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Editorial Introduction

Antonia Pop, Kim Solga and Tamara Trojanowska

Un mot de l’équipe de rédaction

Antonia Pop, Kim Solga and Tamara Trojanowska

Performance For/By/With Young People in Canada

Sandra Chamberlain-Snider and Heather Fitzsimmons Frey
This special issue examines the advocacy for and significance of discussing performance for/by/with young people in Canada. It asks how thinking about young people as audience members, creators, and co-creators can expose ideas about who they are, what they want, and what adults believe is good for them. The nineteen writers who contributed full-length articles and forum essays to this special issue demonstrate how attentive consideration to young people complicates creation ethics, aesthetic choices, affective impacts, content decisions, approaches to training, working conditions, and ideas about risk in connection to the performing arts. As the authors discuss how young people imagine, witness, train, and perform, they are simultaneously advocating for the young people they write about, for the specific issues that concern them, and for these perspectives to expand and invigorate broad conversations about Canadian performance for all ages.

La performance pour/par/avec les jeunes dans un contexte canadien

Sandra Chamberlain-Snider and Heather Fitzsimmons Frey
Ce numéro thématique examine l’importance des échanges sur la performance pour/par/avec les jeunes dans un contexte canadien et les efforts de sensibilisation menés à ce sujet. On y explore comment le fait de considérer les jeunes comme membres du public, comme créateurs ou co-créateurs peut dévoiler des idées sur qui sont ces jeunes personnes, ce qu’elles veulent et ce que les adultes pensent être bon pour elles. Les dix-neuf auteurs ayant signé les articles et alimenté le forum de ce numéro montrent comment le fait de prêter attention aux jeunes personnes complique l’éthique de création, les choix esthétiques, les impacts affectifs, les décisions relatives au contenu, les approches à la formation, les conditions de travail et les idées sur le risque en lien aux arts de la scène. En écrivant sur la manière dont les jeunes imaginent, sont témoins, sont formés et jouent sur scène, les personnes qui alimentent ce numéro défendent en même temps les intérêts des personnes sur qui elles écrivent et les enjeux qui les préoccupent et demandent que ces aspects alimentent et dynamisent les conversations plus vastes sur les spectacles destinés à tous les publics au Canada.

Hommage à Joyce Doolittle

Hélène Beauchamp

In Memoriam: Joyce Doolittle

Hélène Beauchamp

The Aesthetics of Towards Youth: Making Relations in and through Theatre

Kathleen Gallagher and Andrew Kushnir
This article introduces a multi-year, multi-site ethnographic study undertaken with 250 young people in drama classrooms in Canada, England, India, Greece, and Taiwan between 2014 and 2019. The experience and findings of that research then became the basis of an original documentary play, Towards Youth, co-produced by Project: Humanity and Crow’s Theatre in Toronto in February 2019. This article elaborates on the relationship built between the lead researcher and the embedded playwright on the project, accounting for their shared vision for the work, their aesthetic and ethical principles in research and playmaking, and finally their efforts to understand how the documentary play and its surrounding pedagogies were apprehended by audience members.

Traversée: Crossing Borders in Search of the Emancipatory Theatre for Children

Yana Meerzon
How should theatre talk to children about migration and its politics, about death and separation, about arrival and new hopes? What tone—when speaking of violence and torture, injustice and political manipulation, losing one’s family and language, seeking safety and new friends—should the artists take on? Should this conversation be educational, protective, cautious, neutral, or entertaining? How should artists shape their work for children of different ages to help them respond to the scope and complexity of the topic? Estelle Savasta’s play Traversée (2011) provides some responses to these questions. It engages with the pedagogical and artistic traditions of making “emancipatory theatre for children,” and it allows the conversation about war and migration to take place. Director Milena Buziak’s 2016 staging of Traversée presents an example of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) that takes on the responsibility of making its spectators politically aware and emotionally engaged, specifically when it comes to their understanding of social injustice today. By engaging with the most urgent political issues related to global migration, this article provides an example of making theatre for children political.

