Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth

The Performing Justice Project

Megan Alrutz, Lynn Hoare

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351591591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth: The Performing Justice Project offers accessible frameworks for devising original theatre, developing critical understandings of racial and gender justice, and supporting youth to imagine, create, and perform possibilities for a more just and equitable society.

Working at the intersections of theory and practice, Alrutz and Hoare present their innovative model for devising critically engaged theatre with novice performers. Sharing why and how the Performing Justice Project (PJP) opens dialogue around challenging and necessary topics already facing young people, the authors bring together critical information about racial and gender justice with new and revised practices from applied theatre, storytelling, theatre, and education for social change. Their curated collection of PJP "performance actions" offers embodied and reflective approaches for building ensemble, devising and performing stories, and exploring and analyzing individual and systemic oppression. This work begins to confront oppressive narratives and disrupt patriarchal systems—including white supremacy, racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth invites artists, teaching artists, educators, and youth-workers to collaborate bravely with young people to imagine and enact racial and gender justice in their lives and communities. Drawing on examples from PJP residencies in juvenile justice settings, high schools, foster care facilities, and community-based organizations, this book offers flexible and responsive ways for considering experiences of racism and sexism and performing visions of justice.

Visit performingjusticeproject.org for additional information and documentation of PJP performances with youth.

Part One

Performing Justice Project as Critically Engaged Theatre

1.0 Introduction

A novice, teenaged performer stands confidently in the makeshift staging area of the concrete gym of a juvenile justice facility. She faces a small audience of family members (not her own), social workers, teaching artists, and juvenile justice staff. Her peers watch attentively from seated rows on either side of the staging area as she comes to the end of a solo performance piece, a monologue about her experience as a young woman in the system. She details efforts to navigate life when a parent is incarcerated and nods to the ways systemic injustice plays out differently for her and her racially diverse group of friends. The performance piece includes a powerful critique of the juvenile justice system and her year-long incarceration: “I have a question for the whole juvenile justice system. When are you going to give me the real help I need? When I think about what I’ve done, I am not sure boot camp is it,” she says, looking directly at the audience.

This book invites you to intentionally think through the use of theatre and performance to address issues of gender and racial justice with young people. The school-to-prison pipeline, identity-based violence directed at youth, inequities across employment, income, housing, healthcare, climate change, and education demonstrate that identity-based injustices remain central to the experiences of young people in the US. Media attention to systemic racial and gender violence in the US has resulted in a renewal of youth activism and increased public consciousness around race, gender, police brutality, and gun control, among other issues. As young people organize for social change through walkouts, marches, and social media campaigns, theatre and performance texts need to address how theatre-makers and teaching artists can similarly engage with and respond to current events impacting the lives of young people. To this end, Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth: The Performing Justice Project considers performance-making with youth as part of larger conversations about theatre and society. Drawing on our own theatre work with youth, and informed by our commitment to gender and racial justice, this book presents practical performance actions and a flexible framework for creating original theatre with youth—theatre that supports young people as they imagine, create, and perform their individual and collective stories, and their vision(s) for more just and equitable communities.

The Performing Justice Project (PJP) is a highly structured performance-making program designed to engage young people in creating original theatre about their lives as a way of moving toward gender and racial justice. The PJP process is one model of engaging the arts to reflect on and dismantle systems of oppression with youth. Through PJP, we offer short-term residency programs and performance-based workshops for groups of young people. Each residency takes place over 12 to 15 sessions and invites young people to examine and name the connections between their individual experiences and systemic (in)justice. In turn, participants then imagine and perform new and more just possibilities for themselves and their communities. PJP directors and teaching artists guide the project, working with youth—who may or may not have experience with theatre or performance—in a variety of sites, including schools, juvenile justice facilities, and foster care settings. Each PJP residency culminates in a produced performance in which young people share their points of view about living in a racist, sexist, and patriarchal society, as well as their vision for fair, accessible, and equitable spaces for youth. By lifting up and amplifying the stories of young people, PJP illuminates some of the ways that identity, power and privilege, and systems of oppression significantly shape youths’ lives and experiences.

As artists, teachers, and scholars, we—Megan and Lynn, the authors of this text—know that it is essential for young people to have the knowledge and resources to reflect on and name their gendered and racialized experiences. We also understand that society as a whole needs to hear from and reflect on youth’s experiences; young people are critical members of our communities. To this end, PJP directors collaborate with teaching artists, partner sites, and young people to identify and understand intersecting power systems. In this book, we share a collection of what we call performance actions, namely theatre and performance practices and pedagogies designed to engage young people around concepts of personal power and privilege, as well as the ways that systemic and institutional racism and sexism impact every aspect of our lives. By devising original theatre that intentionally examines how our experiences are connected to identities, we aim to build alliances with and among young people and ultimately to foster creative pathways for building systemic change.

Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth: The Performing Justice Project presents a performance-making model that:

1.builds ensemble and fosters a sense of belonging with and among young people;

2.engages young people in addressing critical social justice issues related to their lives and communities;

3.devises and shares original performance work that addresses and imagines gender and racial justice.

Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth includes detailed maps and plans that we use for facilitating, devising, and staging original theatre about gender and racial justice. However, we hope this book encourages theatre directors, facilitators, teaching artists, and groups of youth participants to use and adapt the PJP model to fit their specific context(s). To this end, we organize the book into three major parts, offering a detailed picture of the PJP model and inviting readers to develop their own justice-oriented performance practices, residencies, and program models.

