where youth perform for themselves, or create their
own theatre in the form of youth theatre classes or school performance ensembles,
adults function as artistic advisors in the form of teachers, directors, or club
supervisors. Most often, these adult roles impose a level of censorship on the young
performers’ artistic expression due to their connection to disciplining institutions of
school, church, and home, resulting in performance that is supposedly youthcentered, but filtered through constraining lenses adult understanding. Unlike these
more traditional forms of youth theatre, in many instances, punk production
eliminates the adult intermediary, since bands form outside adult-centered social
structures like schools. Instead, young people practice and perform in their
bedrooms, garages, basements, and occasionally music clubs, and they rarely engage
a traditional adult mentor or supervisor to monitor their progress. By working
almost completely outside adult supervision, punk allows youth voices to find a space
of expression with limited censorship, and this freedom results in a form of theatrical
performance that expresses young people’s unmediated ideas about the world—a
performance of youth culture.
Given this reality, I look at the US- based Riot Grrl movement of the 1990s,
specifically focusing on the work of Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna in
tandem with the more recent work of Russian punk band Pussy Riot (specifically the
work of Nadya Tolokno and Maria Alyokhina) in the early 2010s to explore how punk
rock feminist ideology morphed in the face of rapid global change. Through this study,
I demonstrate how young female performances of resistance find relevancy and push
for radical reimaginings of the world through uniquely female lenses of
understanding.
Seminar IV
Facilitator: Cheela Chilala, University of Zambia
Dr Christine Hatton
University of Newcastle, Australia
[email protected]
The Tough Beauty Project: interrogating girl2girl violence through theatre and drama
Girlhood studies have seen renewed scholarly interest in recent years, building on
decades of feminist scholarship and research across a range of fields such as
education, the arts, sociology, psychology and cultural studies. Scholars have
interrogated how girls negotiate their lives, work and identities within social contexts
and politics that are shaped by the discourses and regimes of patriarchy, inequity
and neoliberalism. In the current climate of moral panic about urban youth as
‘dangerous’ and ‘out of control’, attention has turned to the ways in which girls learn
and perform femininities and hyper-sexualities. In this climate interest has also
turned to girl2girl violence as a contemporary phenomenon. In western countries
girl2girl violence is reportedly becoming more prevalent, more accepted within
youth cultures, and in terms of justice systems, more regularly and systematically
punished. Simultaneously, there appears to be an increased voyeurism and titillation
associated with ‘girl on girl’ violence, where the performances of ‘bad girls’ are
regularly scrutinized, judged and sensationalized in popular culture, mass media and
online. Recent research in drama and girls education has focussed on the ways
dramatic processes might be used to critically examine girl’s stories and gendered
experiences in difficult contexts and times (Hatton 2012, 2013). This paper links this
research to Tough Beauty, an Australian theatre project for young audiences which
focussed on teenage girl2girl violence (http://toughbeauty.com.au). It was
commissioned by the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (CPAC) in south western
Sydney, a culturally diverse and rapidly expanding regional centre. This theatre
project written by Finegan Kruckemeyer and directed by Claudia Chidiac was
designed with youth at the heart of the play’s content, its creative process and the
performance experience. Tough Beauty dramatised complex girl terrain, using
theatre as a means of excavating and problematizing the experience of girl violence
from the inside: from a girl’s point of view. The project raised important questions
about how girls craft and manage their identities, relationships and spaces in difficult
times and contexts. This paper reports on the artistic and educational challenges of
staging a work of this kind for contemporary teen audiences and considers the
implications for girls’ education in and beyond the drama classroom and theatrical
event. This paper considers the positioning and critical engagement of youth as both
complicit audiences and active players within the onstage fictional representations of
violent girl landscapes. Tough Beauty aimed to open up aesthetic spaces for youth
engagement, offering important critical frames for youth (and their teachers) to
interrogate their worlds and relationships. Importantly in response to unstable
contexts and complex problems in which all are implicated, this type of TYA does not
supply easy answers, rather it invites youth audiences to be active meaning makers
and empathetic players as they negotiate their way through these landscapes.
