Young People, New Theatre

A Practical Guide to an Intercultural Process

Noël Greig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134055333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Young People, New Theatre is a 'how-to' book; exploring and explaining the process of collaborating creatively with groups of young people across cultural divides.

Organized into exercises, case studies and specific topics, this book plots a route for those wishing to put this kind of theatre into practise. Born out of the hugely successful 'Contacting the World' festival, it is the first practical handbook in this field.

Topics include:

• debating the shared world
• What is collaboration?
• different ways of working
• adapting to specific age groups and abilities
• post-project evaluations.

1 The twinning process

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

(Margaret Mead)

You can’t transform the whole world, but a small group can go very far in transforming at all levels relationships within itself, and with its immediate audience during a performance.

(Peter Brook)

Making theatre is to enter into an unknown world, to enter on a stage of liberation.

(A nine-year-old pupil in Brazil)

This book is primarily a practical guide to a specific process of creative work: the twinning of groups of young artists from different cultures and communities, leading to new theatre that is rooted in a collaborative enterprise. The work it offers is based upon proven methods, examples and outcomes of creative activities, all of which can be adopted and adapted to a range of contexts.

This work has not come out of thin air. The projects that inspired the work in this book - ones that I have been personally involved with - were themselves inspired by a movement and developments in new theatre that have been evolving for some time; a youth theatre movement that exists outside or alongside the institutional structures; groups of young people making theatre that is not part of an overly formal, educationally driven structure, with working practices and outcomes that are not too ‘programmatic’; new theatre developments, initiated and driven by young artists entering the professional field, that challenge the ways in which theatre is made and what its purpose and function are. This book comes out of that history.

It also comes out of a broader history - the re-evaluation of the role of creativity and artistic processes in an evolving world. That is, ‘art’ not just as an add-on to ‘real life’ (a leisure pursuit to be consumed after the daily battle with material circumstances) - nor indeed as a mechanistic ‘solution’ to particular social or economic problems. The re-evaluation I refer to addresses the major question of our times: ‘How do we release our human creativity in ways that may steer us, in a truly evolutionary way, from the seemingly self-destructive path we have set ourselves on?’.

That question is, of course, a tall order for a book that has a specific brief: the exploration of a particular theatre process. It would be grandiose of me to suggest that I’ll be answering the question in its totality. But I would like you to view the work offered as one aspect of a worldwide movement in the arts - one that is ‘under the radar’ of the cultural mandarins and policymakers, but that may just signal some new way forward.

I would like you to see the work - and your own creative projects - in this context. Therefore, this opening chapter begins with a broad theoretical, political and philosophical reflection on some of the thinking that has inspired it. In all the things I will be referring to - history, cultural developments, neurobiology, globalisation and economics - I am no ‘expert’. But they are all things that artists are interested in and that increasingly - particularly among young artists - form part of our reflection on the purposes of creative activity in our shared world.

Nor are artists alone in their consideration of the place of art in the world. There is a gradual, often fragmentary, but observable shift in the perception of creative collaboration taking place within other areas of thought and action. I was recently at a gathering of scientists and artists. It is an ongoing forum and it is called the Tipping Point. The ‘tipping point’ is an image related to a mechanism such as the water-wheel: the point at which the cumulative pressure of a process - slow and undetectable at first - builds to the moment when there is a massive and unstoppable rate of change. The forum was concerned with climate change and was styled as ‘a continuing dialogue between artists and people engaged in researching and understanding climate change’. The purpose of the forum was not to ‘listen to experts’, but to engage the two disciplines in a creative dialogue around ‘how to respond to this new and extraordinary challenge’. What was extraordinary for me - as someone who became a practising theatre artist in the 1960s - was to hear a major climate-change scientist say that ‘we need artists, now more than ever, to work with and collaborate with’. I say ‘extraordinary’ because, when I began my work, the notion of scientists regarding artists as equal partners would have sounded like pie in the sky. Yet here at this gathering were major figures from the world of science saying that artists could - and must - be collaborators with them in reimagining the world.

