Theatre for Youth Third Space: Performance, Democracy, and Community Cultural Development
220
Theatre for Youth Third Space: Performance, Democracy, and Community Cultural Development
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783205318 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect, Limited |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2015 |
| Series: | Theatre in Education |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 220 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Theatre for Youth Third Space
Performance, Democracy, and Community Cultural Development
By Stephani Etheridge Woodson
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-531-8
CHAPTER 1
Section 1
Field Building — or — the Twenty Principles of TFY Third Space
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
– Marianne Williamson
Section 1 defines my terms, while grounding Theatre for Youth (TFY) third space in contemporary development practices, deliberative democracy, and community-based art. Here, I will outline and explain the principles of TFY third space while offering an expanded discussion of capital systems, diverse development practices, and good work. I posit TFY third space as a viable, exciting, and challenging method of making a difference. I explain how theatre and performance can be a robust intervention into social life. In particular, I build the theoretical foundations for twenty principles of TFY third space, which I list below. In sections 1.1 through 1.8, I explore the first ten of these principles. In sections 1.10 through 1.13, I explore the second ten. Below I list the twenty principles, although the specialized language I use is explained throughout this section rather than parsed below in the list.
1. Culture is action.
2. Children and youth are competent cultural producers.
3. Children and youth are acknowledged experts on both being themselves and the meanings of their lives.
4. Childhood is understood as socially constructed, not biologically innate; and thus, processes do not place artificial limits on the scope of the work or on the assumed abilities of the participants.
5. Primary unit of concern is the community and public-making not individual achievement.
6. The work consciously builds the social, political, economic, and/or cultural power of the communities involved.
7. Facilitation and participatory techniques are understood through principles of deliberative democracy rather than pedagogy, consensus, or traditional directorial relationships.
8. Participants have express relationships to the content of the work developed.
9. Children and youth are civic publics.
10. The public sphere is a collective and discursive space built on and around human environments.
11. Children and youth are participatory publics.
12. TFY third space understands children and youth as social beings with human capabilities.
13. Overall community well-being depends on interdependent and complex flows of capital, collective placemaking, and human agency.
14. TFY third space claims publics with children and youth.
15. TFY third space nurtures children and youth as capable agents, able to collectively engage in the public sphere and civic environments.
16. Good work in TFY Community Cultural Development (CCD) pays equal attention to practice, product, and public-making.
17. TFY CCD builds community wealth and well-being through asset development and human capabilities development.
18. Deliberative democratic and communitarian principles guide all aspects of TFY third space.
19. TFY third space works toward change.
20. Children and youth are agents and assets within their communities.
1.1 TFY Third Space
TFY third space focuses on children and youth as artists and creators, acknowledging their proficiencies rather than their artistic, educational, or social deficiencies. Art functions differently than other spaces in our lives. We can combine the uncombinable, mix the unmixable, and think the unthinkable. Herman Melville's 1922 poem allows:
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt — a wind to freeze;
Sad patience — joyous energies;
Humility — yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity — reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel — Art.
Art connects minds and bodies while presenting multiple realities and layered meanings. "To create a play" and "to play" relate deeply with both occupying in between space — neither real life, nor not-real-life. This is TFY third space: a powerful spot to occupy, an in-between that allows us to experiment with choices, consequences, and ways of being and interact where "unlike things must meet and mate." Theatre expresses the "unbodied scheme." The in- between has risk, but that risk is contained between and to speak from the in-between suggests diverse engagement practices. After all, there is no ONE way to interpret a painting, a play, or a poem. Through the generative and playful possibilities of TFY third space, groups can rapidly see the consequences of their actions and how individual choices transform the whole. This space of "play" also works as an educational environment, allowing us to step outside of our lives for brief moments and into the worlds of others. In addition, we can more fully encompass our own stories by looking at them from other vantage points, allowing us to see through-lines, metaphors, and significant structures rather than experiencing life at breakneck speed. Theatre practices are particularly well suited to this realm, partly because performative storytelling employs multiple communication structures: narrative, embodiment, spectacle, sound and music, time or duration, space, and the reenactment of the intangible original — performance folds all the other arts into itself. In the 2010 young adult novel, Cassie Draws the Universe, P.S. Baber lyrically captures this power of theatrical engagement:
The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe.
(204)
Real and not-real, contained but limitless, theatre is magic made manifest.