Disrupting Age Stereotypes in Theatre for Young Audiences with Older-Bodied Puppets

Julia Henderson
Although expressions of aging and old age differ across other identity categories, they most often yoke aging to notions of deterioration and loss. Young audiences are exposed to this narrative of decline through wide-ranging cultural references in advertising, cartoons, fairy tales, children’s books, and theatre. However, various forms of theatre can also reimagine age narratives in positive ways. In this article, Henderson uses close performance analysis, analysis of archival video, and an interview with Vancouver theatre artist Chris McGregor to examine the Vancouver-based TYA puppet plays The Little Old Man by Theatre Bagger Arts Society and Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch by Axis Theatre. Both plays share a number of age-related themes and establish nuanced, positive messages about aging, older age, and intergenerational relations. By drawing on Steve Tillis’s theory of puppetry and Anne Davis Basting’s depth model of aging, Henderson argues that puppets can be used to interrupt negative age stereotypes and hostile age-related narrative tropes, and encourage children to reimagine old age, aging, and relationships with older people in complex and hopeful ways. In the case of these two plays, Henderson contends that they interrupt age stereotypes by portraying children and older characters as having agency, foregrounding positive intergenerational relations, and reimagining decline. They do this, Henderson argues, through their themes, aesthetics and performance styles, and the embodied performances of the handlers in conjunction with their animation of the puppets.

Youth Participatory Action Research and Applied Theatre Engagement: Supporting Indigenous Youth Survivance and Resurgence

Diane Conrad
For Indigenous youth in Canada, times are challenging, but the challenges youth face do not define the wholeness of their lived realities. This article focuses on applied theatre engagement, drawing on three youth participatory action research projects with Indigenous youth in three diverse contexts: in a school setting, in a youth offender jail, and with a community-based organization serving street-involved youth. It explores the significance of applied theatre approaches to research with Indigenous youth to avoid reproducing one-dimensional damage-centred narratives in favour of inspiring processes for survivance and resurgence. The discussion emphasizes the ways in which research can offer support for youth to become empowered and for others to see the youths’ wisdom and hope alongside the struggles that together shape their realities.

Manifesting the Future

Nikki Shaffeeullah, Nevada Jane Arlow, Jenn Boulay and Senjuti Aurora Sarker
This series of first-person reflections by emerging artists meditates on the future of theatre and performance. Written collectively by a past artistic director and recent participants of the AMY (Artist Mentoring Youth) Project, a Toronto-based arts organization providing free and accessible mentorship and creative opportunities to youth, the article offers specific visions from each contributor: how marginalized artists will disrupt systems of oppression to become part of the mainstream; that any possible future will need to draw from our past, pre-capitalism relationships to performance; and how community-centred approaches to performance will enable the professional sector to become meaningfully equitable.

Expanding Conversations of Race and the Nation: A Closer Look at The Fish Eyes Trilogy by Anita Majumdar

Alysha Bains
“Coming of age” narratives in multicultural Canada often construct an ideal that is not attainable for many Black, Indigenous, and young people of colour growing up in the country. Often times, experiences of racialized young people are dismissed and cast aside. This article explores how Anita Majumdar’s The Fish Eyes Trilogy acts as a tactic of resistance to this reality. Tactics of resistance as argued by feminist media scholar Yasmin Jiwani help us to imagine different ways of seeing the world that is often presented to us. As a tactic of resistance, The Fish Eyes Trilogy uses parody, disrupts homogeneity of South Asian experiences in Canada, and reverses the dominant white gaze. This three-part play offers a curious site for reimagining how we can expand and critique discussions of race with young people in Canadian theatre.

Staging Anxiety in Rachel Aberle’s Still/Falling

Matthew Tomkinson
Still/Falling (2016) is a play for young audiences, written by Rachel Aberle, and produced by Green Thumb Theatre in Vancouver. This forum article critically examines the play’s role in local high-school curriculum through the lens of three topics: pedagogy, staging, and terminology. In particular, the article argues that a number of elements—including questions posed to students in the play’s study guide, symbols chosen to represent mental illness in the play, and mental health discourse surrounding the production—work against Green Thumb’s mandate to challenge stigma around mental illness. To combat stereotypes, a greater sense of ambiguity and complexity in these three areas is called for.

Accompagner la sortie au théâtre par la médiation culturelle en classe : une expérience riche pour les élèves et les enseignants

Anne Nadeau
Cultural mediation is often offered to young audiences as a complement to a trip to the theatre, particularly in a school setting. Such interventions allow young audience members to act as creators or performers in order to better understand the show, to react to it and to reflect on its messages. Such experiences also enable teachers to reflect on their practice, adopt new pedagogical practices, and develop their role as cultural intermediaries.