The creative collaborations between young people - groups of professional artists or youth theatre groups - that have inspired this book are firmly within the context of all the above remarks. That is: making new theatre that is appropriate for the time we live in.

Towards the end of the chapter there will be guidance and comment on practical aspects of the twinning process, key challenges of such projects, and possible aims. For those readers who wish to engage immediately with such matters, please do not hesitate to turn to them first. But I would suggest that you find time to come back to the opening section of the chapter when you feel that may be appropriate or useful.

TWINNING IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

The following thoughts, reflections and comments represent - in a distilled form - the wide-ranging dialogues between artists I have collaborated with: many of them young practitioners and others (such as myself) a bit longer in the tooth. All have been focussed on the new context for the artist in the world. All of them draw upon a keen perception of the forces that are operating in the world and how they affect our lives and futures.

A world in transit

In the eighteen months between my starting to write this book and its publication, huge numbers - possibly millions - of people around the world will have experienced major shifts in their lives: geographical, social, cultural and economic. The conditions of life (in all its aspects) will have changed fundamentally, often without much prior warning and without the benefit of traditional survival codes. These changes will have required the need to adapt, often swiftly and brutally. In the newspaper today, for instance, I read of a scheme that involves the demolition and compulsory eviction of tens of thousands of slum-dwellers in the Dharavi district of Mumbai. The district is a prime property-development site, and the 60,000 families will be shifted in order to make way for expensive residential apartments, new office buildings and an industrial park. Putting aside the fact that the residents of Dharavi have been promised ‘brand new homes’ (the word ‘promised’ is key here), it is worth noting that Mumbai’s government has declared that the scheme will not require the usual seventy per cent approval of the local inhabitants. The compulsory razing of Dharavi and the displacement of its people will have taken place without their consent. The change will have been imposed ‘from the top’.

‘Change’ has of course always been a constant factor in human history. Human beings have always been ‘on the move’. Mass migrations, shifts in populations, wars, slavery, colonialism, famines and the effects (and possible benefits) of developing technologies have all contributed to the transformation of the securities and certainties of ‘the traditional’ and ‘the known’ into the challenges of ‘the new’.

However, it is safe to say that such processes are now happening at unprecedented levels and on a scale and at a pace never known before. The example of Dharavi in Mumbai is just one of the countless mega-schemes that we read or hear about daily. On smaller scales too, the collusion of big business and local and national governments imposes changes that disrupt the fabric of life. In England, a small village will disappear under the tarmac of a new airport runway; a row of perfectly good houses is demolished to make way for a motorway bypass. The experience of change (in all its dimensions) is becoming the determinant factor of life for everyone, and the insecurities, fears - and possibly the occasional exhilaration - that change can bring are heightened by the rapidity with which it occurs.

Even when we are not personally or immediately affected by certain aspects of change, the very fact that we are aware of them can add to the sense of apprehension that comes of living in ‘a world in transit’. The place of safety (tradition, belief, culture or community) seems to disappear in the face of the unknown ‘new’ that lurks around the corner. The technological media beam into our very homes the images of the great transitions taking place. We see the migrations into great new cities of people from previously rural, agricultural economies. We are aware of the destruction of old and stable - if often poverty-ridden - ways of life, through rapid industrialisation, natural disaster (often aided by human ineptitude and greed), mass tourism etc. We know that countless people make desperate journeys across dangerous seas on insubstantial craft or in sealed trucks, to seek a better life on other continents. Governments woo workers from other lands to come and do low-paid and unsafe work. Political asylum seekers seek refuge from cruel and tyrannical regimes. And politicians and ‘leaders’ (with a few honourable exceptions) grab onto the statistics and play on our anxieties to gain votes or hang on to power: ‘our way of life’ is being threatened, we are ‘being swamped’ by ‘alien’ cultures, our ‘cultural heritage’ and our fundamental beliefs are ‘under siege’. And so - whether or not we are personally threatened - we perceive the world as a place that is shifting, dangerous and out of our control. And, unfortunately, we have the tendency to place the blame for this on the very people who are ‘swamping’ us, who are ‘alien’, who are ‘threatening our jobs’. This is perhaps the greatest danger we face - the impulse to fear ‘the other’, to close ranks and to reject anything and anyone who is different. For we are living at a moment in history when - like it or not - we need to adapt to existing cheek by jowl with each other in ways that have never occurred before.

