Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative 9781487541217

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HOPE IN A COLLAPSING WORLD Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative

For young people, the space of the drama classroom can be a space for deep learning as they struggle across difference to create something together with common purpose. Collaborating across institutions, theatres, and community spaces, the research in Hope in a Collapsing World mobilizes theatre to build its methodology and create new data with young people as they seek the language of performance to communicate their worries, fears, and dreams to a global network of researchers and a wider public. A collaboration between a social scientist and a playwright and using both ethnographic study and playwriting, Hope in a Collapsing World represents a groundbreaking hybrid format of research text and original script – titled Towards Youth: a play on radical hope – for reading, experimentation, and performance. kathleen gallagher is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, cross-appointed to the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. andrew kushnir is an independent artist and artistic director of Project: Humanity.

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Hope in a Collapsing World Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative

KATHLEEN GALLAGHER

With Andrew Kushnir and his original script Towards Youth: a play on radical hope Foreword by Ann-Marie MacDonald

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2022 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-4119-4 (cloth)     ISBN 978-1-4875-4122-4 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-4120-0 (paper)   ISBN 978-1-4875-4121-7 (PDF) Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Hope in a collapsing world : youth, theatre, and listening as a political alternative / Kathleen Gallagher ; with Andrew Kushnir and his original script Towards youth: a play on radical hope. Names: Gallagher, Kathleen, 1965– author. | Container of (work): Kushnir, Andrew, 1980– Towards youth. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210389451 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210391103 | ISBN 9781487541194 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487541200 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487541224 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487541217 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Drama – Social aspects. | LCSH: Drama – Political aspects. | LCSH: Acting – Social aspects. | LCSH: Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) | LCSH: Creative ability in adolescence. | LCSH: Drama – Study and teaching. | LCSH: Acting – Study and teaching. | LCSH: Hope. | LCSH: Theater and youth. | LCSH: Children’s theater. | CSH: Canadian drama (English) – 21st century. Classification: LCC PN1643.G35 2022 | DDC 809.2/935 – dc23 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We wish to acknowledge the land on which the University of Toronto Press operates. This land is the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, the Métis, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, for its publishing activities.

We would like to dedicate this book to our Grandfathers who taught us the beauty of intergenerational relationships. To Charles Gallacher (29 November 1894 – 18 December 1981) who survived the First World War, wrote letters to me (wee Katie) from Scotland throughout my childhood, and made me feel like a smart and much-loved person. To Peter Kushnir (5 June 1927 – 12 November 2018) who survived the Second World War, went on to become a prominent master watchmaker in Canada, and imparted to me the profound value of stories and storytelling.

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables  ix Foreword  xi ann-marie macdonald Acknowledgments  xv Prologue  3 Part I 1  Listening, Pedagogy, Theatre, and Cultural Citizenship  15 2  The Settings: Brief Social, Political, and Educational Portraits of Athens, Lucknow, Coventry, Tainan, Toronto  48 3  Ethnography and Its Ecologies  80 4  The Qualitative Landscape: Care and Cultural Citizenship  88 5  The Qualitative Landscape: Hope, Performance Pedagogies, and Democratic Citizenship  114 6  The Qualitative Landscape: Interdependency against All Odds  143 7  Hope and Care in the Quantitative Landscape  181 Epilogue: Acting in Concert  205 Turning towards Part II  217 Part II A Step towards Youth  225 andrew kushnir

viii Contents

Acknowledgments  257 Towards Youth: a play on radical hope  259 andrew kushnir Appendix  345 References  361 Index  377

Figures and Tables

Figures   1  2  3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Research site locations and collaborators  47 Images in Athens 89 Child’s drawing 95 Performing scenes as classmates look on (Athens, Greece)  96 Improvising playfully stories of hardship (Athens, Greece)  97 Images in Lucknow  105 Prerna Girls in role as their oppressors (Lucknow, India)  107 Performance of Izzat (Lucknow, India)  108 Images in Coventry  115 Bruce being lifted in A Museum of Living Stories (Coventry, England) 126 Ensemble rehearsal for A Museum of Living Stories (Coventry, England) 129 Images in Tainan  131 Focus group discussion with Cross devising group (Tainan, Taiwan) 140 Rehearsal for Same (Tainan, Taiwan)  142 Images in Toronto  143 Rehearsal for final performance of That’s What I Would Say (Toronto, Canada)  153 Muckles and his group working on the script for The Stories We Tell (Toronto, Canada)  164 Final performance of Blackbird at the school assembly (Toronto, Canada) 178 Percentage of student participants at each research site  185 Ages of student participants  185 Student self-identification of ethnic minority status by site  186

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Figures and Tables

People youth provide care for, by frequency  199 People youth provide care for, by site  200 People youth provide most care for, by age  200 Map of hope and care  203 Photo of an early design maquette for Towards Youth: a play on radical hope 258 Actor Stephen Jackman-Torkoff in the prologue of Towards Youth 302 Ensemble of Towards Youth depicting Middleview  302 Actor Zorana Sadiq as Bruce in Coventry  303 Ensemble of Towards Youth depicting the site in Tainan  303 Actor Amaka Umeh depicting a Prerna student, Jyoti  304 Ensemble of Towards Youth in the play’s final passage  304

Tables 1 Growth of Prerna  58 2 Life outcomes of seven cohorts of Prerna graduates  58 3 Overview of data generation  83

Foreword

When Pandora opened the box, everything flew out except for Hope. In fact, it wasn’t a box, it was a pot, but “Pandora’s pot” just doesn’t sound right for all kinds of reasons. According to Greek myth, Pandora was the world’s “first woman.” She was given one rule (not unlike that other first lady, Eve): she was told not to open the pot – box, rather. She opened it. And all the evil flew out into the world and beyond our control. Some versions of the myth say that all the good flew out and beyond our control. It amounts to the same thing: whatever was in there was now lost to our control, and we were at its whim. Except, for Hope. It was still there, stuck at the bottom of the... container. Not optimism. Hope. In this book, Kathleen Gallagher draws the vital distinction between the two. For a groundbreaking work of academic research, Hope in a Collapsing World is an emotional and artistic feast. For a web of interconnected stories that are funny, heartbreaking, and redemptive, Hope in a Collapsing World is a rigorous sociological text. I have known Kathleen Gallagher for over thirty years. I have been a theatre practitioner for forty. But when I came to Andrew Kushnir’s verbatim play at the end of this book to find Kathleen as one the characters, it gave me pause: I was struck that a distinguished professor and ethnographic researcher would actually go so far as to become a character in a play built from her work. And I thought, “This is unusual, right? Or is it just that I don’t get out much?” I now know it is indeed unusual. And I suspect it is unprecedented. I ought perhaps not to have been surprised. I met Professor ­Gallagher when she was Miss Gallagher to her class of drama students at St. Joseph’s

xii Foreword

Catholic Girls’ School in downtown Toronto. She invited me to come and lead her class in a theatre-making workshop. It gave me pause. I was once a Catholic girl; and having grown up to be a lesbian, I never expected to set foot in a church again, much less be invited to teach at a Catholic school. I accepted the invitation and plunged in with a group of lively, enthusiastic grade 10 students who, it became clear, felt no compunction to curb their imaginations. They were energized and bold and creative – I think most kids are, given a chance. I understood then that it was their teacher, Kathleen, who had given them the chance. That gave me hope. Reading this book has convinced me that theatre pedagogy is vital to citizenship and personal well-being. Throughout Hope in a Collapsing World, Kathleen Gallagher marshals her formidable skills in service of the young. And of their priceless, tender, and powerful imaginations. Stories change the world. Empowering the young to tell their stories in a setting of care – care not only as a virtue but as a radical ­political ­position  – changes the world and makes it better. Imagination is a ­sacred and rough-and-tumble space that, more and more, is at risk of being invaded, branded, monetized, and flattened. Kathleen speaks of the vital importance of young people having the means to witness themselves and their classmates as they work to embody their stories theatrically. This is key. Stories are what remain when much else is lost. Stories are the “seed corn” of our humanity. I often write about this. Near the end of my novel, The Way the Crow Flies, I put it this way: “What remains? Story. Yours, or one like it, in which, as in a pool, you might recognize yourself.” Put another way, stories are “sacred fire” – this image is part of theatrical tradition. Indeed, it is customary to keep a light lit on the stage at all times, even when the theatre is “dark” and empty. During the pandemic, of course, that darkness has stretched on brutally. Still, we keep a light on – literally. Often a modest 25 watts. We call it “the ghost light.” I have always loved that tradition. It harks back to the days of open flames, long before the candles that were the original “footlights,” all the way back to the regular gatherings round a fire, the focal point of the sharing that makes culture. I often write about this. In my new play, Hamlet 911, an elderly leading actor speaks of the importance of that sharing in the context of theatre: “Draw the circle. Gather round the light. That we might see ourselves – watch ourselves – at play with sacred fire.” It is this witnessing that is integral to Kathleen’s thesis when she speaks of young people becoming an “audience to others and to their own self.” And this occurs in the “mess of a drama classroom.” I work with mess a lot. For the past several years, I have worked with the young student actors and playwrights of the National Theatre School of Canada; I and



Foreword xiii

my colleagues coach them in the creation and performance of a solo piece. And at some point every year, we find ourselves encouraging them to “make a mess.” I often write about mess. In my first play, ­Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet), a character declaims: “Life – real life – is a big mess. Thank goodness. And every answer spawns another question; and every question blossoms with a hundred different a­ nswers; and if you’re lucky you’ll always feel somewhat confused.” This is the mess Kathleen Gallagher is talking about when she talks about young people becoming “cultural citizens.” This is key to what “can therefore enable the conditions of hope.” That sticky bit at the bottom of Pandora’s box. This book reminds me that imagination – and its lifeblood, compassionate curiosity – is unkillable. It also tells me why I, and all of us as adults and citizens, must not allow it to dwindle to an ember before we blow it back to brightness. And it tells me that we can and must do this by supporting those aspects of education that nourish the imagination. Theatre arts do this. I think they do it better than any other of the arts. This gives me hope. Maybe it’s time to think inside the box – pot, rather. My colleague Andrew Kushner’s verbatim play greets readers like a magic spell at the end of the book; at that point, we have learned so much about the education of the imagination, so much about the barriers and portals to it; have come to know so intimately the voices of young people across the globe, along with those of the adults who battle great odds in nurturing them; and suddenly there they are before us, “in the flesh”! Andrew waves a wand, bringing the stories, the data, and the everyday voices to life – including his own and Kathleen’s. ­Together, Kathleen Gallagher’s book and Andrew Kushnir’s play are like a double rainbow. This book is a resource, a blueprint, a rallying cry, and a work that exceeds the (considerable) sum of its parts to synthesize emotion, art, data, and analysis. And that gives me hope. Ann-Marie MacDonald

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the global health pandemic unfolding in our beautiful, sad world as I write this book. It makes all the more real for me the energizing contact that is characteristic of both theatre and collaborative ethnographic research. That co-presence is now presumed to be our greatest threat as a silent, powerful killer passes between us. New forms of being together are sprouting up everywhere as people begin to recognize just how much less human we feel apart, than together. Over the course of this research, there were various crises afflicting all of the research sites: Brexit; the European refugee/humanitarian ­crisis; economic collapse and ensuing austerity measures; the politically ­polarizing and volatile US election; critical LGBT legislation battles; and growing concern about policing practices and young r­acialized people, to name only the most pronounced of those affecting the particular young people we came to work with. Now we are clearly in a new global moment where people are challenged to find equilibrium in a world whose axes have shifted, a world that seems out of our control. Time is precarious, and space is vulnerable. A climate emergency rages on, threatening to displace and leave without shelter so many more people worldwide who do not have the luxury to “self-isolate.” Will we slow down and listen? One can only hope that, if we make it through this pandemic, we will have realized that “physical distancing” somehow re-taught us that we are greatly diminished without one another, that we need to heal the world by addressing the growing social inequalities that routinely separate us, that to heal the physical world is to understand how intimately connected it is to our sociality. And that art is an age-old healer; no one owns it, and no single canon can contain the wondrous difference that

xvi Acknowledgments

art can cultivate. Friends near and far sing to me on Facebook, screens full of faces; the viral contagion of music, theatre, creativity has utterly filled our digital spaces. What does this tell us? Among other things, that art is a point of contact, an urgent communication, and a hope. But it also makes abundantly clear the persistent inequality of our societies. Some can “work from home,” some can take solace with art, while many others struggle to meet basic needs. This book is about both of those things – art and inequality – and the relationship between them. My thanks, foremost, to my family, to Caroline and Liam who operate like an efficient team, taking in stride my many trips abroad over the last five years. You are my bedrock. Further, there are concentric circles of support around the Radical Hope project that need to be acknowledged. A team of graduate students over these last five years – our local Toronto team – has worked tirelessly and joyfully, committed to this project and to our collective work. I have often spoken of my research team as my most important intellectual community; they are that, but they are so much more, too. This team of graduate students has made this project their own in so many ways, bringing to their work a fierce loyalty and care for the young participants, our international collaborators, our theatre partners, and importantly, each other. They have been a team that has grown together, moving from strength to strength. Over this time, some have moved on, graduated, and others, more newly joined. With each evolution, the integrity of the whole strengthened. This project would never have been realized without the unfailing commitment of this group of people. The primary team includes Dirk Rodricks (Team Lead and Lucknow Lead), Nancy Cardwell (­Coventry Lead), Christine Balt (Athens Co-Lead), Kelsey Jacobson (Tainan Lead), Scott Mealey (Quantitative Lead), Rachel Rhoades (­ Toronto Co-Lead), and Sherry Bie (Toronto Co-Lead), Brooke Charlebois, and Lindsay Valve. Other important contributors include Lisa Aikman, ­Rebecca Starkman (Athens Co-Lead), Ben Gallagher, Kate Reid, Franco ­Saccucci, Anjali Helferty, Scott Zoltoc, and Ortega Tampambwa. Over the years of this project, we have published books and articles together, given conference presentations and invited lectures, and kept all the threads of this complex project connected. I am sure I am the luckiest researcher there is. The second group of people who need to be mentioned are our international collaborators. These researchers, teachers, artists, and social workers have worked with such commitment and positivity over all the years of this project. They have welcomed the Toronto team into their worlds with such warm hospitality and shared space with us in Toronto.