TFY third space pulls from the fields of positive youth development, builds on deliberative democratic principles, and expands understandings of "public" and "civic" work. TFY third space appreciates culture as action — the act of coming together to create community, public space, and humanness. TFY third space is also a political space that defines action in terms of social power. The president of Civic Change, Inc. at the Pew Charitable Trust, Suzanne Morse notes,
A study, "Citizens and Politics: A view from main street America," in the early 1990s by the Harwood Group (1991) for the Kettering Foundation found [...] that Americans could not find their place in public life, not because they are apathetic as the common wisdom holds, but because they were politically impotent. That is, they felt unable to make any difference at all in public decisions.
(Morse 2004: 144)
TFY third space labors to make a difference. By this I mean that TFY third space is interactive and purposeful.
Interactive — because power resides in networks rather than in individual humans, TFY third space understands children and youth as collective social actors who can work toward social good and civic change. The performances created in TFY third space then function within a system of cultural exchange and cultural development. I follow the CRAFT (Contact, Research, Action, Feedback, Teaching) model created by Keith Knight and Mat Schwarzman and a team of graphic journalists (2005) in their Beginner's Guide to Community-Based Arts. The CRAFT model places art at the center of a CCD process, not as the end result. Art is action and action points to social power. Within the CRAFT model, an art action interactively and consciously builds the social, cultural, civic, and/or economic power of the community. The art action adds social and cultural capabilities in — and to — social, cultural, and civic systems. By its very nature, TFY third space cannot be separated from communities because TFY third space focuses on collectives rather than individuals.
Purposeful — intended to affect social, cultural, and political structures in a certain way, TFY third space purposely intervenes in systems, working to increase the public good and social justice. Tom Borrup of Creative Community Builders writes, "The term creative community building describes efforts to weave multiple endeavors and professions into the never-ending work of building and rebuilding the social, civic, physical, economic, and spiritual fabrics of communities" (Borrup 2006: xv, original emphasis). William Cleveland (2012) defines Arts-Based Community Development (ABCD) as "community-based arts activities that equitably and sustainably advance human dignity, health, and productivity" (298). Each of these understandings applies here. The TFY third space empowers and engages children and youth as civic equals in the shaping of society. TFY third space functions as a form of social power based on collective action and social action. In this, I take to heart the warnings of Harry Boyte and Nancy Kari (1996). They write,
Today, most adults in the youth development field — including teachers, youth workers, counselors, clergy and others — see young people as clients to be served or as consumers of the knowledge they "need to know." Although their intentions are far different than simply marketing to young people, their practices can unwittingly reinforce the patterns which see youth as passive recipients, not active creators.
(173)
TFY third space acknowledges children and youth as active creators who contribute significantly to their communities and the larger society.
My use of the term TFY third space depends heavily on the scholarship of Homi Bhabha (1990, 2004), as well as an understanding of cultural processes and performances as what political theorist Harry Boyte calls "free-space" and of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña's call for a "Fourth World." A postcolonial theorist, Bhabha's work uncovers the underlying meanings contained in seemingly simple moments. His concept of the third space acknowledges that while western cultures often polarize identities and structures (e.g., boys/girls, men/women, work/play, child/adult, and public/private), an engagement with these binaries and boundaries can create gaps between. This "between" landscape calls into question fixed categorizations and fosters new possibilities for cultural meanings. Bhabha's work is not concerned with revolution or with ideological evolution — both of which are still contained on the line between thesis and antithesis — rather, his work looks at expanding creative possibilities and cultural mash-ups. Bhabha's third space adds a third dimension to the limited possibilities of polarized understandings. He moves us off the page and into space.
Boyte, in his 2004 book, Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life, writes, "free space, rooted in everyday life settings, are places in which powerless people have a measure of autonomy for self-organization and engagement with alternative ideas" (61). There are few classes of people in the United States with less power than children and youth. As a society, we regulate children and youth's lives, but we do not allow them a political voice in that control. From the federal to local levels, they have no say in funding allocations or the way space is designed or regulated. Children account for 73.5 million US Americans (24%), but only 8% of federal expenditures. Boyte points out,
Free spaces are places where people learn political and civic skills. They are also culture-creating spaces where people generate new ways of looking at the world. In free spaces, people simultaneously draw upon and rework symbols, ideas, themes, and values in their traditions and the culture to challenge conventional beliefs.
(2004: 61–62)
A CCD practice understood as a "free space" can create opportunities for children and youth to find "discussions of meaningful differences and non- market-based democratic identities" while consciously acknowledging young people as powerful cultural workers (Giroux 2000: 11). Children and youth are highly regulated in educational and civic settings, which position them most often as spectators rather than agents (i.e., audience not actors). Boyte's notion of "free space" opens up the function of public art-making to simultaneously understand and act on the world. A creative process understood as a "free space" supports an unromantic respect for the abilities and expressive forms of young people highlighting capacities not deficiencies. "Free space" also supports young people's diversity of experience as a type of knowledge with just as much validity as traditional written or adult conceptions.