************************************************************************************
Tamara Goldbogen
Weber State University
[email protected]
An Exploration of Life, Loss, and Lessons Learned in Finegan Kruckemeyer’s
Contemporary Fairy Tale This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing
My paper will examine the ways in which Australian playwright Finegan
Kruckemeyer’s play This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing addresses
and subverts the representations of young women overcoming loss, searching for a
home, and coming of age. The opening of Kruckemeyer’s (2013) This Girl Laughs,
This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing begins in a familiar way:
Once upon a time, a girl was born. And twice upon a time, a girl was
born. And thrice upon a time, a girl was born. Until there existed three
girls who were sisters, who were triplets. Albienne was the oldest. And
Beatrix was the next. And Carmen was youngest. (p. 1)
This language conjures up expectations of myth and fairy tale in its presentation. And
while Kruckemeyer’s storytelling utilizes many familiar dramatic conventions, this
tale of three sisters finds new insights into the contemporary representation of youth
on stage. I will explore how Kruckemeyer’s Theatre for Young Audiences script
successfully draws from traditional forms of storytelling (fairy tales, myths, legends)
and pushes the medium forward with contemporary stylings. Guiding questions for
my research are:

What contemporary representations of women are
offered in the play?

How does the playwright create a bridge between the
traditional and the contemporary?

How are the themes of war, death, and leadership
represented for our youngest audience members?

How does Kruckemeyer explore the notion of family in
this script?

How is the culture of the playwright reflected in the
storytelling?
In This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing, Kruckemeyer has
created a world where the audience is taken on a journey to experience three sisters’
passages from childhood to adulthood. Touchstones for my research will include
multiple drafts of Kruckemeyer’s script as well as my experience producing the North
American premiere of This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing at the
University of Pittsburgh (Spring 2012) and subsequent touring production (Spring
2013). Through my inquiry, I will examine Kruckemeyer’s contemporary
representations of young women overcoming loss, searching for a home, and coming
of age in the play while referencing my own experience translating this powerful
story for the stage.
************************************************************************************
Andrew Waldron
Arizona State University
[email protected]
Turning the Red Tide: Creative Arts Team and AIDS Education in NYC, 1986-1992
This study examines the creation and development of the Creative Arts Team’s (CAT)
HIV/AIDS education program in New York City, which brought sexual health issues
into the foreground. The primary research questions address how the company
employed drama education methods in response to societal concerns for urban youth,
misinformation about the disease, and the general atmosphere of fear that
permeated AIDS discourse in the public sphere. Drawing from their previous drama
work with sex and teen populations, CAT confronted the relatively unknown health
crisis that was suddenly gripping the United States, particularly in urban areas like
New York City. Both city leaders and educators recognized that young people were the
most at-risk for infection, whether by unsafe sexual practices or by intravenous drug
use. However, they were constrained by conflicting social, cultural, ideological, and
political beliefs that were often in direct opposition to the notion of teaching children
about a much misunderstood disease.
Despite the socio-political cacophony of arguments about condom access,
abstinence-only education, the apparent promotion of homosexuality, and the risk to
young people, CAT brought discussions about safer sex and intravenous drug use
directly into the classroom, modeled responsible sexual behaviors, and tackled teen
questions head on. The multi- faceted and continuously evolving program arose from
CAT’s own work with Theatre of the Oppressed and their partnership with New York
University. Amidst a groundswell of civic support, evident in meeting minutes from
the AIDS and Adolescents Network of New York, along with feedback from local and
state health organizations, CAT performed the piece for private, public, and
alternative high schools, outreach programs, homeless shelters, and youth
correctional facilities. This study aims to show how the Creative Arts Team’s work
not only changed the way New Yorkers viewed the disease, but also how youth
throughout the world were taught about the pandemic.