Acknowledgments xvii

All the researchers met in Toronto for a week-long meeting when we launched the Radical Hope project, working hard to make our extremely different contexts appreciable to one another. From there onwards, digital communications helped us to keep connected, sharing research artefacts with one other, and leaning on each other in every conceivable way. Each researcher in each site built around them a team of local collaborators, who in turn became our collaborators too. As research collaborators, we have also, together, published books and articles and given conference presentations over the five years of this study. To this group, I am eternally indebted. They are Rachel Turner-King, Urvashi Sahni, Wan-Jung Wang, Myrto Pigkou-Repousi, Nikos Govas, Tatiana Rodolfou, Anand Chitravanshi, Anshu Jain, Shibani Sahni, Jouvan ­ ­Fuccini, Angela Evans, Kai-Shun (Rolsha) Chang, and Michael Limerick. The third group I would like to thank comprises the many theatre industry people who supported this work, especially through the specific support and goodwill garnered by Andrew Kushnir. His own company, Project: Humanity, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Brian Quirt, Tarragon Theatre, Alan Dilworth, Crow’s Theatre, and the many, many individual artists who supported Towards Youth: a play on radical hope in both its years of development, readings, workshops, and finally its premiere. Crow’s Theatre, who co-produced with P ­ roject: Humanity the premiere of the documentary play in their 2018–19 season, put every conceivable resource behind this wildly ambitious project and took great leaps of faith with us all. Particular thanks go to Chris ­Abraham, artistic director of Crow’s Theatre, who co-directed with Andrew Kushnir and set himself on the great task of feeling this research so that he could help others feel it too. Chris and Andrew’s vision was brought to vivid life through the moving work of the ensemble: Aldrin Bundoc, Tim D ­ owler-Coltman, Jessica Greenberg, Stephen J­ackman-Torkoff, Liisa ­ ­ Repo-Martell, Zorana Sadiq, Amaka Umeh, Emilio Vieira, and ­Loretta Yu; and to the adept creative production work of Ken ­Mackenzie, Deanna H. Choi, Amelia Scott, Eric Armstrong, Sarah Miller, Karli ­Feldman, N ­ atasha Greenblatt, Eudes Laroche-Francoeur, and Hershel Blatt. ­Profound gratitude also to Daniel Chapman-Smith, Andrew’s partner at Project: Humanity, who led the workshop series for young people that accompanied the play and did so much more too. ­Behind the scenes, Dan was a fierce supporter of the research and the play that Andrew created from it. He developed important pedagogical work around the play, along with Lauren Vandervoort, ­Andrew ­Kushnir, and Chelsea Woolley, who collectively met so many new young people who came to see the play and have their experience of it extended through the verbatim work these artists created with them.

xviii Acknowledgments

My deep thanks also go to Ann-Marie MacDonald, for whom I have always had wild admiration and respect, for the gift of her Foreword. Celebrated author and theatre-maker, playwright, actor, and friend for over thirty years, it is truly a special joy to have her voice in this book. Long ago when I was a drama teacher in a high school for girls, I reached out to Ann-Marie, a “cold call,” to see if she had any interest in working with me and my drama students. That day shared in the dusty basement of a school was playful and profound, and ignited in many of us the promise of drama. Lastly, and most importantly, there were 250 young research participants in this study over its five years, who created with us, who shared their thoughts and insights with us, who let us into their complex processes of play-building and performance, who demanded our attention, who challenged us, who humoured us and humbled us, and who ultimately built a trusting community with us. I truly hope I have listened well enough to you. And I hope you find in these pages traces of your profound understandings about theatre, about school, about hope, care, and citizenship, and about your lives and our democracy. Thank you. In the Oral History Performance Unit we carried out ­together, Evangeline in Toronto said of a story she shared about a time of depression in her life, “Oh, I never thought of it that way”; when her classmate Josh repeated her story back to her as he had heard it, she suddenly saw possibility in it that had not been perceivable to her before. Please consider this book my attempt to speak your words back to you, but also to bring to them my own understanding, so that maybe you realize anew the gift that your thoughts are to the world. Kathleen Gallagher

HOPE IN A COLLAPSING WORLD

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Prologue

The Meta-Space of Drama At its core, this book is about hope, care, and democratic citizenship. In my collaborative, ethnographic, mixed methods research of the past five years, I have seen how, for young people, care given and received aerates the soil from which hope grows; not hope as some ­future-oriented wishful thinking but hope as a political alternative to a collapsing world. This book is also about theatre. We have been asking in so many ways and in so many different places, What kind of metaphor is theatre for the world? Unfortunately for me, most of my best thinking happens in the middle of the night. Amid the wild chatter of my unconscious mind, narrative connections break through. I now think this sudden insight is very much like what is happening for young people in drama classrooms. Against the din of the creative cyclone that is most drama classrooms and creative spaces, the quiet of an individual mind breaks through. I have seen it happen in drama spaces across the globe. The axiom of drama spaces states that young people gain confidence and find their “voice” in such classrooms. It’s a powerful narrative; I understand why it holds such currency. But in this book, I am going to ­argue something slightly different, because my research has revealed to me that it is the absence of insecurity, not the presence of confidence, which is most important to the student of drama and to the creative spirit. Many youth scholars are familiar with, and appreciate, the largely developmental narrative of young people coming into their confidence as a natural progression of aging and accept that insecurity is a symptom of a missing confidence that comes with age. That is not how I see it. Insecurity is not an affliction of youth. We all have insecurities. It may simply be that adults have more sophisticated means of masking

4

Hope in a Collapsing World

insecurities, more practice at acting confident. Young people, generally, have more primal responses to the presence of insecurity: anger, disengagement, comic relief. Any teacher will tell you how many times in a day they are witness to these primal responses. Most adults, merely by virtue of more living, are more practised at performing confidence in the face of insecurity. What is critically important, then, in distinguishing between “confidence” and “security” is the outward-facing aspect of security. From my observations, interviews, informal conversations, and quantitative survey, I have come to understand that the presence of confidence is no guarantee of a regard for others, while the presence of security frees up young people – and all of us – to consider the well-being of others alongside our own. Unlike confidence, security is a fundamentally and necessarily relational condition. The empirical data across the sites of the study will bear this important revelation out in the pages that follow. In short, to be secure in one’s context affords a significantly different ­orientation to the world; it is to be available, in a more selfless rather than self-preserving way, to the other selves in our midst and ultimately to those further away. It is not merely a more generous or altruistic stance but a powerful and life-altering one, as young people come to e­ xperience their interdependent selves bound up with the fates of others. Lest this way of thinking sound too psychological (I am not a psychologist), let me introduce what is also utterly fundamental to the process of understanding and thus managing insecurity through the creative activities of the drama classroom. What the drama classroom affords is a meta-space where young people can watch themselves as learners and creators in relation to other people. In its successes and its failures, it remains a space where people become audience to others and to their own self, a space of introspection and double-­consciousness, moving between their performative, social, and self-conscious selves. It is a space, then, full of potential. And in the mess of a drama classroom, the mess of creating with others, what is it that many drama students see when they float above the clamour and chaos? They see themselves providing things for others. They see themselves as character witnesses, key audience members to the emerging selves around them. The drama space, that space of collective creating, can therefore enable the conditions of hope. The evidence I have found both qualitatively and quantitatively clarified a simple but important idea: in that space, young people can grow in the confident belief that they will find – and help provide for others – the agentic self with an ear attuned, and a voice awakened, to the beauty and misery of the world. They become, as I will argue, cultural citizens.

Prologue 5

One of my graduate students, Scott Mealey, and I wrote a chapter in a book on prototyping that nicely summarizes some of what I am ­alluding to here (Gallagher & Mealey, 2021). What is going on in a drama room is a conceptual and a social prototyping; that is, in the face of all manner of insecurities normal to human existence, and perhaps even more normal to a space of creation, in the face of fears and self-doubt, a kind of conceptual prototyping can flourish where new modes of response can be practised against old forms of challenge. This process is what we have understood as conceptual prototyping. Further, our sense of social prototyping means that other selves in the room provide avenues for rethinking one’s own judgements, especially as they come to interrupt our comfortable narratives about the other. When we fashion a self, relative to a stable other, and when that stable other acts differently, our own self, too, is re-formed. The chances of this transformation happening in a creative space, with its explicit invitation to experiment, are greater. This potential makes the drama space an experiment worth paying some attention to. When I speak of “insecurity,” I am not talking about insecurity that comes from the many pathologies of mental illness. I hold, in any case, that every one of us is walking the line between mental wellness and mental illness every day, not as fixed states but as fluid performances for which our equilibrium is key but always at risk. The insecurity I am referencing here may come from internal destabilizers or external ones, though that may be an unhelpful division, as internal and ­external ­uncertainties are more porous than is often acknowledged. The “state of the world,” from whichever vantage one sees it, is one of the greatest stressors in human life. Inequality, environmental destruction, and systemic oppressions of many kinds weigh heavily, as do the particular political and cultural contexts of our living. In England, young people were burdened by the divisive rhetoric of the Brexit campaign and its ensuing aftermath. In India, young women were using their education to build solidarity in the face of overwhelming and dehumanizing gender oppression. In Greece, young people were shouldering the weight of a decade-long economic crisis compounded by a horrifying refugee crisis on their shores. In Taiwan, young people on the cusp of adulthood were trying to square the social pressures and expectations of traditional culture with their own ambitions in a far-from-hopeful economic landscape. In Toronto, differently situated young people were trying to understand why the rhetoric of multiculturalism seemed both true and false, why racism persists, why an American political landscape was invading their sense of sovereignty, and how they could address questions of mental illness in the face of growing social and economic

6

Hope in a Collapsing World

inequality. These were the contexts out of which drama s­ tudents were creating. These were some of the external factors for which drama would provide a meta-world for contemplating. And these were the conditions shaping the undertaking of this research. A further word about the crises discussed in this book: to name these particular crises is not to discount other crises that have gone unnamed in this research. One might ask, Why these particular crises and not others? Early on in the research, it became a kind of running joke that I seemed to keep turning up in places right as some major political or social crisis was at its zenith. At first, I thought my timing was strangely coincident. But then, I came to realize that crises were not the great, singular events they used to be. Perhaps crises were perpetually appearing because the state of the world was now given to crises, and it would have been more remarkable to find oneself somewhere new when there wasn’t some state of crisis unfolding. That is the new normal, or it was the new normal until a global pandemic shut everything down, including the economy, and put us all in our homes, at least those of us who have homes. Though the experts were warning for years of just such a global pandemic, coronavirus still put all other crises in their place and found most world leaders and governments unprepared. Years of neoliberal economics and chronic underfunding of health-care systems ensured that steps of preparation had not been taken. Warnings had gone unheeded, by and large. So why did we choose these particular crises and not others? Because our single most important task as ­researchers was to listen to young people’s stories, to attune our ears to what mattered most to them and was having the most significant and material impacts on their lives. Importantly, though, rather than from a stance of “empathy,” we worked from a stance of “compassionate witnessing,” which is about finding a “distance from which one can offer one’s ­attention, thought and emotion” as part of “intellectual rigour and dedicated consideration” (Tracy, 2017, p. 8). I have drawn conclusions from the research I have carried out with over 250 young people, in five countries, over five years. And while I have made observations through the social science methods I have deployed, and from my role as audience to their dramatic and everyday worlds, I have been able just as much to make these discoveries because research, itself, provided a meta-context for the young people with whom we were working. The research became a reflective mirror, a question posed just at the right moment, an outside adult perspective interrupting the practised norms of the space for teacher and students, an invitation to unravel and share one’s messy thoughts in process and retrospectively. In essence, it was a scientific world that said, in many

Prologue 7

different ways, What is going on in here matters. It matters not just to you, or your teacher, but to social science researchers and to others out there: we who do not already think we know everything we need to know about young people; people who continue to feel curious about the cultures of youth; people who are suspending their talk in order to listen. The drama space, then, is a series of concentric circles, widening gyres: the circle of individual people facing one another in a room; the inner dance of communities and concerns above each of those solitudes; and the research circle above that trying to observe, to listen, to find just the right question. Such a quest raises the stakes and communicates to others and ourselves that the pursuit is of value, that the pursuit will lift us higher through knowledge gained, and that knowledge gained is the gateway to action taken. It shows that words and books are one kind of action; that communication is active and its own kind of reaching; that a book can reach others. The Relational Space of Drama One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person. – Aunt Lydia in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, 2019, p. 148

When I was visiting Taiwan for the first time in 2006, I found myself hiking up a mountain in Taipei with a colleague. This particular mountain is one of the biggest in Taiwan. We were looking out over the city far below as we came around one bend, when my colleague told me about the earthquake that had rocked that small island in 1999, claiming 2,415 lives. She told me about close friends and family members who had died in that quake. I found myself wondering how anyone could live along a fault line – or, in the case of Taiwan, forty-two active faults – so dangerously close to the unpredictability of the earth’s unfoldings. What Su said next surprised me: “We are lucky in Taiwan that we have these regular earthquakes. The earth needs to release its pressure, just like we do. If it did not release its pressure, it would be far worse.” In that moment, I saw myself very acutely, my own biases and what I reasonably expect in my life. I thought for a moment about how ­almost 2,500 lost lives, including friends and family, was both terrible and beneficial, according to my friend. How are humans meant to understand what it means to live alongside the power of the natural world? I felt removed from the worry of earthquakes, perhaps naively so, in ­Toronto, Canada, where I live. I felt how easy it becomes to live human-­ centrically when not faced regularly with the supremacy of “Mother

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Nature,” secure in a built environment. In that moment, I knew that I was in the presence of a worldview unlike my own. And then, I began to see the fault lines of my context, the ways in which social locations and inequalities have allowed me to have shelter and to “work from home” during a pandemic that has displaced so many others and disclosed our collective reliance for our survival on those who are the least well paid or valued societally. These kinds of realizations or awakenings sit at the centre of my impulse to create global studies that bring my own thoughts and research actions into deep and long conversations with other global worlds. Crossing geography, language, culture, and worldviews invites us to see “home” in clearer and more complex ways. The other critical aspect of multi-sited, collaborative, global research is how powerfully it forces the question of our relationship and responsibility to others, as George Marcus (1995) early on contended in his definition of multi-sited ethnography as “designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography” (p. 105). And so was born the study Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary: An Intercultural Investigation of Drama Pedagogy, Performance and Civic ­Engagement, the argument of the ethnographer that diverse young people and their creative work are bound up with much larger questions about ethical relations and hope. Using a socially engaged and collaborative model of research, the Radical Hope project, as we came to call it, first asked what makes the classroom or theatre workshop a forum for the creative exploration of civic engagement: Who am I, relative to others, and what compels me to act upon my world? Collaborating across schools, theatres, and community spaces in Canada, India, Taiwan, England, and Greece, the five-year ethnographic study explores notions of hope and care (for oneself and others) by way of examining how theatre-making with young people might cultivate practices, relationships, dispositions, and values that orient them towards and support them in engaged, creative, ethical, relational, and cultural forms of citizenship. Nicholas Ridout (2009) has considered that ethical theory offers a practical approach to philosophy in asking the question, How shall I act? (p. 5). But this “acting” is a double entendre in theatre research, because there is both the social performance of everyday life and the theatre performance of your “character” or, in the case of the young people of this study, the questions: How will I use theatre to engage my community of peers, of family, of neighbours? What can my performance do in the world? Working in

Prologue 9

the expansive ways of applied drama, then, invites creators to newly perceive their relationships with others and their world. The Structure and Purpose of the Book Given the complexity of our study, the sheer scale and breadth of the undertaking, it may seem surprising that I have begun with conclusions. The esoteric nature of art-making, and the improvisational nature of social science research that cultivates artistic ways of knowing, would not obviously lead one to land upon concrete findings. But I want to be clear about the point of this book, this account from my perspective. I would like to share with others what I have learned from young people over the last five years of this research study. And I would like to do so because I am now responsible to my witnessing, to what I have heard and seen, to what has been generously shared with me. Part I of this book begins with a theoretical proposal, a theory of young artists and the kinds of things I believe may be going on for them in their relational acts of creating. To restate it: the drama classroom ­affords a meta-space where young people can watch themselves as learners and creators in relation to other people. When this happens, they grow in the confident belief that they will find – and help provide for others – the agentic self. Some of those young people, like Aunt Lydia in Atwood’s The Testaments cited above, risked “becoming no one” without the relational art-making and cultural citizenship they were engaging in. I will move onwards to the heterogeneous findings across vastly different research sites to illustrate this important discovery about both the space of the drama classroom and the relational understandings of self it can cultivate, and I will share these findings from my ethnographic standpoint.1 I will do so by taking the reader through my qualitative sense-making within each site (Toronto, Tainan, ­Coventry, Lucknow, and Greece) and across sites, which will also ­include analyses from a robust quantitative survey. It is important to explain that the collaborative ethnographic work of this study never

1 The results of this long-term project have also been published in book form as a collection from the standpoints of all seventeen researchers across all five sites who ­collaborated through this study. For that multi-vocal perspective, please see ­Gallagher et al. (2020). This book, by contrast, will centre my own perspective as the lead researcher of this network of scholars and artists. And it will also include my playwright collaborator’s play Towards Youth, created from his crafting of the research data, his own first-hand experiences, and his form of witness to the young people of this project.