Finally, my use of the term third space depends on Gómez-Peña's call for a "Fourth World" unconfined by conceptions of "Old World", "New World", "First World", or "Third World". He writes that in the "Fourth World"
there is very little place for static identities, fixed nationalities, "pure" languages, or sacred cultural traditions. The members of the Fourth World live between and across various cultures, communities and countries. And our identities are constantly being reshaped by this kaleidoscopic experience.
(Gómez-Peña 1996: 7)
Gómez-Peña points out the playful and fluid processes of self and cultural formation. His work emphasizes the complicated and messy web of identities, relationships and stories while highlighting possibilities for playful reimagining and aesthetic blending. The Fourth World is neither a place for the glorification of traditional stories, nor a type of humanistic enterprise focused on domesticating children and youth. Instead, the Fourth World playfully fosters social interrogation and commentary while acknowledging the questing nature of such engagement.
My use of the term third space then 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 CCD.
• Suggest grounds for ethical artistic and cultural engagement.
This text proposes a particular form of TFY, which functions as a space of play, of reflection, and as public acts of creating culture, or public-making, recognizing children and youth as civic assets and social actors. TFY third space uses theatre and performance in partnership with young people and communities to consciously affect society in legitimate and measurable ways.
KEY IDEAS
• TFY third space focuses on children and youth as artists and creators.
• Theatre practices are particularly well suited to CCD.
• TFY third space is interactive and purposeful.
• My use of the term third space grows from the scholarship of Homi Bhabha, Harry Boyte, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.
1.2 PUBLIC ART AND COMMUNITIES OF BELONGING AND LOCATION
I live in Tempe, Arizona, a small city of about 40 square miles, with a year- round population slightly under 200,000. Home to the main campus of Arizona State University (ASU), this dense, desert city holds a forward thinking aesthetic as well as a chip on its shoulder about its status in the Phoenix Metro area. In the late 1960s, architecture students at ASU developed an urban park design using the dry riverbed of the Salt River — which directly borders ASU's Tempe campus — focused on bringing water back into the low desert. Contained early in the twentieth century by the Roosevelt Dam, the Salt's dry bed then housed industrial landfills and unincorporated junkyards. Dubbed the Rio Salado Project, this vision grew — over a 30-year period — into a coalition of community, business, and civic partners, with continuing support from ASU. Originally conceived as a multicity project, the Rio Salado was ultimately funded almost entirely by the Tempe community, and the Tempe Town Lake opened in 1999, over 30 years after the idea's original inception as a class project.
Art and community have always been a part of the design of the Rio Salado. As of spring 2013, there are ten separate installations, featuring the work of ten professional artists. Incorporating practical structures and standalone art pieces, the vision of public art for the Rio Salado mirrors the concept as a whole — marrying public space for recreation and anchoring commercial enterprises — both gateway and destination. Randy Martin (2006: 3) points out that public art "can be considered a particular kind of social good that serves as a means to bring forth ideas about our lives together." Art here functions to cocreate meanings of place and community, building what Martin calls "the attachment to a location that encourages people to feel they belong together" (2006: 3). As a whole, the Rio Salado Project, with its 2-mile-long lake and 5-mile, 600-acre park system, represents how Knight and Schwarzman define community-based art: "any form or work of art that emerges from a community and consciously seeks to increase the social, economic and political power of that community" (2005: xvi). Projects in this vein, however, can be remarkably diverse. To illustrate how different public artwork can be, I want to share the stories of two of my favorite pieces at Tempe Town Lake, while further teasing out the different understandings of "public" contained within each.
1.2.1 Words over Water
"Words over Water" is the name of a 600-piece granite tile installation running along the south border of the Tempe Town Lake. The multidisciplinary team of poet, Alberto Álvaro R'os, and visual artists, Karla Elling and Harry Reese, conceived of the project as an "abecedarium" or ABC book. As they point out on their original 2000 website,
Our project is a search for meaning, which is intrinsically interesting. Rather than decoration, our Abecedario is a connection to the past and the future, to water and lack of water, to people and place. Abecedario is Spanish for abecedarium, which is a primer for learning the alphabet and for then using it to find and create meaning.
(http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/abecedario/page4.html. Accessed 22 March 2013)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Theatre for Youth Third Space by Stephani Etheridge Woodson. Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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