Part One, Performing Justice Project as Critically Engaged Theatre, outlines the purpose and rationale of the book, proposing an urgent need for creative and embodied approaches to addressing identity-based inequities with and among youth. Part One also introduces the PJP model, providing the history and background of the project, as well as the core values, beliefs, and theories that underpin our practice. PJP is part of many ongoing conversations and movements and this part of the book outlines theoretical and practical frameworks, such as storytelling, intersectionality, social justice education, and racial justice, that we draw on and remain in conversation with as we facilitate critically engaged theatre-making.

Part Two, Preparing Participants and Performing Justice, presents our approach to creating and staging original performance work with young people. We include detailed descriptions of how we work and how we devise. The bulk of Part Two includes a collection of performance actions that we use for devising critically engaged theatre with youth. PJP performance actions introduce embodied approaches to building ensemble, performing and staging small bits of performance, analyzing systemic oppression, and applying theatre as a tool to explore and disrupt patriarchal systems including white supremacy and racism, sexism, and homophobia.

We organize and codify our collection of performance actions based on three core questions that serve as the foundation of PJP:

•Who am I?

•What is (in)justice and how does it show up in my life?

•How do I perform justice?

Using these questions as our organizational framework, we scaffold performance actions in each section to engage participants in PJP’s core questions and build toward performance. The performance actions are laid out as facilitator guides, including step by step instructions for leading the action and supporting participants to name and perform their visions for justice.

Part Three, Producing a Performing Justice Project, considers many of the practical elements and steps we rely on to build and produce a PJP residency, script, and performance. We reflect on the roles and responsibilities of the leadership team, logistical frameworks for producing a public performance, and partnership development and maintenance. This part also offers sample session plans and program outlines that our team has piloted with multiple groups of youth, many of whom were incarcerated, in foster care, or attending under-resourced middle and high schools. We end this part of the book with a reflection on the practice of belonging and accountability, and the ways that that this necessary work requires a commitment to each other, imagination, and above all, action.

Woven throughout the three parts of this text are original essays that we call Doing Justice. These essays were written by PJP resident teaching artists and speak to their experiences of facilitating PJP residencies and address what it means to “do justice” when working with youth participants. The authors of these essays employ autobiographical stories, reflection, and other research to frame their ideas and questions about what this work does, what it requires, and what it leaves behind. The essays dance with other parts of the book, offering insight into and questions about struggles with anti-racism and gender justice, facilitator identity, youth agency, healing, and respectability politics. The authors of these pieces have significantly shaped the PJP model, and the inclusion of their voices in these pages serve as a reminder that this work comes with tensions and questions and that it never happens in isolation.

As you move through this book, you may notice that we share only a few samples of script work, photographs, and stories from the PJP rehearsal room. With these select examples, we try to represent the energy, movement, and aesthetics of PJP. However, representing our work with youth often comes into conflict with institutional efforts to “protect” youth identity by restricting research with vulnerable populations and prohibiting the use of any identifying information about the youth participants in our writing. As a result, this book does not include our direct interviews or evaluations conducted with young people. Rather, as we share the PJP model, participants’ voices are foregrounded through the small bits of performance material that were performed for larger publics, as well as animation, video, and audio recordings of participants’ work and experiences in PJP. We encourage you to visit the PJP Gallery pages on our website for further visual and audio documentation of this work.¹ The performances and stories that are included in this book and on our website are shared with written permission, represent our own experiences in PJP, and/or come from public performances.

Taken together, the three parts of this book invite you to devise original performance work that lifts up youth voices, inspires critical dialogues around identity and justice, and imagines and performs a more just society. As young people experience and witness racialized and gendered oppression in the US, Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth: The Performing Justice Project offers a blueprint—a possibility—for creating original, critically engaged theatre with young people in a variety of contexts and settings.

There is not one way to move through this book. If you are interested in the contexts and theoretical framings underpinning PJP, we encourage you to begin by reading Part One first. If you are looking for facilitation strategies and a practical approach to devising, you might begin with Part Two, which explores how to devise with youth and includes our collection of PJP performance actions focused specifically on gender and racial justice. And if you are looking for how to build or produce critically engaged theatre with youth in your context, you might turn to Part Three and the Appendices, both of which address many of the logistical, administrative, and relational practices that help develop a community-engaged performance program and produce a public performance. Megan recommends reading this book from front to back, suggesting that readers will gain a sense of the larger contexts, theories, and content that shape PJP before getting into the details of devising of performance. Lynn prefers to move through this book with a bit more freedom, knowing that readers might begin with Part Two to understand how PJP works in practice before reading Parts One and Three in search of theories on social justice education, autobiographical devising, or samples of PJP script outlines. No matter how you use this book, we hope it will inspire you to do justice—to support young people in critically engaged devising and to recognize the role that theatre and creative practices can and do play in imagining and performing justice.

1.1 Why the Performing Justice Project?

In our work with young people, the process is just as important as the product. We chose the name Performing Justice Project (PJP)² to reflect our intentional focus on performing as a way of presenting or staging something for an audience, and performing as a way of working, bringing about knowledge, or carrying something out. We imagine theatre as both a way to perform and practice justice. Participants in PJP embody their vision for justice, including opportunities for systems, communities, and actions to become just, impartial, or fair. Therefore, participants in PJP are both performing justice and performing justice.

We designed the PJP model as a way of working towards justice while also acknowledging that justice is not a fixed state, an agreed-upon set of outcomes, or even an achievable outcome within the limited structure of our process. Rather, we understand performing justice as ongoing work—always a project, intentionally being constructed and performed individually, together, and within systems. Within any given PJP residency, there are moments where an act of justice is performed. However, we also understand that those moments do not create a state in which justice continues to exist. Rather, the ongoing, daily need to work on, pay attention to, and perform justice remains.

The Performing Justice Project gre...