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situated sites in a comparative relationship to one another. The sense that has been made of this global research has come from a concern to see radically diverse contexts alongside one another; to surface differences and learn about “home” through an engagement with “away”; to learn about self through relationships to others; and to build a collaborative framework that would be of benefit to all the important local communities who engaged in the global work. An epilogue at the end of Part I will return to the questions, What kind of metaphor is theatre for the world? What is the drama space about, and how is the world its curriculum? And it will include provisional answers to consider after having taken a “walk in the words” (Smith, 2003, p. 7) of the young people in this collaborative ethnography. In Part II of the book, the reader will meet the theatrical storytelling of this research, Andrew Kushnir’s verbatim play Towards Youth: a play on radical hope. Andrew describes documentary or verbatim theatre as dramatizing text drawn from interview transcripts or the carefully transcribed footage of real-life encounters and events. It produces what he calls a fictional non-fiction experience in the theatre, wherein the actual words of often-underrepresented voices (or historically misrepresented voices) take the stage (Kushnir, 2020). At this time of incredible youth activism around the globe, privileging their voices is indeed a powerful creative and political act. To do so, as Andrew has done, is to position listening as a vocation of the researcher and the community artist. I use theatre to research because it vividly reveals how young people sense and narrate their world. Dara Culhane (2017b) writes that this “sensory knowledge” is “non-verbal, tacit, taken for granted, felt, performed, invisible, emotional, mundane, intuitive, emplaced, imagined” (p. 47). The stories young people tell about themselves and about their world through theatre is a sense-filled and poetic framework for gaining insight into how they understand real life. But it is also a form that gives insight into young people’s dreams. So, this book is also about dreaming; but dreaming is not not about real life. Putting it most succinctly, craftsman Peter Korn says that makers are “thinking with things (such as material, sound, movement, and language) to discover, embody, and communicate a vision of what matters” (Korn, 2015, p. 64) or, as ethnographer Sara Pink (2015) has written of sensory knowledge, “[it is] not easily or even possibly expressed in written or spoken words” (p. 164). Or, as my Indian collaborator Urvashi Sahni articulated it early on, “they [her students] use theatre to say things they don’t have words for.” That is why her entire school, the curriculum for every subject, uses theatre methodologically to teach. That same insight into the relationship between the content to be taught and



Prologue 11

the subjectivities of those who will learn it, the relationship between the subject itself and the relevant worlds of the subjectivities of those learning, comes into active connection, where the links can be found and the gaps can be surfaced. To close this introduction, I land on one important thought to remind us all why this one study of the modest space of drama classrooms around the world matters. It matters for the simple reason that, through the proxy of young people, we see how our democracy is doing, how they and we all are doing. Out of the effort to hear voices amid the din, we perceive ourselves as listeners in a world that can seem to have abandoned listening altogether – to science, to facts, to democratic ­institutions, and to the lessons of history itself. This study comes from the unique context of a creative space where listening is critical to its very unfolding. It is, I might even suggest, foundational to what cultural policy scholars call “cultural democracy” (Gross & Wilson, 2020). Even more perspicaciously, Jonathan Gross (2019) goes on to argue, through his own case study of young people in the London Borough of Harrow, that cultural democracy requires conditions that enable hope, and the conditions for hope require environments conducive to creative self-narration, including practices of care (p. 10). And practices of care enable individual and collective self-narration (p. 12). I came to this cultural policy reading late in my own literature investigations, but it resonated loudly when I did. The following pages of this book will illustrate forms of individual and collective self-narration that could, with the right support, resources, and political will, shift the tides of these politically polarized and harrowing times. At the end of our own rich five years of research, there is urgency and hope for the idea that present generations have certain duties towards future generations, and one of them is to guard and protect young people’s unalienable right to imagine.

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PART I

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1 Listening, Pedagogy, Theatre, and Cultural Citizenship

What we perceive may be transformed if the way we pay attention changes. – Isabelle Stengers, 2008, p. 5

Listening as an Artful Practice of Care In all of the sites where I worked, I was challenged to know myself. In this work, “knowing oneself” is not only an existential quest but also a political question. In all of the sites, I made voice memos to myself so that I could listen to them again, at a later point, and have a felt memory, a sense memory, of what had occurred. I recorded my own thoughts as I was having them in particular moments so that, later, I could listen to how I was processing things. It is true that doing this kind of international research is one way of perceiving the relationship between a place and its people. At one point, I recorded the whole score of Star Wars that a high school band was playing in a school close to the park in Tainan where I was sitting. I recorded birds in Coventry, cars in Lucknow, voices in Toronto, and lapping waves in Greece. It was a way of being alone in a collective enterprise. My voice memos, however, were doing something different. When I recorded my thoughts in each of the sites, I asked myself: What are the young people here pointing at for me to see? What are they asking me to pay attention to? Invariably, what young people demonstrated to me was the idea that what I have, today, is what I can act from. It may be imperfect, or incomplete, but it gives me something to act from. Pay attention to my actions. Watch me imagine. But listen to my words carefully. Care ethics is relevant not only to small-scale or existing personal attachments but to all levels of social relations and, thus, to international or global relations. (Robinson, 1999, p. 2)

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Listening and hearing young people was the bedrock of both our study and its dramaturgical expression. Through the qualitative questions within our quantitative survey, across all sites we found that, when we asked the young people to explain how they understood “care,” something they both give and receive, they consistently identified care as grounded in aspects of communication – listening, talking, understanding, with “listening” being named by most young people as the most important way of showing care. “Listening,” as a concept, crosses many scholarly disciplines. It is prevalent in communication studies literature, which includes the study of sound and semiotics. Theories of “listening” and “hearing” are central in scholarly bodies of work in philosophy, sociology, and psychology, largely owing to the work of two generations of predominantly French theorists. More recently, the fields of education, and social justice education in particular, have championed the cause of listening as a right, a competency, and an activist tool for students, educators, and researchers alike. More recently still, “­listening” has been taken up in the realm of political studies with a focus on democracy and citizenship. A review of the literature uncovers listening as a much-valued construct across diverse scholarly disciplines. Our perceptions of listening as centrally important to caring pedagogy and caring performance is echoed by Sylvan Baker and Maggie Inchley (2020) in their recent research work using verbatim theatre with “care-experienced young people” in London. Here, they use “headphone” verbatim theatre-making, a manner of creating characters through the embodiment of “real” people by means of simultaneously listening to, and reproducing, their actual (recorded) voices via headphones worn by the actors. These researcher-practitioners used headphone theatre to heighten forms of caring in participatory theatre practice and performance. For Baker and Inchley, listening is an affective mode of engagement where care is present in the act of listening to testimonies, to the sharing of actual people’s words. Headphone theatre has been used by a range of performers and practitioners. In their particular work, Baker and Inchley describe the power of headphone performance to generate a performance of “care-full” attentiveness by requiring the performer to – via the recordings of interviews – listen to the original textures and ­cadences of the interviewee’s speech, paying attention and reproducing the gaps in words, hesitations, vocal ticks, false starts, and paralinguistic parts of speech such as laughs, sighs or groans ... applying what anthropologist Thomas Csordas describes as a “somatic mode



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of attention” to another person … a mode of embodied attentiveness where the body becomes a means of attending to another. (Baker & Inchley, 2020, pp. 137, 181)

They describe their choice to use verbatim theatre as “due to the desire to use theatre-making strategies that would preserve the authority and integrity of the young people’s own accounts of entering state care” (p. 181). The listening through verbatim practices, in these ­researchers’ experience as in ours, became a way to actively demonstrate r­ esponsibility to others, their very words, intonation, inflections, affects, ­hesitations, punctuation, rhythms, and meanings. Our research and pedagogical work in drama classrooms also position listening similarly to music scholar Joseph Abramo (2014), who writes about sound (which for him means hearing and listening) as an “experience” more than a subject. Listening and hearing, for Abramo, do not foreclose understanding in the same way that seeing does (p. 86). The metaphor of listening came early in my ethnographic ­research work with young people. In a study of nearly fifteen years ago now, I was working with young people in a Toronto classroom when one young woman raised her hand to ask me how I was going to hear her. Her words implied that my head was already so full of ideas about young people and so full of other, different young people’s thoughts and voices that I might not have the capacity to hear anything new, to hear her distinct voice. This challenge has followed me my entire career. That young woman would agree with Abramo that listening is harder than seeing, because if you listen, you must actively tune out all the other noises/voices in order to hear the particularities of the new utterances. That young woman attuned me to listening in a way that has shaped my entire life as a researcher. Brian Kane, writing about Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2007) seminal philosophical work, Listening, talks about listening as “intentional acts of uncertain openness” (Kane, 2012, p. 442), which for me is a clear epistemological stance for research. Deciding to listen means one is refraining from speaking. Hearing what one is listening to is always an ethical act that implies responsibility. Nancy drew from Lacan, Hegel, Husserl, Kant, and Heidegger in his phenomenological approach to listening. He describes sound and music as “the becoming-sound of sense” (quoted in Kane, 2012, p. 442), which resonates strongly with our own methodological approach to listening and tuning in to young people’s complex processes of becoming. This dance between speaker and listener is, by definition, embedded in relations of power when speaking of the affiliation between researcher and research participant or adult and young

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person. The important part of the researcher listening, in this case, is to defer meaning-making, to not foreclose on understandings that may come of refraining from speech. In the space that is made when a researcher announces herself, by her silence, as listener, not adjudicator, that space of a full silence invites the speaker to assess whether they have been heard. Only if they are heard, can the act of listening be a success. Every act of listening invites the possibility of change for both speaker and listener. The words residing between them have very little to do with conclusions or meanings but much more to do with the interchange of ideas and histories as the researcher absorbs the words of the speaker and consequently engages in conversation about what has been heard. I have found the silence of the listener in the moment of listening to be critical to collaborative ethnography. In other words, the fullness of being heard by the listener must be felt by the speaker. Only then can collaborative meaning-making be advanced. There is a reason why ancient Greek philosophers and dramatists privileged listening to a play over seeing it, calling the place where we “see” performances an auditorium, rendered in medieval Latin as “auditorius,” literally meaning “a place where something is heard.” When I speak later in the book about “ethnography and its ecologies,” I theorize further about this co-creation between researcher and research participant. Then, in our work in Coventry, I offer a particular example from the empirical data of this kind of listening, the deferring of meaning and the co-creation of understanding, when it occurs between peers in Coventry as they are building their creative ensemble. In the field of education over the last twenty years, emerging primarily from the subfields of critical race theory, critical pedagogy, critical literacy, and feminist theory, the idea of listening as critical to sound and just educational practice, being “seen” and being “heard,” remains a hallmark concept of critical movements in education. For instance, using critical race theory to talk about “difference,” and also using listening as an “act” that potentially moves us to “action,” comparative and international education scholar Katherine Schultz (2003) employs critical theories of listening as a distinct stance in education. Her work is grounded in the political and the practical, and also draws heavily from literacy and gender studies. This kind of theoretical eclecticism is prevalent in the education literature because of the complexity of social relations at play in every instance of the educational encounter. Listening in this case is a deeply interdisciplinary concept, traversing subfields of study and addressing pressing contemporary social and scholarly concerns veering towards the political and cultural impact of listening/not listening in classrooms through



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social media, in cultural production, and in all other areas of formal and informal education. In the field of communication studies, it is interesting to trace how listening as a concept has greatly evolved over the last forty years, moving from a narrow instrumentalist conception to a much more philosophical and expansive construct. American communications scholar Andrew Wolvin produced much early work on listening in this field. In 1985, Wolvin and Carolyn Coakley wrote one of the first comprehensive handbooks about listening that covered both the history of listening as well as the theory and research in what was then a relatively new field (Wolvin & Coakley, 1985). Five editions later, and with the publication of Listening and Human Communication in the 21st Century (Wolvin, 2010), chapters no longer focus on “effective listening,” “appreciative listening,” and “discriminative listening,” but instead lean into the relational aspects of listening and their effects, becoming chapters on “qualitative research methods in listening,” “cognitive and relational aspects,” “dialogic perspectives,” and “listening pedagogies.” Roland Barthes (1985), marrying literary theory, philosophy, and semiotics, contributed an important book of essays centring the visible and the audible in art and politics. Among other things, Barthes ties listening to a hermeneutics that “decodes the underside of meaning” (p. 249). In our ethnographic work, this kind of hermeneutic approach particularly surfaced in our efforts to listen to the silence and the unspoken in our research sites. Often, we were hearing languages that most of us on our Toronto team did not understand – Mandarin, Hindi, and Greek – which meant that our listening did not always lead to understanding. We relied on translation often enough, but in our participant observation work, we were also listening deeply to words we could not comprehend, to exchanges between people, to the ordinariness of speech in the vernacular. Without being able to make immediate sense of what we were hearing, we leaned into the senses of sound, such as tone and emotion, and the physicality and gestures of sound, coming to us through affect, body language, and facial expression. Feminist political theorist Susan Bickford’s (1996) seminal work, The Dissonance of Democracy, has particular resonance for our study, as ­Bickford considers listening “a central activity of citizenship” (p. 2). Our study was explicitly concerned with desires for and realizations of citizenship for diverse young people. Their interviews with us, overtly positioning us as listeners to them, spoke consistently of their desires to be heard by teachers, by parents, by peers, by theories, by mainstream representations of them, and yes, by us researchers. Using feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) work on “multiple-voiced

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subjectivity,” Bickford works to reconfigure identity in public space as “an understanding that gives rise to the possibility of a public identity that is more than just a string of labels, yet does not ignore the relevance to our lives of the groups those labels name” (Bickford, 1996, p. 125). What it often meant for us, in our research, was the mobility of questions of identity: I am/am not this. I am both this and that. I am this in this moment, in this context, but I am other than this in other contexts. Listen for all of these shifts; listen for all of my subjectivities, the young people urged. British scholar, environmentalist, and Green Party leader Andrew Dobson (2014) writes about listening as a necessary skill in democratic conversation. He argues that the expectation “should not be for the marginalized to speak up and be given space but for the centralized to learn how to listen” (p. 30). He imagines what kind of “deliberative and dialogic democracy” might be possible if political theory and rhetoric embraced this kind of just listening. He further advocates for active citizenship in a world where citizens have been reduced, in his view and the view of many others, to spectators (p. 47). Dobson decries the absence of discussion about listening in political theory and so draws his ideas from education, medicine, psychotherapy, media, and communications. He also writes about reconciliation, certainly timely in Canada, along with other social and youth movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, which ask the “centralized” to step aside and to listen. Short story writer and novelist Eudora Alice Welty wrote a collection of autobiographical essays based on three lectures she gave at Harvard University in 1983 called Listening, Learning to See, and Finding a Voice. Of listening, she writes: Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole. (Welty, 1984, p. 14)

This notion, for us, was exactly the right orientation for the “listening researchers.” Listening for stories implies a form of participation, which is what our community-engaged research aimed to privilege: to know that our listening needed to be active; that we would not only be called to listen or to witness but to engage and respond, to take up roles, to be participants in the creative and the research processes together with the youth. And if we were to do this kind of work ethically, we would be engaging in “care-full” research, in research as an act of care.