This is the world that young people are coming into and having to deal with. It is - if we simply go by the things just mentioned - a pretty gloomy prospect. So it is worthwhile remembering that ‘in transit’ can also bring benefits and opportunities - equally challenging, but with some promise of good outcomes. The benefits of cheap travel (the question of ‘the carbon footprint’ aside, for the moment) have meant that students have been able to experience life and learning in different countries and cultures. Some forms of travel (the ones that do not simply drop us down into expensive resorts in exotic places) have opened eyes, ears, hearts and minds to the possibility that ‘the other’ is not so very different to us. The arrival and presence of people from another culture in ‘our’ community are not always and inevitably shaped by the fears vote-seeking politicians attempt to instill in us. I am reminded of a rural community in England recently, in which an African family had settled. Such communities can often be a little inward-looking and suspicious of ‘the outsider’, but in this case, when the Home Office attempted to repatriate the family to its country of origin, the community rallied round and fought off the government. The family stayed. A tiny example, certainly, in which the experience of ‘a world in transit’ does not result in fear and suspicion of ‘the stranger’ - but there will be countless others, even if the ‘official’ picture gives them little recognition.

The challenge of change

Nevertheless, it would be foolish not to recognise that an aspect of human nature is a sort of innate conservatism: a desire for the safety and security of ‘the known’, and a predisposition to suspicion and fear of ‘the new’. Even when - through necessity, coercion or a sense of adventure - we venture into a new environment, we have an impulse to carry with us, or recreate, the symbols of our known and secure worlds. Nineteenth-century European ‘explorers’ into Africa took with them the trappings of their bourgeois world. ‘Native’ muscle and sweat dragged European implements, furnishings and bedding across deserts and through forests. In more modern times, the package-holiday trade from northern to southern Europe has seen the arrival of the ‘English pub’ in the resorts of Spain and Portugal, catering for the need to ‘be abroad’ and ‘be at home’ at the same time. A friend of mine, whose family moved to the UK from rural India, tells me how her mother reproduced in full detail her Asian village environment in an English terrace house kitchen - the implements, decorations, foodstuffs, language and total feel of the place.

This need to replicate the known (and keep the strange at bay) seems to be an imperative that exists in all cultures. Such strategies are clearly designed to lessen the aggravation, confusion, apprehensions and tensions of the contact zones between different cultures and environments. But these protective devices, harmlessly conservative as they may seem, can mask an underlying aggression towards ‘the other’ - a resistance to absorbing the new and the ‘alien’. We can be critical of this and take a moral or political stance - the image of the feather-bedded nineteenth-century European being carried around Africa by native bearers is as dubious as the notion of the English pub being deposited in the middle of a twentieth-century Spanish village. The attempt of an Asian woman to reproduce her home village in an English terrace house seems equally defensive, even if possibly more understandable in the face of entering a dominant environment that is hostile to her presence in the first place.

All of the above examples of this tendency to want to carry our known culture with us, like the turtle with her shell, are relatively harmless on a global scale. None of them suggests a major threat to human evolution or the end of the species. Yet all of them suggest that there might be something amiss in our resistance to the new, and particularly when we look at this tendency in terms of our rapidly changing world. Looking at the big, global issues that face us, this failure to embrace the new begins to take on more alarming dimensions. The current rise of certain forms of fundamentalism, the possibility of a new arms race, the reappearance of vigorous forms of nationalism all suggest that we have evolved our protective shields to the point where our capacity for mutual distrust has led us into the dangerous territory of mutual destruction. The question arises: Has our ‘innate conservatism’ (survival, a sense of identity) outlived its usefulness? Or is it our destiny?