************************************************************************************
Roxanne Schroeder-Arce
Department of Theatre and Dance
The University of Texas at Austin
[email protected]
Seeking Culturally Responsive Pedagogical Practice:
Teaching TYA as Other in the University Setting
My pre-service theatre education students often respond with some hesitation when I
charge them with selecting and directing plays which represent the lives and
characters that their future students may recognize, not necessarily those that are
closest to their own lived experience. While I have played the role of Other as an artist
and pedagogue before and reflected on both as a scholar, a recent production of And
Then Came Tango by Emily Freeman, placed me in the role of Other again, this time as
director of the play and professor of the class that was to tour the production. As a
straight, married woman, my identity as Other in the process of working on the play
exploring the journey of two male penguins who father a baby chick brought up new
questions for me as Other and forced me to again look at the question of how we
represent Others on and off stage, as artists, pedagogues and scholars. While I had
prepared myself for the role of director of the play in relation to my own identity and
representation of this story that is not my own, I had not prepared myself for what
became a more challenging role: the role of professor, leader and advocate for this
production when it faced great adversity and our tour was ultimately cancelled.
As TYA practitioners who are in most instances representing Others, often adults
representing children and communities other than our own, this question of
representation of Other is vital to our work. In this paper, I reflect on my journey as
Other in this production process, a new kind of representation and vehement
adversity that I have never before experienced. The paper employs scholarship
around pedagogy and otherness, representation, and culturally responsive education.
Ultimately, through teaching this class, I was reminded that the charge I offer my
students about telling stories of Others is a tremendous challenge and responsibility
which requires constant self-reflection, openness and empathy. Given the increasing
partisanship in the US around gay marriage and other pressing issues, pre-service
educators must be prepared to engage with opposing views of schools and parents.
The contemporary child, growing up in a divided society, needs to see examples of
Otherness in theatre as well as examples of characters facing adversity around
Otherness. And Then Came Tango offered both, as well as the opportunity for me to
sit in and model an authentic place of concern and bewilderment as I looked at the
world through an Other’s eyes, even for a moment. For TYA practitioners, this is a
critical space to consider as we represent the life of the contemporary child.
************************************************************************************
Dr Steve Ball
Associate Director
Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham, UK
[email protected]
Professor Jane Coad.
Professor in Children and Family Nursing, Centre for Children and Families Applied
Research (CCFAR).
Coventry University.
[email protected]
Planting ….and Growing Seeds For The Future
This paper will present a longitudinal commissioned evaluation of the impact of the
social and educational role of Birmingham Repertory Theatre, West Midlands UK,
with respect to an early years theatre project, delivered to a cohort of children born
in Birmingham City and Sandwell general hospitals during October, 2004 who were
all offered a free theatre experience every year for the first ten years of their lives.
Birmingham Repertory Theatre is situated in the city centre of Birmingham, West
Midlands and is located near some of the highest levels of health inequalities, social
deprivation and social exclusion in England. The project, known as REP’s Children,
has continued for the last nine years during which time Birmingham Repertory
Theatre has developed and sustained the participatory relationship with the October
2004 cohort. The REP’s Children project, delivered by the Learning and Participation
team, comprises of theatre experiences for the families which to date has included a
combination of theatre and art activities in order to help increase access and reduce
pre-conceived ideas about the arts. The initial three year evaluation was important in
ensuring that the project met the identified aims and drew together clear messages
about engagement with families in delivering early-years theatre projects. The REP’s
Children project was repeated in February 2013 with Birmingham City Hospital and
Heartlands Hospital and is currently being evaluated.
At the outset of this project, Birmingham Repertory Theatre were committed to
evaluating what differences this would make to the children and families lives and
commissioned to Professor Jane Coad, Coventry University for three years to ensure
that this innovative project met the identified aims. Evidence was collated from the
230 families who agreed and included demographic data, questionnaires and
participatory focus group interviews with parents and steering group
members/artists delivering the programme. A particular strength is that the views of
young children and families who experienced the project were sought over three
years. A rich in-depth picture emerged and important comparisons about what
families valued in the programme emerged.