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Listening and Caring as Political Acts Beyond scholarship on listening, many have come to attach listening to views on democracy, especially in the contemporary context of polarized political visions. Astra Taylor, an American filmmaker very much interested in questions of democracy, recently wrote: But to listen is to act; of that, there’s no doubt. It takes effort and doesn’t happen by default. As anyone who has been in a heated argument – or who’s simply tried to coexist with family members, colleagues, friends, neighbors – well knows, it’s often easier not to listen. We can tune out and let others’ words wash over us, hearing only what we want to hear, or we can pantomime the act of listening, nodding along while waiting for our turn to speak. Even when we want to be rapt, our attentions wane. Deciding to listen to someone is a meaningful gesture. It accords them a special kind of recognition and respect. (Taylor, 2020)

Several scholars have recently argued not about the loss of care in schools but about the co-opting of care in schools as a condition of ­excellence and achievement. In Babak Dadvand and Hernan Cuervo’s (2020) research in Australia, the authors see a problematic schism between the meanings and methods of caring in schools and the unmet needs of marginalized students in particular. The neoliberal policy context, in other words, has not created the conditions for schools to place the material, social, and emotional needs of students as the basis of their care work (p. 140). Such a context instrumentalizes care, imagining an autonomous and self-reliant subject as the recipient of that care rather than building care as an ethic, entwined with trust and mutuality and a clear understanding of power and processes of disenfranchisement in schools (see Chatelier & Rudolph, 2018). Taking further the idea of care ethics in schooling, and of listening as a condition of a healthy democracy, I turn to the other thread of our research study, which was to understand how young people are invited to engage civically in their local and larger global communities. I am aware, as I write this, that devastating violence in India – arguably one of the oldest democratic societies – is unfolding, centred around the question of who is a citizen, with violence advancing particularly on religious grounds against a Muslim minority. The very idea of citizenship is contested in many cultures around the world, and next to the home, schools are the place where most people begin to wrestle with its meanings and conditions. Caring for self and others is a kind of democratic act, a kind of civic engagement that, if understood on the local

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or micro scale of a classroom, could ostensibly have much to offer to such questions concerning broader forms of youth civic engagement. Our r­esearch specifically asked how participation in artistic practices and local-global social relations could provoke forms of engaged citizenship worth considering in times of increasing social unrest. What, then, can a listening practice in creative and research work with youth accomplish? For one thing, it helped us to clearly see how the drama space is one that can awaken activism and ideas about citizenship. Civic ­engagement, as a central conceptual interest of our study, was powerfully realized in the imaginative performance space in the sites we studied. Young people were using their imaginative power to escape binaries of citizen/non-citizen, and systems of separation, in favour of acting on their affective impulses. Some scholars have recently argued that schools, widely considered the public institution most responsible for making “good citizens,” have largely failed in this primary task. Formal civic education courses have become commonplace in schools across the globe, and service education has become a part of many tertiary education programs. What young people are expected to glean from such courses, however, remains contested. The government-approved curricula tend to borrow primarily from liberal notions of civility and respect for political systems. Many, for instance, have argued that such a discourse is elitist and racist (see Gillborn, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 2004), failing to acknowledge systemic inequalities. Michael S. Merry (2020), in his account of the failure of school to realize a robust civic education and particularly to support notions of dissent critical to redress systemic inequalities in advanced democracies, writes that, “owing to time and curricular constraints, but also a general unease about broaching politically sensitive issues, few teachers are inclined to engage students in ‘deliberative’ discussions in classrooms where opinions vary on controversial issues” (p. 133). While this statement is true in many cases, and while the ideals of citizenship often fall far short of redressing systemic and historic inequities, what the drama space within schools and beyond schools has always done is engage in deliberative discussions and debate, and often heads directly towards “controversial issues.” While pedagogies and facilitation skills and power relations can severely limit what will be possible in these spaces, this book will nonetheless soberly uncover what might still occur for young people in these contradictory and flawed spaces. In Reza Gholami’s (2017) critique of the English National Curriculum as a normative and “fact-based” citizenship education, he signals how this work is deficient in precisely the ways that drama typically engages



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students pedagogically. The official discourse of citizenship education, Gholami argues, fails to engage the dimensions of young people’s identities that they find most meaningful. From his research in England, he describes “official attitudes and everyday/intimate experience – which some young people actually describe as a difference between an ‘untrue’ (but government-sanctioned) and a ‘true’ self” (p.  802). Through Gholami’s work with youth in England and, in particular, with a young Iranian diaspora in Britain, he came to value a model of music consumption and production put forth by Simon Frith (1996), linking identity and aesthetic judgement with his own approach, which finds the connections between individual identity and civic/­political life in order that they be foregrounded and explored. “This will allow young citizens to map their own ‘citizenship journeys’ – to think about and manage their citizenship in a way which engages rather than alienates them” (Gholami, 2017, p. 807), Gholami argues, summarizing accordingly: In citizenship education lessons, young people could reflectively interpret and discuss their experiences of each other’s self-performances much like they do with other forms of art. These discussions could then be connected quite meaningfully to the various strands of the citizenship education curriculum – not only to learn but also to critique them. This opens up the crucial path to developing “pedagogies of interpretation” which would facilitate more flexible, reflexive and dialogic interactions in place of rigid judgements and problematic value systems around notions of “respect” and “tolerance.” (p. 808)

Drama classes take young people’s identities, histories, contradictions, identifications, and dreams as the complex matters that they are, attending both to how identity and citizenship are formed and performed. What I learned most critically from this study is that citizenship must be understood relationally. James Thompson’s (2015) influential article “Towards an Aesthetics of Care” provoked a conversation about the particular kinds of relational caring that can be active in applied theatre contexts, that is, theatre that means to do its work in the service of a better, more equal, world. Taking this idea further, in his recent 2020 essay “Performing the ‘Aesthetics of Care,’” Thompson suggests that to speak of care as an “aesthetic” is to surface two foundational and related claims. First, “that reciprocal acts of caring, whether formal, informal, interpersonal or collective, have a sensory, crafted quality that could be called an aesthetic” (Thompson, 2020, p. 215) and second, that arts processes can be caring or uncaring: “In

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process, design and execution, the arts … can promote or exhibit inter-human forms of care that demonstrate a mutually reliant, selfless, constructive form of sociality – and of course they can do precisely the opposite of this” (p. 215). If the arts are caring, Thompson goes on to argue, they will realize the uneven distribution of dependence and therefore work towards the more equitable “conditions of our distinct human dignity” (Kittay, 2015, p. 67, cited in Thompson, 2020, p. 218). The opposite of care, then, will be a doing of injustice. Being guided by care does not mean achieving pedagogical perfection or always-harmonious arts practices. On the contrary, it means choosing care even when it is challenging to do so; it means acting with care even when we are not receiving it ourselves. From this kind of pedagogical and art practice can spring the powerful social value of theatre-making, where the contested terrain of citizenship can get a full hearing and the difficulties and missteps of our human-ness become points of learning. Creating Social Value from Theatre Jennifer Welsh (2016), Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University, has argued that the defining feature of the last decade, the “teens” of this century, is polarization, which exists across many different liberal democracies and on a global level. Along with polarization, the value of fairness has been deeply corroded in most liberal democracies because of growing inequality and persistent historic inequalities that we have failed to address. Considering both the rise of populist politicians and xenophobic policies across the globe and also the rise of some of the largest and most important progressive social movements in decades, my research has taught me that, in this fraught and driven-apart social context, theatre has a vital role to play: the social value of theatre has never been more important or more necessary. Some theatre scholars have recently argued that there has been a “collaborative turn” in the methodologies of performance studies (see Cervera & Laine, 2020). Being a social scientist, it has always been my interest to harness the notion of the “ensemble” in performance to better understand social life more broadly. Jonothan Neelands (2009) elegantly expressed this impulse in his article on ensemble as a democratic process in art and in life, inviting the use of ensemble in theatre-making to model “a better version of the real world on an achievable scale” (p. 187). To lay out the research of this book through this lens, then, is to point to the fundamental ways in which we are at stake to one another, and so being, the theatre-making space can enact forms of what many now call “cultural citizenship.” If we take culture to mean ongoing processes of



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collective meaning-making (Boele van Hensbroek, 2010; Geertz, 1973), we can think about the social value of theatre as a singular practice that can contribute to people’s sense of cultural citizenship (see Kuttner, 2015). The theatre, and its demand for ensemble-making and collaboration across difference, creates a fertile platform for understanding how polarization need not tear us apart. Helen Nicholson (2002), in thinking about trust as a practice of care in drama-making spaces, points out that “a productive and creative environment built on an ethic of care does not mean that there will be agreement between participants; on the contrary, a political theory of trust acknowledges that a caring environment may create a robust environment in which debate, dissent, generosity and artistic experimentation might be encouraged and valued” (p. 90). Adopting the idea of politicizing the personal, Michael Balfour (2019) examines in particular the role of play, stillness, and presence in his drama work with participants with mid- to late-stage dementia. In the work, he argues for play-based practices, applied theatre, and participatory art as capable of challenging “many of the assumptions and intentions of art with a social intent, questioning and re-phrasing these into an ethics and aesthetics of care” (p. 93). He fashions his work as an enquiry into the “relationship between individual moments of aesthetic caring and public justice” (p. 93). In the “theatre” of this research, teachers, students, artists, researchers, and social workers came to create work together and then to share that work with a broader public through both scholarly and artistic modes of communication. As Judith Butler (2015) has asked, “if it is not always language that names and forms the people as a unity, is it perhaps taking place with other bodily resources – through silence, concerted movement, stillness” (p. 155)? She points out that “the assembly is already speaking before it utters any words” (p. 156; emphasis in original). The play in Part II of this book stands as a particular example of the layers of collaboration that such a study can nurture, even as it continues to host new publics. The actors who met the words of the global youth and research collaborators through the script began a kind of collaboration with and as those voices through their embodiment of the script. Then an audience arrived each night to “meet” the actors and the people being inhabited by the actors, and new collaborations were imagined again as Kushnir’s play itself “called in” a broader public to listen and respond to the voices in the play and their sometimes quiet and sometimes raucous pleas to be heard. It was a way to u ­ nbind the voices of the research and reach out to new listeners. This final c­ ollaboration – with new publics – was born of the idea of research knowledge as an imaginative summoning.

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The System: Worlds Apart but Structurally Familiar Each site of the study was overcoming structural conditions and the failure of systems in unique ways. Governments and schools were falling far short of what many young people felt they needed to thrive. The conditions for hope and the context for care in each site were, therefore, far from ideal. Here, Terry Eagleton’s (2015) examination of hope offers an important insight: “One can have hope without feeling that things, in general, are likely to turn out well” (p. 2). Hope, for Eagleton, is the opposite of optimism, “which does not take despair seriously enough” (p. 12). Hope is held by people, despite much evidence to its contrary, precisely because the one who is hoping is not engaged in self-delusion. In an interview with Cornel West (2017), the interviewer noted that West had spoken at a recent colloquium about the importance of being a hope rather than just having hope. West elaborated: It is profoundly Aristotelian ... It’s a matter of embodying and enacting certain kinds of virtues. It’s not just a matter of having a discourse. It’s a way of life. It’s a mode of being in the world … It’s a matter of choosing to be a certain kind of human being before you die. And it has to be in your practice, it has to be in your habits, in your deeds, in your actions. (para. 4)

We witnessed hope as a verb, hope as an action, many times over the course of our research. Despite obvious systemic failures, we encountered radical forms of hoping. It was, at times, hard to conceive. In many ways, each site was an example of system failures of different kinds – social, political, and educational failures. The students were very attuned to the particular effects of these structural conditions and often brought astute analyses to the ways in which school policies and practices were falling short. Toronto, Canada It’s kind of like a systemic thing. Our system, like the education system, has always been made like (she demonstrates by holding hands with Marcel), “Hold my hand, yeah. I’m gonna hold your hand until you’re this age. Oh, you’re sixteen now? Hold on. Bye, bye. Just do whatever you want.” So, I think it’s that as well. ’Cause we’re all sixteen, not you yet (pointing to Brittney), or seventeen, fifteen, whatever, and we’re being told like, “Hey you should know how to do this. You need to plan out the rest of your life.” Like we’re all of a sudden being told to have these giant,

estelle:



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giant, like, responsibilities without even being briefed on it. So, I don’t think this type of thing is something a teacher could fix. It’s a systemic thing. kathleen: So, I think you’re right. There’s, if you think of adolescent psychology, there’s a tension there because, on the one hand, tell me if I’m wrong, you actually want that autonomy, freedom. You don’t want to have your hand held anymore. So there’s a desire for that, but it doesn’t mean that you can do it all. And so, when people pull back they sometimes make the mistake that in your, in your call out to say, “Look, don’t treat me like a baby, I have some, you know, I have some thoughts about this. Don’t patronize me.” But on the other hand, if you don’t have, if all you’ve ever had is someone leading you along and saying, “Follow this step and this step,” then once you get that freedom and independence, it doesn’t always go completely smoothly, right? There’s a tension there for sure. I think you’re right. It’s no one’s ill will. It’s part of how the system works. It’s structural. marcel: And I think one thing is the holding my hand thing (reaches for Estelle’s hand), and you’re like a child, and they hold your hand for so long and then they just let go. There isn’t much of a transition from you have no responsibility to help you through this to all the responsibilities are on you; figure it out. There’s no middle ground where you can slowly add all the responsibilities. kathleen: At what age do you think that transition should happen? estelle: Twelve (lots of voices interject with “yeah”). (Classroom reflection, Kathleen, Nancy, Mr. L, Brittney, Evangeline, Leroy, Estelle, Josh, Zofia, Marcel, 15 December 2015) From Estelle’s vantage point, the ways in which the system is structured seriously misjudges young people’s needs, either patronizing them or leaving them to fend for themselves, never quite understanding what supportive care might be; as Marcel put it, “holding my hand thing, and you’re like a child, and they hold your hand for so long and then they just let go.” A year later, we meet that twelve-year-old in Coventry, the one the Toronto sixteen-year-olds think should be ideally helped through the transition from childhood to being a responsible and autonomous agent. But Max, too, feels somehow abandoned by the system. Coventry, England Well that is, like, one thing I always like to think about, which is kind of a big question a bit too early. I don’t know. For career

max:

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choices, do I go with science or do I go with acting? ’Cause I think I’m more likely to be in films rather than stage plays. And, um, and it’s a pretty big force, because I love both of them and they are complete opposite things. kathleen: And when do you have to make those decisions in school where you have to focus on one or the other? max: Well, it’s when you take, well science is always compulsory, but it depends on your option sheet. Do I take drama or not? Or do I choose something else like media or something like that. So that’s the kind of time where you really make your mind up and you need to ... This is ... basically it’s like, “Here’s a street that can change your life forever. Choose wisely. Good luck!” andrew: Can I ask how old you are? max: I’m twelve, twelve and a half. (Individual interview, Max, 29 June 2016) How does the drama classroom, as we’ve observed it, shore up both young people’s sense of support and security as well as their desire for independence? This achievement is perhaps one of the greatest contributions to the social contract that a drama-making space can provide. Through the collaborative work of making something together, young people experience the joys and frustrations of contributing their individual views to an emerging whole. There is not much about our neoliberal schools that allows young people to exercise their independent thought and also provides reassurances that they are not alone in undertaking challenges. Neoliberalism’s ideologies of individualism and competitiveness have thoroughly seeped into key domains of the youth experience, including education, employment, policing, and recreation (see Reay, 2012; Rodricks et al., 2018). The notion of youth community and a “commons” is not something most systems enable. In the neoliberal school marketplace, the drama classroom is a disruptor, building from a pedagogy that places the whole ahead of the individual parts. The s­ ocial value of theatre was keenly felt in the microworlds of the individual drama-making spaces of this study. In this way, theatre’s social value ­becomes a kind of intervention or a proposition for young people to feel less mute and disempowered by the systems and structures that shape their lives and to feel more a part of a collective than many other domains of their lives afford. As seen in the above excerpt from Max’s interview, I brought the insights of Estelle from Toronto to young Max in C ­ oventry, where the young people had carefully listened to each other’s stories about important objects in their lives, and then



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told him Evangeline’s story of her important object to see whether there was resonance for him: You know how in this research project there’s a site in Toronto. It’s a secondary school where we work, and they were doing an oral history project, devising a piece like this too. And there was a moment where a small group of the students, it was a big class but there were three smaller groups and they shared their objects and their stories with each other, and there was a girl who shared quite an emotional story. Actually, it was about a time when she felt quite hopeless, and then the students decided to tell each other’s stories … So it was Evangeline who told a story. Her object was a wrapper of a candy bar, a chocolate bar that she’d saved for a long time and then decided to eat it ’cause they stopped making this particular chocolate bar and she decided to eat it because she felt very low. And this other boy, Josh, was charged with telling her story. And it’s exactly what you’re saying. She heard her own story; her own feelings being expressed in different words she hadn’t used by someone else, and she felt like she understood herself for the first time and that someone had really listened to her. Someone had even heard beyond the words that she spoke. Does that seem accurate? max: That’s probably exactly what I felt as well. kathleen: That someone had really heard, had really listened and reproduced the story. max: Yeah, that’s the good thing about this, like with some of the script. It’s exactly what we say. Maybe edited because they couldn’t hear the words or it didn’t quite make sense, but it’s 95 per cent our own words. andrew: Why is that important to you? max: Because it feels, it goes through a process, it changes it in a way. (Individual interview, Max, 29 June 2016) kathleen:

This process to which Max is referring is the modus operandi of drama spaces: something that is felt individually, then put out into a room, ­receives the reactions and creative expressions of others; it is changed in that process and becomes something co-produced. That feeling so many young people across the sites expressed of abandonment by the system, after being patronized or minimized by it when they were younger, is reconsidered as they come into a sense of themselves as individuals within a larger community. Or, as Barry Freeman (2017) ­eloquently put it, it is “the impression that ‘the stranger’ may stand in for both the

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‘other’ and the ‘self,’ both ‘out there’ and ‘in here’” (p. xviii). It does not mean that every experience or sharing then ­becomes a blissful realization of community but that the experience of being heard and having others make something with your words and thoughts, however flawed, is the experience that young people are often craving, which our systems so thoroughly fail to deliver. Naming it “pedagogic affect” in her work on attuning to the impacts of affect on education, Megan Watkins writes: “While part of this wider school context, classrooms have their own ambience and spatiality resulting from their specific interiority and the interrelations of those present, especially between the teacher and students, and the students themselves” (Watkins, 2007, p. 75, 2016). The ethnographic sensibility is especially prepared to perceive these intangible and felt phenomena as it attunes to the practices of a space, and in this case, the artistic and pedagogic practices of the drama space. In the Journal of Education Policy, Lisa Nandy (2012), the shadow minister for children and young families and member of Parliament for Wigan, United Kingdom, asked: “What would a socially just education system look like?” She considers several principles, but her very first states: “An education system that recognized the equal worth of all children must place collaboration at its heart” (p. 677). She argues that a system that rejects a competitive vision is not an excuse for mediocrity, as some politicians and educationalists would argue, but a call for ­excellence. She also argues, as others have, that the quality and working conditions of teachers are a system’s best chance at excellence, and she considers an essential plank of good working conditions to mean “the freedom to innovate.” In this vision, teachers’ freedom to create and innovate within the system and students’ right to a collaborative model of schooling is how equity and justice will be most robustly achieved. This recipe is a breeding ground for many drama classrooms where, despite the larger systems and structures that govern their work, drama teachers make a space for collaborative and creative work that may well be one of the greatest points of potential access to a just education that young people find within that system. There is a considerable amount of research on those students most disenfranchised from the normative trajectories of schooling. Every country studies this problem, too often labelling students experiencing the most barriers to success as “drop-outs” or having “learning disabilities.” What these studies, policies, and practices most often fail to consider are the relational aspects of schooling, which my work suggests is critical to the social well-being and academic success of all students, but most notably those who feel more alienated from school systems and pedagogies. What is notably missing in many of those studies of so-called



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“disengaged youth” is the conception of learning as a political act ­undertaken or rejected by young people. Also often absent is an analysis of global forces that all too readily relegate many young people across the globe to “the precariat” or, as Marianne Dovemark and Dennis Beach (2016) describe it, young people who are “precaritised” (p. 174). In a very interesting study from Denmark on young people at the margins of the education system, researchers Anne Görlich and Noemi Katznelson (2015) found early signs in their research that such individualized notions of self-confidence, low ability, or work ethic normally attributed to “low achieving” students are irreparably flawed from the start; and that relationality and ideas of “educational trust” become key to researchers’ deeper understanding of these students’ realities. Taking relationality and trust seriously in their work, the Danish researchers turned to theories that would articulate “confidence” as something not merely directed inwardly at “the self” but outwardly at social relations too (pp. 207–8). Self-confidence, trust, and trustworthiness, they argue, evolve through the trust relations we enter into (p. 208). This ontology of social interdependence between people is the very foundation of theatre-making practices and therefore fertile ground for extending the study of trust and relationality to the systems and structures of education. As Görlich and Katznelson conclude, “trust requires time, transparency and communication and it evolves between people or between people and systems” (p. 208). Tainan, Taiwan In Tainan, there was a shared concern about future job prospects. Young people no longer felt confident in schooling and education as an assurance of their future work possibilities, social mobility, and well-being. Taiwanese youth, often “only children” in their families, typically come from homes where parents are heavily engaged in their academic success.  Nearly three-quarters of school-age children receive significant out-of-school tutoring and are engaged in additional language and music classes. The intense competitive pressure is frequently noted as placing unacceptable stress on youth. There is a long-standing, historical commitment to education in Taiwan. Though traditional rote teaching remains dominant, the educational system has increased its formal commitment, over the last twenty years, to individuated learning, universal access and integration, parents’ rights, multiculturalism, decentralization, small class sizes, internationalization, and increased autonomy for teachers, who first unionized in 2010. Applied theatre and drama in education first

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emerged in Taiwan in the 1990s in response to social and political inequality. Its reach began to expand at the end of the decade through the creation of the Council of Cultural Development through the ­Community Theatre Building Movement, which built community theatres and the training and  development–oriented  Centre of Applied Theatre out of the ­Department of Drama Creation and Application at the National University of Tainan, where we were doing our research. Despite this growth and development, gainful employment in the arts sector seemed highly unlikely, according to the teachers, students, and administrators with whom we spoke: I feel like that right now they [the students] really are more interested in the overall goals of the economy in Taiwan because jobs – wan-jung: Jobs and employment opportunities – I think that’s their main concern after they graduate. kathleen: Yeah, of course. wan-jung: I’m worried about students’ future. I always say, “You have to have many different abilities. So, you can take part-time jobs so that you can do something you like. You have to support and survive first.” (Lunch meeting with our collaborator Wan-Jung and university administrators, 15 November 2016) yi-ren:

In a focus group with the theatre students, we heard repeatedly how unhopeful they felt about realizing their dreams: dirk:

What is your greatest worry about the future?

(group laughter) Joblessness. Joblessness; not getting a job. jia-jia: Without no money. dirk: No money. Without a job you won’t have money, is that it? jia-jia [translated by fei-fei]: She’s afraid that chasing the dreams cannot, cannot give, give people money … Chasing what we like to do doesn’t mean it can earn money. dirk: OK. So just because you’re chasing dreams does not mean that you’ll be able to – voice off screen: Dream and reality. dirk: OK, there’s a difference between your dreams and reality. Chasing your dreams does not mean that you will make money. voice off screen: dirk:



Listening, Pedagogy, Theatre, and Cultural Citizenship

dandy:

…

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Yes.

OK. Can you help us understand why economic struggle is a theme throughout the three plays? We saw that today. Today, what we observed was, in some way, there was always some kind of reference to economic struggle. Why?

dirk:

(voices off screen speaking) It’s more exactly talk about the labour. The labour problems in the economy? superjet: In Taiwan. Most of the community of labourers is awful. Maybe they treat them not very good. dirk: So, let me see if I’m hearing what you’re saying. What you’re saying is that the labour situation in Taiwan is bad, and so what happens is that labourers get treated very badly in their work. And then when they come home, they bring that experience to the home. Is that what you’re saying? superjet: The pressures. dirk: The pressures of what they’re facing in work they bring home? OK. superjet: dirk:

(group talks in Mandarin to each other) I think, we think, that we have no money, we [won’t be] happy. But I think if we have love and we can be happy. dirk: Where did you learn that? How did you learn that if you have love you can be happy? dandy: Money is not everything. dandy:

(a voice off screen interjects, and they laugh) Because I, uh (switches to Mandarin) He says, he doesn’t have, he doesn’t really have much money. But when he can be around his family and friends, he can feel the happiness. dirk: OK. Anybody else, want to tell me why? You as the playwright, want to tell me why was that important to you, Jia-Jia, [writing a play] about economic struggle? jia-jia: In my (switching to Mandarin) jia-jia [translated by fei-fei]: She said, most of the difficulties people will face in life are about economic problems, so that’s why they will put many of these kind of issues in their play. dandy:

dandy [translated by fei-fei]:

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(Focus group interview with the devising group members of their play, Money Is the Lover, 16 November 2016) Athens, Greece The young Greek students echo the concerns of the Taiwanese students and of Max and his peers in Coventry too. They are articulating how the political and economic hardships in Greece create a very real sense of a precarious future. Leaving Greece, leaving their family and friends because of economic hardship, is a real possibility for these young people. This outcome is exactly what the Taiwanese administrators feared for Taiwanese youth: future generations will be forced to leave in order to earn a living. The idea of displacement is clearly understood by the young students in Greece, having witnessed it through the refugee crisis and through the splintering of their own families. These concerns actively determine the students’ choices regarding schooling and future career o ­ pportunities. The students are making choices based on the idea of “a safe future.” Lack of choice and of pleasure in school has also been compounded by the diminishing presence of “the arts” in the Greek education system: I believe that most of the people who study won’t find a job; they leave Greece because there aren’t very good jobs they can take … adrian: I’m going to add something about what she said, but in Greece you can’t find easily a job. That’s why refugees that came to Greece, they want to go to Germany so they can find a job and live there, and uh, yes, that’s the reason why most of the people leave. manolis: I think that in Greece people can think only for the present. They are not thinking, they are not thinking about the, like, they can run out of money, they are out of national balances these days for the European Union. And they [are] not thinking, “How are you going to pay it back, you got stuck with the debt and so you have to pay it.” And because they got stuck with that debt, we have no choice but to be restricted, restricted, be very, uh, very (pauses to think – looks to Nikos, says a Greek word, Marianna says “careful”) very careful with our choices, uh, with money. andrew: Do you feel as a young person, you have to be careful with your choices? marianna:

(Bruono nods “yes”; Marianna and Manolis say “yes.”) andrew:

Help me understand that.