A Conversation about Songs My Mother Never Sung Me

Caroline Howarth, Mieko Ouchi and Kelsie Acton
This conversation explores the development and premiere production of Songs My Mother Never Sung Me, an American Sign Language (ASL)/English chamber opera written and composed by Dave Clarke and produced by Concrete Theatre in Edmonton, Alberta. Staging an opera for Deaf and hearing family audiences required building meaningful connections to Edmonton’s Deaf community, both through engaging a Deaf cultural consultant and through a partnership with SOUND OFF, Canada’s Deaf theatre festival. Prioritizing ASL, Deaf audiences, and casting a Deaf actor in the role of Mom were significant.

Volunteerism and Calgary’s “infa-Moose” Community Impro Theatre

Claire Carolan
Moving beyond current discourses of increasing self-confidence, reduction of social anxiety, disengagement, and risky behaviour as positive outcomes of participation in youth theatre training, this article identifies volunteerism, entrepreneurship, and generativity as beneficial outcomes to youth participation in the Loose Moose Theatre Company (LMTC) community in Calgary, Alberta. This article also discusses the increased benefits of learning that occur as compensation for time spent volunteering versus learning in exchange for a monetary fee. Examples of successful and notable LMTC alumni are included.

Balancing Act

Lisa Marie DiLiberto
This article discusses the challenges of being a professional artist and parent working in the performing arts industry and the measures being taken to create increased accessibility in the sector. It opens with an anecdote by the author recounting moments of exclusion from professional opportunities due to caregiving responsibilities. The article goes on to outline global initiatives created to support artist caregivers in the performing arts and then points to various media responding to this issue. The article introduces the national initiative Balancing Act being developed by Theatre Direct, which aims to support artist caregivers in Canada and concludes with a personal reflection from the author, herself a professional artist, scholar, and mother.

Youth as Subjects and Agents of Artistic Research: A Comparison of Youth-Engagement Models

Sheila Christie
The iCreate Cape Breton pilot project sought to cultivate intergenerational networks of community artists and practitioners, with the long-term goal of empowering youth who face challenging economic or environmental circumstances. The three-year project began with recruitment of youth through established community organizations, followed by an initial phase of multidisciplinary creative exploration, during which youth worked closely with Cape Breton University faculty, as well as elders from their own communities. Phase One culminated in a public showcase of youth-led artistic projects, including theatre, music, film, and visual art, centred around the theme of slow violence. During Phase Two, young artists worked more independently, creating one feature film and two short documentaries. While the second-phase partnership model illuminated challenges around power dynamics, responsibilities, and expectations, it was more effective than the first-phase mentorship model with respect to empowering youth as research partners and facilitating long-term resiliency and social transformation.

Queer Isn’t a Choice! Queer Is My Family!

Pamela Baer
This article reflects on the way that young people with LGBTQ2S+ parents engaged in the writing of an original song as a form of gender and sexual diversity education during an applied theatre research project. The creative work was self-revelatory, deeply personal, and created a powerful space for both self-exploration and youth-led advocacy. Participants believed that queer is to be celebrated, embraced, and owned. Not as a marginal identity that needs to be questioned and explained, but as an embodied site of emergence and becoming. The song that was written during this workshop celebrates unique family formations while also suggesting that everyone is different in their own way. In doing so, songwriting as affective practice engaged participants in a subversive and empowering reordering of their world. The emergence of new possibilities materialized by centring the stories of, by, and for youth participants as we navigated the tensions between authorship, aesthetics, and pedagogy.

SOLGA, KIM, Theory for Theatre Studies: Space. London: Methuen Drama, 2019, 184 pp. / BENNETT, SUSAN, Theory for Theatre Studies: Sound. London: Methuen Drama, 2019, 151 pp.

Roberta Mock

ALVAREZ, NATALIE, CLAUDETTE LAUZON, and KEREN ZAIONTZ, EDS., Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2019, 343 pp.

Katherine Zien

NEVEUX, OLIVIER, Contre le théâtre politique. Paris : La fabrique éditions, 2019, 320 pp.

Camille Gascon