It was envisaged that the evaluation of REP’s Children could make a difference to
children and families from the outset but our presentation will highlight how the
programme and working together in partnership contributed to the team’s learning
surrounding planning, delivery and current provision of early-years theatre and arts
projects. This seminar will allow exchange and discuss the topics addressed in our
paper. It will have resonance for many delegates faced with such challenges of early
years arts programmes.
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Manon PASQUIER
sociology of young audiences and cultural practices consultant
ASSITEJ France member
[email protected] / [email protected]
Spectators Today, Audiences of Festivals for Young Audiences
"Spectateurs d’aujourd’hui, les publics des festivals jeune public" (Spectators today,
audiences of festivals for young audiences) is an exploratory research in social
sciences, conducted and written by Manon Pasquier and based on family audiences
from the french festivals Petits et Grands (Nantes – 44), Mé li’mô me (Reims – 51) and
Festi’Mô mes (Questembert – 56).
Even if we can find sociological data and research results about libraries or museums
attendance by the young audiences, there is almost no work in France about the
relationship between theatre and children as well as families. Started in 2011, this
exploratory research submits a reflection in 3 parts, in order to question the
audiences of the French theatre for young audiences :
I. The performing arts for the early childhood audience
II. The impact of the performing arts for young audiences on the spectator-child III.
The theater for young audiences as a family experience
The main purpose of this qualitative and quantitative research is to emphasize the
extent of children and families experiences. And, overall, it provides precious
information about spectator habits and practices.
III. The theater for young audiences as a family experience :
How children and parents experience this moment of the performance ? How is it
prepared and organized ? What does happen before, after ? Do parents and children
talk together about it ? What are the experiences of each family ? Do these families
develop spectator habits ? Do the parents who attempt a performance with their
children have already spectator habits ? Are they interested in arts education ? What
are their expectations about the theatre festivals for young audiences ? How theatre
for young audiences is received by these parents?
Regarding the methods used in this third part, 17 families have been questioned
during collective and individual interviews (22 adults and 18 children from 5 to 15
years old). Gathering children’s testimonies is a rarely-used method in France, but it
has been essential in this research. Moreover, the cross-checking data from children’s
speech on one hand and parent’s speech on the other was particularly instructive.
All these testimonies enable to achieve a much deeper understanding of the
performing arts reception of each member of families and to work on issues like
cultural transmission, discovery of the performing arts at any age, practice of the
spectator and its empowerment as the experiences increase... The various analyses
and parts of answer are punctuated by portraits of families who participate on a caseby-case basis or regularly to theater festivals for young audiences.
Finally, this research brings to light a wide range of experiences, because each family
is a singular spectator, depending on the family structure, the number and the age of
children, the parent-child relationship and their tendency of speaking together, their
life habits and priorities, their leisure activities... rather than factors as the parents’
socio-occupational category and the place of residence (city or countryside).
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Joohee Park
Adjunct Instructor, Sogang University, Seoul, Korea
[email protected]
Perceptions of the Contemporary Teenager in State Sponsored and Private Korean
Theatre for Young Audiences Companies
Not long ago, I had an interesting conversation with a researcher at the National
Theater Company of Korea. We were talking about the film Hwhy, in which a
seventeen year old boy comes face to face with an ugly truth about his father(s), and
explodes into a killing spree of revenge. The researcher noted that the teenage
character could be someone who contemporary teenagers think is awesome,
someone who takes matters into his own actions; I wryly replied that the movie is
rated “R” and therefore teenagers could not watch it at the cinema. An interesting
conversation followed, as we discussed exactly which element of the film deserved to
be restricted: gun violence? A hint of sexual content? Swearing? We could find
anything that could not be found in the video games or television programs that
Korean teenagers gain access to on a daily basis, yet the film was officially banned to
those under eighteen years old. I found myself thinking, how do state
funded/sponsored art for youth and private art for youth perceive children
differently?