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Because, because, I mean, I started to feel this way, uh, from, I think summer, yes, when we started school again for the second year in high school, junior high school (looks to Bruono and Manolis). And I started to feel depressed that I should take only the choices that are better for my future life. And when we go to our (looks at Nikos and speaks in Greek) – nikos: Grades – marianna: Grades, for the first semester, I was very nervous (laughs) because I took – I didn’t do as good as I did last year so I started to study more because I thought that I wouldn’t be good enough for my marks, and I felt that I was a little useless. I don’t know what to say to that. (Focus group interview, Andrew, Nikos, Mariana, Adrian, Manolis, Bruono, 23 March 2017) marianna:

Lucknow, India In Lucknow, every social, political, and educational system was failing the girls. Ongoing structures of patriarchy meant that girls of the lowest caste were forbidden an education. Urvashi Sahni’s Prerna School sought to make students change agents in their communities and in the broader society: Women are really not encouraged to have a self … They’re positively discouraged from having a self or an identity, which might, if you have your own identity – and a strong one – it might not fit into the social role you are expected to play. (Interview by Kathleen during the collaborators’ meeting in Toronto, 19 November 2015)

urvashi:

Urvashi reminds us that the educator in the room (the proxy for the system) must recognize themself as being addressed as someone called to receive something (Friesen, 2017, p. 753). This position of receiver, which I earlier positioned as the listener, presses the educator into their own subjectivity and pedagogical relation as someone receiving the lifeworld of the young person, as someone pausing in order to receive. The exchange then becomes a relation wherein the educator is both ­being acted upon and called to act. Friesen further counsels that, in our current education systems, educators are called to “see adult failure at its core” (p. 753); to see that failure is to attend to one’s subjectivity and be acted upon by the life force of the young person. I call to mind here the profound words of British drama education pioneer Dorothy Heathcote (1971),

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who was once asked how to become a good teacher. She said she had no idea how to teach teachers how to teach, but she thought that teaching had something fundamentally to do with “­receiving.” The research in the pages that follow, from the rooms of this study, will elucidate how this kind of failure (of teaching, of ­performance, and of interdependence) is key to understanding the hopeful aspiration of the pedagogical relation.



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Radical Hope Global Sites – Cast of Players2 Athens, Greece Dr. Myrto Pigkou-Repousi (researcher), assistant professor, Theatre Department, Fine Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Nikos Govas (researcher), founder of Hellenic Theatre/Drama and Education Network; editor of Greece’s “education and theatre” journal Dr. Maria Repousi (key informant), Myrto’s mother; associate ­professor of history and history education, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of Education, School of Primary Education, Department of Social and Cultural Studies Tania (teacher), After School Drama Club leader, General Middle High School Patricia (teacher), After School Drama Club leader, General Middle High School Lena (teacher), After School Drama Club leader, General Middle High School Drama Club: After School Drama Club at General Middle High School Number of student participants: 22 Age range: 13–15

Adrian (student), male Vicky (parent), Adrian’s mother Angelo (student), male Manolis (student), male Marianna (student), female Dinos (student), male Diamantis (student), male

Kalliopi (student), female Calista (student), female Angelika (student), female Anatola (student), female Elias (student), male Marina (student), female Myra (student), female

2 Each site collected demographic information differently, in accordance with their own ethical protocols. As a consequence, the identifying information about students varies considerably. In Toronto, we invited students to include all social identity markers that they wished to include and to choose their own pseudonym. Moving forward, we would choose to make more explicit room for non-binary gender identities and the intersectionality of identities. In the other sites, pseudonyms were mostly used, sometimes chosen by the students and sometimes by the researchers. In cases where real names were used, only a first name was included and no other identifying information.

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Rafaela (student), female Anna (student), female Eugenia (student), female Kostas (student), male Giorgio (student), male

Nikoletta (student), female Chrysa (student), female Petros (student), male Elena (student), female Bruono (student), male Lucknow, India

Dr. Urvashi Sahni (researcher), founder and CEO, Study Hall ­Educational Foundation (SHEF), female Roopa (principal), Prerna Girls School at SHEF, female Arvind (director), Digital Study Hall at SHEF, male Komal (teacher), SHEF, female Aya (teacher), Prerna Girls School at SHEF, female Chintan (teacher), Study Hall Day School at SHEF, male Sapna (teacher trainer), Prerna Girls School at SHEF, female Ash (research assistant), SHEF, gender non-conforming Anshu (translator), non-binary Nita (Prerna Girls School alumna), female Arzu (Prerna Girls School alumna), female Study Hall Day School Grade 11/12 Class3 at SHEF Number of student participants: 22 Age range: 15–17

Priya (student), female Tarun (student), male Utkarsh (student), male Avinash (student), male Aparna (student), female Rekha (student), female Jaya (student), female Meena (student), female Anita (student), female Darsh (student), male Ameena (student), female

Madan (student), male Shefali (student), female Avni (student), female Atya (student), female Asmi (student), female Inaara (student), female Visha (student), female Indira (student), female Bala (student), male Suresh (student), male Abhishek (student), male

3 Drama is used pedagogically in all subject classes at Prerna.



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Prerna Girls School Grade 7/8 Class at SHEF Number of student participants: 27 Age range: 11–14

Kavita (student), female Meera (student), female Tara (student), female Aruna (student), female Radha (student), female Sushma (student), female Manika (student), female Bhavna (student), female Gayatri (student), female Shweta (student), female Tanvi (student), female Vaishali (student), female Upasana (student), female

Aditi (student), female Gauri (student), female Deepika (student), female Anjali (student), female Indrani (student), female Pooja (student), female Nivedita (student), female Sabina (student), female Devika (student), female Nalini (student), female Jyoti (student), female Uma (student), female Maanvi (student), female Geeta (student), female

Coventry, England Dr. Rachel Turner-King (researcher), assistant professor in ­creativity, performance, and education, Centre for Education Studies, ­University of Warwick, female Jouvan Fuccini (arts worker), education officer and theatre director, Belgrade Theatre, male Angela Evans (youth social worker), Coventry Integrated Youth Social Service, female Justine Themen (deputy artistic director), Belgrade Theatre, female Drama Club: Canley Youth Theatre Group, an after school, outreach drama club run by the Belgrade Theatre Number of youth participants: 9 Age range: 12–17

Max (youth), male Ophelia (youth), female

Luke (youth), male Brian (youth), male

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Brian’s mom (parent), female Neena (youth), female Theo (youth), male Connie (youth), female Connie’s mom (parent), female John (youth), male Bruce (youth), male Dmitri (graduate student ­assistant, University of ­Warwick), male

Lorrie (graduate student assistant, University of Warwick), female Maya (graduate student assistant, University of Warwick), female Angela (graduate student assistant, University of Warwick), female Helen (graduate student assistant, University of Warwick), female Ellie (graduate student assistant, University of Warwick), female

Tainan, Taiwan Dr. Wan-Jung Wang (researcher), professor, National University of Tainan, Department of Drama Creation and Application, female Dr. Mei-Chun Lin (professor), dean of College of Performance, ­Music and Visual Arts, National University of Tainan, Department of Drama Creation and Application Yun-Shuan (research translator), the dean’s daughter, PhD candidate, female Dr. Yi-Ren Tsai (assistant professor), National University of Tainan, Department of Drama Creation and Application, female Dr. Wen-Ling Lin (associate professor and chair), National University of Tainan, Department of Drama Creation and Application, female Dr. Bo-Wei Chan (assistant professor), Department of Applied ­Sociology, Nanhua University, male Rolsha Chang (teaching assistant), National University of Tainan, male Drama Course: Second-Year Oral History Theatre Performance, National University of Tainan Number of student participants: 25 Age range: 18–22

Fei-Fei (student), female Jia-Jia (student), female Hung-Hung (student), male Dandy (student), male SuperJet (student), male Shuan (student translator), female

Fong (student translator), male Jia (student), female Ling (student), female Pei (student), male Hao (student), male Wei (student), male



Listening, Pedagogy, Theatre, and Cultural Citizenship

Han (student), male Ming (student), female Hwei (student), female Ting-Ting (student), female Yuan-Yuan (student), female Rey (student), male Xiao-Yi (student), female Ah-Cheng (student), male

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Shuan-Shuan (student), female Shawn (student), male Arnold (student), male Xiao-Ying (student translator), female Xiao-Wen (student translator), male

Toronto, Canada Dr. Kathleen Gallagher (principal researcher), Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto; female, white, queer, middle-class, working-class Scottish heritage, Christian, Toronto-born, Englishand French-speaking, research interests in youth studies and theatre Andrew Kushnir (embedded artist), theatre-maker, creative director of Project Humanity; male, white, queer, middle-class, Ukrainian heritage, Montreal-born, Ukrainian- and English-speaking, embedded artist in the Radical Hope project Mr. L (drama teacher, Years 1–3), assistant curriculum leader of the arts at Regal Heights Collegiate; male, Black, queer, Guyanese, middle-class, Toronto-born, English-speaking, drama, English, and film instructor Dirk Rodricks (research assistant), graduate student at Ontario ­Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto; male, brown, desi/South Asian, queer, middle-class, Mumbai, India–born, ­English-, Hindi-, and French-speaking, research interests in equity studies, post-secondary education, and drama education Kelsey Jacobson (research assistant), graduate student at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto; female, white, English-speaking, research interests in theatre and performance studies Scott Mealey (research assistant), graduate student at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto; male, white, Christian, Toronto-born, English-speaking, research ­interests in theatre and performance studies Rebecca Starkman (research assistant), graduate student at Ontario ­Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto; female, white, straight, upper-middle-class, Jewish, Toronto-born, English- and Hebrew-speaking, research interests in gender, girlhood, and religion Rachel Rhoades (research assistant), graduate student at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto; female,

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white, queer, New Hampshire, United States–born, research ­interests in youth, theatre, and social movements Nancy Cardwell (research assistant), graduate student at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto; female, white, straight, dancer, middle-class, Toronto-born, English- and French-speaking, research interests in arts education Sherry Bie (research assistant), graduate student at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto; female, white, straight, Vancouver-born, English- and French-speaking, research interests in theatre and arts education Kate Reid (research assistant), graduate student at Ontario ­Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto; female, white, queer, middle-class, musician, Cambridge, Ontario–born, ­English-speaking, research interests in song-writing, queer/trans identities, arts-based research Christine Balt (research assistant), graduate student at Ontario ­Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto; female, white, straight, Johannesburg, South Africa–born, English- and ­Afrikaans-speaking, research interests in applied theatre and ­geographies of youth year

1

Drama Course: Grade 12 Drama at Regal Heights Collegiate Number of student participants: 12 Age range: 16–17

Jamal (student), male, Black/Ethiopian, straight, middle-class, ­Muslim, Toronto-born, first language Harari, second language English Scarlet (student), female, Canadian (Irish/Scandinavian background), heteroromantic demisexual, lower-middle-class, atheist, T ­ oronto-born, first language English, speaks some French and Spanish Astrid (student), female, white (Ukrainian, Canadian, French, English, Danish, Irish, Scottish), heterosexual, upper-middle-class, (ancestral upper-class), Anglican/atheist, Toronto-born, English-speaking Maliky [Malikai] (student), male, Black/Canadian/Eritrean, straight, Christian, Toronto-born, first language English, also speaks Tirgrinya Kool Dranks Samson (student), female, white/Northern European, middle-class, pagan, Toronto-born, first language English



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Zeida (student), female, Chinese, straight, no religion, born in China, first language Mandarin/Chinese, also speaks English DJ Abraham Lincoln (student), female, white (French/English/­ Scottish), straight enough, upper-middle-class, agnostic, sort of atheist, Toronto-born, first language English M&M (student), female, African-Canadian/parents from Eritrea, ­heterosexual [crossed out], middle-class, Toronto-born, first ­language English, also speaks French, Tigrinaya, some Arabic Mya Ibrahim (student), female, Somali, heterosexual, middle-class, Muslim, Toronto-born, first language English, also speaks Somali/ Arabic Michelle (student), female, white/Israeli, heterosexual, upper-­middleclass, Jewish, Toronto-born, first language English Atticus (student), male, Native/Nigerian, straight, mid/high-class, believes in god, born in London, Ontario, first language English, also speaks Ojibwe Deen (student), female, Middle-Eastern, heterosexual, middle-class, Muslim, born in Bethlehem, Palestine, first language Arabic, also speaks English year

2

Drama Course: Grades 10–12, Integrated Drama Class at Regal Heights Collegiate Number of student participants: 28 Age range: 15–17

Evangeline Scott (student), female, white, straight, lower/­middleclass, atheist, Toronto-born, first language English Greg Tran (student), male, East-Asian, heterosexual, middle-class, atheist, Canadian-born, first language English, some Cantonese Paul (student), male, Caucasian, bisexual, middle-class, Anglican, ­Toronto-born, first language English, also speaks French Jessika (student), female, straight, Roman Catholic, Toronto-born, first language English Katie (student), female, Caucasian, heterosexual, Canadian-born, first language English Max Roads (student), male, Caucasian, straight, middle/upper-­ middle-class, no religion, Toronto-born, first language English, some French

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Marcel Delfigalo-Michaelis (student), female, African-Canadian, straight, lower-middle-class, raised to be Seventh Day Adventist but is not religious, Toronto-born, first language English Estelle (student), female, Asian/Black/white, unknown ­sexual ­orientation, middle/lower-class, raised Catholic, practices ­Hinduism, Canadian-born, first language English Zoe Jenkins (student), female, Caucasian, straight, middle-class, ­atheist, Toronto-born, first language English, some French and Spanish Zofia (student), female, Caucasian, heterosexual, upper-middle-class, Catholic, Toronto-born, first language English, also speaks French, Polish, Russian Vanessa (student), female, brown, straight, middle-class, Hindu, born in Guyana, first language English Phil McFarlene (student), male, white, straight, lower-middle-class, agnostic/Jewish, born in Calgary, first language English Mindy Moore (student), female, Caucasian, straight, lower-­middleclass, not religious, Toronto-born, first language English Scarlett (student), female, white, straight, middle-class, not religious, Toronto-born, first language English, some Arabic Josh Rontego (student), male, Caucasian, straight, middle-class, “casual” Catholic, Toronto-born, first language English, also speaks Serbian Katrina Willis (student), female, white, straight, middle-class, Jewish, Toronto-born, first language English, also speaks French Hannah (student), female, Toronto-born, first language English, also speaks Greek Breanna (student), female, Canadian/African, heterosexual, ­Toronto-born, first language English, “knowledge” of French and Spanish Julia (student), female, South Asian, heterosexual, Muslim, Canadianborn, first language Urdu, also speaks English Brittney Anderson (student), female, Caucasian, Toronto-born, first language English LeRoy Fiterbert (student), female, mixed race, straight, middle-class, Toronto-born, first language English, also speaks French Xaviar (student), male, European, straight, middle-class, not religious, Canadian-born, first language English Xzibit (student), male, Afro-Caribbean, straight, middle-class, ­Christian, Canadian-born, first language English Muckles (student), male, white, straight, middle-class, Christian, ­Toronto-born, first language English



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Cameron (student), female, pansexual, not religious, Toronto-born, first language English Kathryn (student), female, Native American, straight, lower/­middleclass, Toronto-born, first language English, also speaks some Ojibwe and Cayuga Pippi (student), female Reigna (student), female year

3

Drama Course: Grade 12 Drama at Regal Heights Collegiate Number of student participants: 22 Age range: 16–17