Do we have the capacity to think about this and - through thinking - discover new and creative ways to avoid the ‘tipping point’? Recent research into the human brain and its development may offer some optimism here.

The human brain

Scientific research into the human brain and its development suggests that innate conservatism and its negative or destructive outcomes are not our destiny. For those of us who are interested in developing strategies - in the arts or otherwise - for tackling the challenge of change that faces the world, this work sheds helpful light upon our task.

Recent developments in the field of neurobiology have revealed that this ‘innate conservatism’ exists in the structures of the brain and how it develops. That is, there is a scientific basis for our resistance to change. Without going into this in huge detail, the research has shown some of the following.

In early age (childhood), the human brain - in its developing structure - is remarkably ‘plastic’ in its ability to absorb and be literally shaped by its environment. For example, the ability to absorb - and adapt - that is observed in the child’s brain is shown in the greater ease with which children learn new languages compared with adults. Another - and truly distressing - example of the ability of the child to absorb and adapt to the influences of new information can be found in some accounts of the concentration camps during the Nazi regime in Germany. Here, there were reports of children’s games called ‘going to the gas chamber’.

By early adulthood, however, the brain has become much less ‘plastic’ - the elaborate structures developed in childhood begin to show a diminished ability to change. A sort of ‘hardening of the adaptive arteries’ is an image that comes to mind. From being the ‘absorbing-adapting’ structure of the ‘child brain’, it becomes an organ (the adult ‘mind’) whose structures are established. The previous, more receptive, activity of the brain changes to that of ‘going out’. It now seeks to make the world around it (environment etc.) conform to its established structures. This process - according to the research into neurobiology - begins in early adulthood. Our need to ‘shape the world’ is therefore based on the imperative of the brain to ensure that the external structures of the world - the whole environment - match its internal structures.

The above is putting into a very small nutshell a massive amount of research into the physical development of the brain and its structures. To go into it in any further detail is beyond the remit of this book, but, even if we consider this abbreviated account, it casts a new light on our behaviour as human beings - how we interact with each other as individuals and groups, socially, culturally and historically. Suddenly, the difficulties facing groups or individuals when their ‘known’ environment changes - through immigration, imprisonment, exile, migration, the destruction of a settled habitat, the development of new technologies etc. - are understood in a new way. In such circumstances, the ‘external’ (the symbolic environment) no longer matches with the ‘internal’ (the structured brain). The discomfort and trauma this can produce - personal, inter-group, inter-ethnic etc. - can be immense. But now that trauma can be viewed not just as some eternal, unsolvable or feckless aspect of human nature, to be ‘solved’ by war, conquest or martial law (or by being nice to the maids and the waiters in our ‘exotic holiday retreat’!). It is rooted in the codes laid down in the brain. The struggle to ‘control the story’ - to demand consistency between internal structure and external reality - is lodged in our evolution.

So what does all this mean to us, living in this world ‘in transit’, where the contact zones between different cultures, faiths, beliefs, traditions and ways of life multiply daily? What strategies are available or possible for minimising the actual or perceived threats that turn these meeting places into battlefields? For find them we must, if we do not wish the defensive, structured and ‘non-plastic’ brain (mind) to overwhelm us in fundamentalist ways of thinking and behaving, increased state controls, more ‘gated communities’, ‘exclusion walls’ and border controls.

Once again, all this seems a recipe for gloom and doom. Are we condemned (in Greek tragedy style) by the very nature of our neurobiology to a repetition of cycles of mutual distrust and destruction that become even more regular and overwhelming? It is not the place of this book to provide the answer or the solution. But - in the parti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The twinning process
• 2 A creative dialogue
• 3 Collaborative exchange
• 4 Getting the story
• 5 Working methods
• 6 Full participation
• 7 Form and style
• 8 Structure
• 9 Adaptation and its opportunities
• 10 Broadening the horizons
• Appendix A: Companies you may wish to contact
• Appendix B: Contacting the World