In this paper, I compare TYA works produced for adolescents (age 13-18) by the
National Theater Company of Korea to TYA productions by the company Jeendong.
Since 2011, the National Theater Company of Korea has produced four TYA
productions aimed at teenage audiences, each dealing with crime, bullying and
friendship, pregnancy, and love. While the National Theater Company is not fully state
funded, the producers and artists work with a mission to establish an exemplary
repertoire of theatre for adolescents in Korea. In contrast, the works of Jeendong,
founded in 2001, focus on what the producers/artists think teenagers would like to
see on stage. Jeendong has also produced plays on love, pregnancy, bullying, and
crime, but the message and aesthetics of the plays by the National Theatre Company
and Jeendong are quite different. The former tends to portray its subjects in a more
poetic and reserved manner, while the latter often throws the subject directly into
the audiences’ faces. The perceptions of contemporary youth and what art for youth
“ought to be” in plays by the two groups vary widely, and the goal of this paper is to
analyze where the dissonance come from.
I am informed by the theoretical frameworks of Antonio Gramsci (“cultural
hegemony”) and Louis Althusser (“Ideological State Apparatus”) and start from the
assumption that TYA is an ideological tool that can spread the ideology of the
dominant class, but at the same time can attempt to overcome and upset hegemony
through subversive content and aesthetics. In this paper I examine the how
perceptions of youth are expressed through the subject, text, and aesthetical choice
of TYA plays by the National Theatre Company of Korea and Jeendong, and compare
works by the two. I also assume that as the two companies operate under different
material conditions, that such circumstances inevitably influence their practices of
TYA.
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Ivana Djilas, MA
Assitej Slovenia
University of Ljubljana
[email protected]
Accessibility and the equitable distribution of cultural content for young
audiences in Slovenia: Who are we making theatre performances for?
In the long years of fighting for the professionalisation, acknowledgment and respect
of theatre for the young audience in Slovenia, a great deal has been achieved: today,
productions intended for young audiences have comparable budgets to regular
productions in professional government-supported repertoire theatres, noninstitutional theatre groups have access to funding, tickets are less expensive due to
lower self-funding requirements in institutions that produce art for children, both
parents and teachers are involved in taking children to theatres, there is more media
engagement and less commercial pressure in theatre for young audiences, and art in
the school system is now even being included in the National Programme for Culture
as one of its priorities.
However, while a great deal has been achieved in the struggle for the quality of
theatre for children and young audiences, audience numbers are, paradoxically,
diminishing.
In the fifth year of the financial crisis, Slovenian repertory theatres are now too
expensive to support. Production costs are being reduced, tickets are being
aggressively marketed and, in spite of discussions on cultural education, any
commercially viable audience is being targeted. Thus, at a time when more and more
families have difficulty providing for the basic needs of their children, we are
producing more and more performances for fewer and fewer children.
In this situation, we are forced to start asking hard questions. Which children really
have access to cultural content? Are these the children with the greatest need for this
kind of access to culture? What will the cumulative effect of the crisis be on our
cultural capital? Are we investing in culture in the right areas? Could art be free of
charge for young audiences? Should art be free anyway? What can be done to reduce
the differences between children?
Unfortunately, we do not have research providing the facts. We are essentially
surmising that most children with access to art live in the capital city and a few larger
towns, and that access is assured by parents and teachers who themselves care for
and attend theatre, while children from families with lower cultural capital are less
likely to ever be able to establish contact with art and the theatre.
For this reason, we have decided to create a network that will offer access and
equitable sharing of cultural content to children and young people in socially deprived
environments. In particular, our network will offer a chance to freely attend
professional high-quality performances to children and young adults in
kindergartens, schools, refugee centres, Roma cultural centres, schools for children
with special needs and similar institutions. We plan to integrate the network with the
education system and thus enable teachers to use art in pre-primary and primary
education.
We are convinced that this approach will increase Slovenia’s cultural capital, and we
hope to demonstrate that this kind of investment pays off for our country and for
Europe.