Jessika (student), female, straight, Roman Catholic, Toronto-born, first language English Katie (student), female, Caucasian, heterosexual, Canadian-born, first language English Marcel Delfigalo-Michaelis (student), female, African-Canadian, straight, lower-middle-class, raised to be Seventh Day Adventist but is not religious, Toronto-born, first language English Estelle (student), female, Asian/Black/White, unknown sexual orientation, lower-middle-class, raised Catholic, practices Hinduism, Canadian-born, first language English Zoe Jenkins (student), female, Caucasian, straight, middle-class, ­atheist, Toronto-born, first language English, some French and Spanish Vanessa (student), female, brown, straight, middle-class, Hindu, born in Guyana, first language English Mindy Moore (student), female, Caucasian, straight, lower-­middleclass, Toronto-born, first language English Breanna Hughes (student), female, African/Canadian, heterosexual, Toronto-born, first language English, some knowledge of French and Spanish Julia (student), South-Asian, heterosexual, Muslim, Canadian-born, first language Urdu, also speaks English LeRoy Fiterbert (student), female, mixed race, straight, middle-class, Toronto-born, also speaks French Xzibit (student), male, Afro-Caribbean, straight, middle-class, ­Christian, Canadian-born, first language English Muckles (student), male, white, straight, middle-class, Christian, ­Toronto-born, first language English

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Kathryn (student), female, Native American, straight, lower/­middleclass, Toronto-born, first language English, also speaks some Ojibwe and Cayuga Reigna (student), female Xaviar (student), male, European, straight, middle-class, not religious, Canadian-born, first language English Scarlett (student), female, white, straight, middle-class, not religious, Toronto-born, first language English, some Arabic Mother of Dragons (student), female, Bengali, straight, upper-­middleclass, Hindu, born in Bangladesh, first language Bengal, also speaks English, Hindi, Urdu, and French Chloe Myron (student), female, white, heterosexual, upper-­middleclass, atheist, Canadian-born, first language English Mikey (student), male, Canadian, straight, Toronto-born, first ­language English Susan Goldridge (student), female, white, straight, middle-class, born in Markham, first language English Sebastian Two Fango (student), male, Asian, no religion, born in ­Vietnam, first language Vietnamese, also speaks English Flora Dulce (student), female, Latina, middle-class, born in Argentina, first language Spanish, also speaks English

The Places and the Research Network (Artistic Director, Project: Humanity) (Regal Heights Collegiate Institute, Toronto District School Board)

(Chief Executive Officer/Founder-Prerna Girls School/Study Hall Educational Foundation)

(Professor, Dept. of Drama Creation and Application, National University of Tainan)

(Assistant Professor, Centre for Education Studies, Warwick University) (The Belgrade Theatre) (Coventry Youth Services)

(Assistant Professor, Theatre Department; Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) (Drama/Theatre Pedagogue, Hellenic Theatre/Drama Education)

Figure 1.  Research site locations and collaborators

2 The Settings: Brief Social, Political, and Educational Portraits of Athens, Lucknow, Coventry, Tainan, Toronto

Athens, Greece: Setting the Context Our research site was located in Athens. Athens is the capital of and largest city in Greece, a city of approximately 4 million people. ­Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world’s oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning over 3,400 years and its earliest ­humans recorded starting somewhere between the eleventh and seventh ­millennium BC. It is widely referred to as the cradle of Western civilization and the birthplace of democracy, largely because of its cultural and political impact on the European continent. Today, Athens is a large cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, financial, industrial, maritime, political, and cultural life in Greece. Our work unfolded in a junior high school located in the largely working-class Gerakas neighbourhood, a suburb of Athens. Our time in Greece was most marked by two political, socio-economic disasters. The first of these was the economic crisis. The economic crisis came to a head in 2010, appearing as a national debt crisis. Greece went into significant financial depression and was forced to accept austerity programs from the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Group, and Eurogroup (a non-official, non-elected body). In order to give the Greek banks loans to save them from defaulting on their loans, these organizations instituted many severe economic measures, the reverberations of which have been felt through all parts of Greek society: extreme cutbacks were made to the social welfare state (especially education and health care); teachers lost 25–30 per cent of their wages; extremely high levels of unemployment abounded; the middle class was destroyed ­financially; and many homes were repossessed. From 2010 onwards, the Greek people have been expressing great anger, distress, and suspicion about the austerity measures and how they are affecting the country.



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The refugee crisis is the second ongoing reality in Greece that substantially shaped our work there and continues to shape our ongoing collaborations with our colleagues. An estimated 362,000 refugees and migrants risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean Sea in 2016, with 181,400 people arriving in Italy and 173,450 in Greece (United Nations High Commission for Refugees, n.d.). These refugees are largely refugees of war, economic hardship, and various persecutions, coming from Middle Eastern and North African countries. They arrive on the Greek islands and then generally make their way to mainland Greece. Some refugees move on to other European countries, while others are looking to settle in Greece. Especially vulnerable are the unaccompanied children refugees. For a country already in a state of scarcity and of job and economic instability, the influx of refugees puts further pressure on state resources. It is also fuelling a climate of increased racism and xenophobia among Greek people who are looking to the refugees with suspicion, resentment, and fear about how they will further impact the job and financial markets (Praksis, Médecins sans frontières, & Save the Children, 2016). The Education System Education in Greece is compulsory for all children between the ages of six and fifteen. The education system is divided into early childhood education for children up to the age of six; primary school for children between the ages of six and twelve; secondary education for teenagers between the ages of twelve and eighteen; and higher education for those wishing to attend university courses. Primary school is compulsory, ages six to twelve. Lower secondary school is compulsory, ages twelve to fifteen. Upper secondary school is optional, ages fifteen to eighteen. All levels of education are paid for by the government and free of charge to the student. At the end of upper secondary school, students sit the “external exams for university.” The national exams are standardized and nationally administered. They are a very significant part of Greek culture. All social classes buy into the significance of this exam; poor and rich families alike invest time and money in preparing students for the exam. It is believed by many that this exam can be a class shifter for the employment and economic future of families. The Greek education system is centralized, and the curriculum is centrally designed. There is one single, very detailed textbook per subject. School teachers must follow the curriculum strictly, and teachers are heavily monitored. Music and fine arts classes are compulsory in primary and junior secondary school, but are not offered at all in upper secondary school. Primary teachers must hold a bachelor of education

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degree, and secondary school teachers must hold a bachelor’s degree in a specific subject. Teachers, however, have not necessarily had specific teaching training. Teachers are hired and paid by the Ministry of ­Education, though some of the teachers we met were working additional jobs outside of their school job to make ends meet. There is a centrally administered salary scale, and teachers are paid according to the number of years they have worked (Fulbright Greece, n.d.). Drama is a core, compulsory subject in primary schools. But according to our teacher collaborators, only a very small number of schools seem to offer the subject, and it is taught for one period only per week. For secondary schools (lower and upper), there is no drama subject in the curriculum, not even as an elective, and that is why we found ourselves working with an after school club within the junior high school. There are no drama teachers employed in the schools in the country, with the exception of three specialized arts high schools. Despite these extremely limiting structural constraints, drama makes its way into many schools through theatre/drama clubs in secondary schools, after school or weekends, with teachers running such clubs on a voluntary basis, for which they are not paid. That was the case with our drama teacher collaborator in Athens. In other subjects in the school, drama is often embedded as a “learning tool,” depending on individual teachers’ skills and interests. Within the broader school, drama is sometimes used as a “social intervention tool,” often in interdisciplinary projects that deal with social or controversial issues. Drama teachers in Greece get their training from a non-profit organization called the Hellenic Theatre/Drama & Education Network (n.d.), which was communitycreated almost sixty years ago. I have long partnered with this organization, sharing professional development with its members. It is led by volunteer and passionate members, like our collaborator Nikos Govas. Of course, Greece has a long and rich history of theatre-making and performance, which makes the non-status of this subject in schools all the more perplexing and discouraging. There are a great many national and regional theatre companies in the country, as well as national theatre training institutes. Yet schools, the real breeding ground for building a love of drama and levelling the playing field for working-class ­students, remain bereft of this critical, community-building subject. We were very fortunate to have the opportunity to carry out a lengthy interview with Dr. Maria Repousi, an elected member of the Greek Parliament and an advisor to the parliamentary Special Committee on Education. Maria is also a university professor of history and a very controversial character in Greece. She further happens to be the mother of our Greek research collaborator, Myrto Pigkou Repousi. Maria created a history textbook for schools in 2007 that was adopted by the



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government of the day, but when that government was ousted by an extreme right-wing political party, Maria Repousi’s history book was not only discontinued in secondary schools but subjected to a public burning in the city square in Athens. She commented: “So the power of the school book is that it shows what the state considers must be taught in schools. It’s a mirror of the dominant knowledge. This is the power of the school book. They burned my book because it was at schools in that period” (Individual interview, Maria Repousi, 25 March 2017). Maria’s candour in the textbook, grounded in academic scholarship, exposed for the first time the nature of the Greek Orthodox Church’s revisionist history, and she had dared to challenge the dominant narratives of the stories a nation tells itself about itself. The book also uncovered the critical place of women in public life and periods of “­Aboriginal oppression” that had undergone erasure in the public ­record. The m ­ inister of education, a woman who had supported the textbook, lost her parliamentary seat in the following election. It was after this experience that Maria herself decided to enter politics in 2012, joining a party whose name in English is “Democratic Left.” At that time, Maria put much of her political energy into fighting for legal s­ tatus in the state for LGBT couples. Walking again into the face of controversy, Maria remained an MP for two and a half years before her small Democratic Left Party was defeated. But in order to understand all the reactions about every effort for changes in Greek education, you have to understand that the Greek education system is oriented in the past. There are historical reasons for that because when we had the war of independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the base for asking for support for Europe and for the foreigners was our past, the ancient Greece. So, the ancient Greece was always our basis of legitimacy for modern Greece. All the organization of education was turned, oriented in the past. Even today. So, the past, not as it originally was, but as it was fabricated during the century. andrew:  A created past. maria:  Yes, a created past, because ancient Greek past was very open, especially in Athens. But the Orthodox Church has a very strong point in the fabrication of the past … Their version was that all of ancient Greece was fabricated in the Byzantine period. And in the Byzantine period, the church has a dominant role. So, the narration, the narrative of the church was that the survivance of the ancient Greek culture was due to the Orthodox Church, itself. kathleen:  They’re the heroes. maria:  So, in fact, in the Greek state, we have no separation between the state and the church; it is a couple. Even now … So we have maria: 

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a series of dominant myths in our education system about who we are, who we were, and every attempt to change the things in education has the strong reaction from the dominant sects. I don’t know if you understand. kathleen:  It makes perfect sense. maria:  So, my attempt was to change the way history was taught in schools. andrew:  Can you describe how you effected that change? maria:  Yes. First of all, I have to say that I am teaching history and didactics of history in a pedagogical department. So, I prepare the future teachers, what and how to teach. But as I understood that, at the university you are free to teach everything you want but the fabrication of the citizens is at the secondary and the primary education. I tried to interfere there. I wrote a series of history books in which everything was different. First of all, there were no national myths. Second, it was not the same as the others. I tried to change all the way the historical, the dominant historical narrative was constructed and perpetuated from education. And many new themes about the history of childhood, the history of women, the history of minorities were part of the history book. And at the same time, the way to teach was different. The text evidence, many sources, primary, secondary sources – and I tried to create workshops in the book. Perhaps to show you? kathleen:  Yes, show us. Maria, it sounds like a series of books that trusted teachers, and teachers are not accustomed to being trusted here (Interview in Maria Repousi’s home with Kathleen Gallagher, Maria Repousi, Myrto Pigkou-Repousi, Dirk Rodricks, Rebecca Starkman, and Andrew Kushnir, 25 March 2017). In Greece, we found an educational and social context that had been impacted by years of economic austerity, a refugee crisis, and serious ongoing political turmoil. There were many tensions: the myths of Greek national identity versus the precarious material realities, characterized by economic hardship in the lives of the students and their families; truth versus narratives in the media regarding the refugee crisis; and educational and career aspirations versus extreme uncertainty about the ­future. The after school theatre program functioned for the young students as a place of respite from endless worries about academic pressures from parents and teachers, concerns for their future economic well-being, and a preoccupation with the possibility of having to leave Greece altogether in order to survive and thrive. The site was also a laboratory for carrying out drama-based learning, which, as the data reveal, emerged as an interesting pedagogical intervention into pervasive negative narratives



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about the refugee crisis. ­Caring and careful pedagogy, through drama, functioned as an invitation for alternative narratives regarding refugees in Greece, propelled by the students and their own desires for friendship, belonging, and justice. Their i­magined versions and stories for how these refugees came to be in Greece were mobilized through aesthetic experiments in collaborative poetry and scene development. The power of the aesthetic and the imagined functioned as alternative, caring ­expressions of affective solidarity and civic engagement. Lucknow, India: Setting the Context Lucknow is located in Uttar Pradesh – the largest state in India and the most populated (almost 200 million people, 16.5  per  cent of the nation’s population) – with a sex ratio of 912 females per 1,000 males and a literacy rate of 56.3 per cent (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2011). As the state’s capital city, Lucknow is the eleventh most populous city in ­India, with a population of approximately 2.8 million people (an increase of 25.36 per cent over the last decade) and an average literacy rate of 84.72 per cent (males, 87.6; and females, 81.26). As the site for our research, Study Hall Educational Foundation/­ Prerna  School is located in the burgeoning northeast area of Gomti Nagar – a planned and organized settlement targeted by the Lucknow Development Authority as a destination for commercial investment, specifically information technology. In 2009, Tata Consultancy S ­ ervices (TCS), India’s leading information technology (IT) and business solutions organization, opened its technology park in Gomti Nagar (Tata ­Consultancy Services, 2009), and plans are underway to designate the ­adjacent Gomti Nagar Extension locality as a special economic zone (SEZ) where special economic and financial incentives attract foreign direct investment in specific industries, in this case, information technology. This shift in the state’s priorities towards industry will impact the rate of investment in Lucknow’s erstwhile economic mainstay of handicrafts and textiles – a largely  labour-driven tertiary sector providing (temporary) employment to much of Lucknow’s impoverished and illiterate populations. As a potential counter to this poverty, in July 2014, the Narendra Modi–led federal government announced a Rs. 200 crore (approximately US$40 million) investment proposal to set up a textile mega-cluster in six Indian cities, including Lucknow.  Whether this growth and investment trickles down to Lucknow’s most i­ mpoverished communities is yet to be determined.  With its demographics, ­Uttar Pradesh is a highly politically active state with growing cities such as Lucknow being pivotal to expanding the voting blocs.

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Politics, Society, and Culture Uttar Pradesh has occupied a position of great political influence in independent India. It has provided eight of India’s prime ministers and has the largest number of seats in India’s lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha. Despite this political influence, Uttar Pradesh has an issue of organized crime and corruption (see Hayden, 2012), which has resulted in the state having one of the poorest records of economic ­development and administration. It has also been repeatedly affected by critical incidents of caste- and community-based violence, especially between Hindus and M ­ uslims. In December 1992, Ayodhya (135 ­kilometres east of Lucknow) became especially violent when Hindu fundamentalists demolished the  Babri  Masjid (Mosque). This incident led to months of rioting between the Hindu and Muslim communities, causing the death of at least 2,000 people. I have elsewhere written about the young women at Prerna with whom we have worked: For these young women in India, however, the everyday work of colonization and subjectification is being carried out most often by family members and not simply police officers, employers, or distanced others. Their loved ones are often carrying out the work of patriarchy and colonization, which makes refusal and violence, in most instances, untenable options. (Gallagher, 2017, pp. 473–4)

The young girls we worked with have repeatedly articulated, explicitly and creatively, their concerns with child marriage, domestic violence, sexual assault, the inability to make choices about schooling, careers, their bodies, and their friendships and relationships. In particular, the play Izzat (meaning “honour” in Hindi and Urdu) – a performance by the  Prerna  girls that emerged from the verbatim process of Year 1 of our study – captures these issues quite viscerally. (For the process and a video of the performance, please visit https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=MGhcyZsWfsU.) The Education of Girls in India Jyotsna Jha and Ramya Subramanium (2006) report on the issue of education for girls: The focus on minimum “thresholds” for public investment, in turn derived from the analysis of rates of return to education, has contributed to the neglect of female post-primary education. Influenced by Human Capital



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theory (HCT), “gender” and female education have been central framing discourses of education policy, resulting in substantial policy rhetoric and concern about women’s and girls’ education as a lever of development and progress. In India, acceptance of this global rhetoric has been mediated by particular policy choices, which have resulted in the neglect of the secondary sector, the rise of for-profit schooling at all levels of education, and a fragmented formal elementary-education system, with particular implications for achieving gender parity and equality. This has resulted in a range of issues relating to female well-being being erased from the policy map. Girls disappear off the formal education policy agenda past the age of 14, at a crucial age when aspirations can be channelled into opportunities. (p. 278)

In 2009, the Indian Parliament passed the Right to Education Act (RTE) that provides children aged six to fourteen years the right to free and compulsory education until the completion of primary education (or elementary education up to grade 8) in a neighbourhood school. “The regular curriculum does not afford opportunities or ‘sites’ to work … in [a self-constructive way] … There is very little legitimacy for this selfwork, for imagination, in an official epistemological stance adopted” (Sahni, 2007, p. 45). Prerna Girls School follows the National Institute for Open Schooling (NIOS) – the board of education under the federal (union) government. Open Schooling was established by the Ministry of Human Resource Development of the government of India as the National Open School in 1989 (the name changed in 2002). The main mission was to increase literacy by offering a flexible learning alternative to the other boards of education. Its courses and examinations are similar to the other boards, and despite being established for distance education, the NIOS has grown to also provide a formal and regular secondary and senior secondary program equivalent to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). The Emergence of Theatre for Education in India Within communities, street drama has been popular as a means of generating awareness and educating communities with information ­related to social issues such as health and literacy (Pelto & Singh, 2010). The Dalits (lowest caste Indians) increasingly began to use this medium to demand equal rights in the 1970s (Singh, 2009). ­Historically, these informal drama performances have made central the project of education (see Richmond et al., 1993), political awareness and ­resistance (see Bhatia, 2004), and development issues, such as health-, women-, and children-focused issues (Yarrow, 2012). Neelima Talwar (1997) calls this street theatre a “theatre

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of development” (pp. 94–5). Pertti Pelto and Rajendra Singh (2010) note two approaches to street theatre. The first involves the use of professional or semi-professional touring theatre groups to target specific populations, thus covering a larger ­geographical area with its message. The other approach focuses on a “peer education-based” model (p.  151), where “local amateurs are r­ecruited and trained for presenting these social messages” contextually bound to the “cultural framework and language” of that particular community (p. 147). Pelto and Singh (2010) specifically used the latter strategy where street theatre was mobilized as a social intervention strategy to communicate behavioural risk reduction messages for HIV in low-income slum communities in Mumbai. Similarly, Susanta Ghosh and colleagues (2006) studied the use of “Kalajatha”  – a popular traditional art form of folk theatre that aims to deliver messages about life processes specific to sociocultural settings (for example, local dialects, and so on). Here, the study authors mobilized  Kalajatha  to facilitate malarial control awareness.  Anita Singh (2009) has written extensively on the aesthetics of women’s theatre in India, arguing that such feminist theatre is a way of speaking back to power and social disparities. It is a tool for conscientization, for self-­exploration and expression, and for examining women’s ways of knowing, communicating, and doing. Drama at Prerna Girls School Others beyond us have also studied the innovative feminist and drama work at Prerna Girls School.4 In Jessica Ann Ennis’s (2014) dissertation research on theatre for development (TfD), she studied the efficacy of four  TfD  techniques: cultivation of local relationships, community script-drafting, improvisation, and post-show discussions. In her research, Ennis specifically studies Bond Street Theatre – a n ­ on-governmental

4 Though for our project we focus on our work at Prerna Girls School, we also spent one memorable day with the middle-class, fee-paying day school students at Study Hall, where we worked entirely in role, a lengthy improvisation, on an idea of building a global school that would include students from all over the world. These students, too, were gifted improvisers. We also had an interview with two students from that group and were not surprised to learn that they had political ambitions and had also taken up the social justice ethos of the school and easily imagined themselves as future leaders with ambitions to make India a less polarized and more equal society. These are generally India’s middle- to upper-class/caste students who come to Study Hall due to its well-known academic strength. This private school allows Urvashi Sahni to use resources from this school to offer education to the lowest caste girls of Prerna, who would otherwise have no access to education.



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organization that visited India between 2006 and 2009. In 2008, Bond Street Theatre delivered a series of workshops at Anantnag, Jammu and Kashmir, and Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh (Ennis, 2014).  Specifically, the workshops at the  Prerna  School (Lucknow) aimed “to provide the girls of  Prerna  School ‘life skills’ training through theatre workshops; and to help the Study Hall Foundation [school sponsor] in their efforts to encourage self-reliance, self-expression, and creativity in the most disadvantaged girls” (pp. 71–2). During the Bond Street–led workshop, the  Prerna  girls self-initiated the development and performance of an original piece of theatre called The Trial of Krishna (p.  72), highlighting their commitment to safeguarding their rights and fighting oppression. Prerna is an outward-facing school. Sahni, in particular, reaches out to all available resources and opportunities for her students. Personally, I have been collaborating with Prerna School and studying the pedagogy of my collaborator Urvashi Sahni for over fifteen years. In 2010, I wrote about how Sahni used improvisation and role play in her pedagogical practice: “[Sahni] is using improvisation with her students to examine their social conditions, their family life, and their material and embodied experiences of gender and citizenship” (Gallagher, 2010, p. 46). Her use of improvisation with parents, as well, has resulted in more effective communication and better involvement on their part, using improvisation for her broader “social agenda” (p. 46). At  Prerna, the pedagogy of theatre is used across all school subjects as a methodology to resist, explore, and understand. What makes Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF)’s  Prerna  distinctive is its integration of the critical study of institutionalized gender power relations as part of the curriculum. Urvashi has written: “My view is that education ‘as usual’ will not change girls’ lives in India. A technical education – that is, literacy, numeracy, history, geography and science – ­decontextualised from the realities of girls’ lives might give them some skills but will not empower them with the important knowledge that they are equal autonomous persons deserving of respect and that they have a right to use these skills for their own flourishing” (Sahni, 2016, p. 135). The use of theatre is realized through a feminist dialogic process that Urvashi calls “critical dialogues,” which is a practice of movement between scene development and critical analysis in a creative process. “Critical dialogues,” alongside drama pedagogies, becomes one way for the girls to name their story, understand their circumstances, gain a critical understanding of the systemic gendered power relations that frame their lives, and work towards resistance, subversion, and a new social order (see Gallagher, 2017 for further discussion). The following tables illustrate very clearly the growth and success of the program at Prerna.

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Table 1.  Growth of Prernaa Year

No. of students

No. of teachers

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

80 160 200 250 335 435 451 480 510 587 697 711 800 880

4 6 6 8 10 12 16 18 20 22 25 28 35 37

a

Prerna Girls School records.

Table 2.  Life outcomes of seven cohorts of Prerna graduatesa

Cohort 

No. of students

Transitioned to higher education (%)

No. married as of 2016

Average age at marriage

Percentage (%) employed 

2008–09 2010–11 2011–12 2012–13 2013–14 2014–15 2015–16 All cohorts

9 15 15 18 21 18 19 115

88.9 93.3 93.3 100.0 95.2 100.0 100.0 95.8

5 4 1 1 5 1 1b 18 (15.65%)

23.4 23.5 18.0 21.0 20.5 18.0 17.0 21.5

45.0 60.0 73.3 55.6 24.0 55.6 57.9 52.2

a

Prerna Girls School records.  Neetu was married at seventeen years of age when in grade 9. She left school and returned five years later.

b

As we spent time at Prerna, we found ourselves asking how it was that the work there was so objectively successful. We knew it was critically important for the girls’ lives  as well as being an academic powerhouse. At a leadership staff meeting we observed, Urvashi was told that the pass percentage for the Prerna grade 12 examinations was 97 per cent for the Prerna girls. At that, she exclaimed: “We must get the other 3  per  cent! We must find out what’s holding us back” (­Recorded staff meeting, 31 March 2016). We were also astonished by



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the sophistication of the drama we saw used there, owing no doubt to deep roots in I­ndian political and street theatre and Urvashi’s own drama training in Western traditions at Berkeley University in the United States. What we came to understand as utterly key to the success of this place and its pedagogy was that the teachers, too, were on a learning journey and an experience of conscientization in the true Freirean sense. We watched a teacher training led by Prerna teachers – well experienced in the powerful pedagogies of drama – on the subject of child marriage, an ­enormous problem for girls in India and the teachers who are t­rying, against powerful cultural norms and traditions, to educate them. As they led a large group of teachers from girls’ schools across several ­Indian states, we watched unfold – as we observed these teachers role play a scene  – the real key to the learning environment that is Prerna. The teacher ­explains the scene to us as it is unfolding: So, she said that child marriage is something that has to, that should be done, because there is now, when they get married at an early stage, then they know how to dress, they can teach them how to dress, how to, how to behave. But all these girls who are independent and empowered, look at them, they walk around, they go out at night, they wear whatever they feel like, no wonder they get raped and that is why this is the best way to keep the girls in check and to protect them. kathleen:  Who is she? Who is she [playing]? teacher:  She? She is her father’s elder brother’s wife. (Prerna Teacher Training Workshop, 4 April 2016) teacher: 

Then later, as we debriefed what we had witnessed with Sapna, the facilitator, and Anshu, our translator, we began to understand how teacher learning is deeply embedded in the learning context of the school: One of the things that excited us a lot about the training when we heard about it was that the teachers themselves do their own self-exploration, that they come to understand the role of violence and the role of freedom in their own terms and in their own lives, before they imagine themselves to be teachers of other people that they help; that there’s a real investigation that is personal to them and I don’t just mean personal in a kind of emotional way but really that the teacher is the learner and learning about themselves as well as learning about how to help young women. So that seems very central to the workshop that you were

kathleen: 

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giving. Can you tell us a little bit about that choice and what you think that – how that impacts this idea of teacher training? anshu: (translating the question into Hindi for Sapna and then back to us in English) One of the biggest parts of our training is that teachers themselves do some introspection – that they realize how gender has impacted their own lives before we let them move into their teacher role. On the first day, we treat them as participants, we treat them as women; we don’t see them as teachers. kathleen:  So, in this teacher training module, how does this kind of approach – considering them as women before teachers – how does it impact the training? sapna: (in “Hinglish” to researchers) Training on the first day is fully dependent on individual change. Until we understand the issues, know the issues, then we cannot work on them. If we don’t know how it feels to be poor, if we don’t know what it feels to be a victim of sexual violence; so then how can I work with children on these same issues? We cannot do critical dialogues with them. The main component of critical dialogues is communication. And the communication must be sensual – meaning you have to get very personal when you talk to them so that the children can then take their cue from you and share in return. But in order to bring that emotional touch, to understand your own life first is most necessary. With the teachers, it is important to speak to them individually, because many of these issues are normalized for them. For all of their lives, no one has ever told them that they may be following a particular tradition, just because they are female. And then the gender has actually been removed from the tradition, such that the tradition must be followed because it is expected. Therefore, in the absence of individual change, there is no possibility to engage in change with the girls. kathleen:  Do you see the individual and the collective, the personal and the structural explored differently with the tools of drama than other kinds of workshops and teaching? Does drama allow people who use it and work with it to move between the personal and the structural in ways different from other kinds of conscientization workshops? anshu:  As we’re talking about individual change and personal change on one hand, and then social change and collective change on the other hand, so how does drama move between the two? How does drama facilitate movement between the individual and the social and vice-versa? So, there are different mediums. Introspection is one of those mediums.



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But in drama, we can borrow from real lived experiences. And you mix it to create a safe zone. It becomes a space where children can work freely and the teachers can work freely. Even with the teachers, there are fears that, if we speak in a certain way, What will my grandparents/elders say? What will my father say, or mother say, or husband or my own children say? But when doing drama, they are free, they are in a safe zone, they can communicate with themselves, they can express themselves. Using drama for individual change allows for teachers to express themselves, and then they can use that experience to explain to others that such a kind of situation is possible because I was in that situation as well. And how do we figure out solutions? Because in each drama, there is a solution. After a situation, what is the solution? How can we change the situation? So, when we talk about drama in community, by seeing the drama we can understand – we can identify and connect it with our own lives, and if there is a solution in the drama, then we can potentially implement it with our own life. (Individual interview with Sapna, Anshu, Kathleen Gallagher, Dirk Rodricks, and Andrew Kushnir, 2 April 2016)

sapna [translated by anshu]: 

Coventry, England: Setting the Context Coventry is a city located in the West Midlands of England, its ninth largest city with a population of close to 350,000. A suburb in the southwest corner of Coventry, Canley is an example of the contrasting social and economic polarity in the Midlands. Coventry was a thriving centre of industry (textile, motor, aircraft, munitions) until the Second World War, when the city centre was almost entirely annihilated by the G ­ erman Luftwaffe in 1940 – the Coventry Blitz. During the war, ­Coventry was the first city to “twin” with another, establishing the practice of “twin cities” to promote peace and reconciliation. They first chose Stalingrad as a way to show their support for the Soviet Red Army and the people of Stalingrad during the war, and shortly after, twinned with bombedout Dresden, a city that had suffered a fate much like their own. After a successful, post-war recovery, Coventry and Canley were economically decimated again with the decline of the British motor industry in the mid-1970s and further when Britain suffered a serious economic recession in the early 1990s, leaving record levels of unemployment. Canley Youth Theatre members are situated across this economic and social spectrum. Recent studies undertaken continue to highlight the economic disparity in Coventry and Canley. As director of study for

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the Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value and Research Project for the Creative Industries Federation, Jonothan Neelands ­focused on culture and the arts, and health and welfare as part of his research for the commission, discovering that there is a twelve-year life expectancy gap between bus stops in Canley (Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value, 2015). Coventry has been almost exclusively represented in Parliament by the Labour Party since the constituency was established in 1950, with only one term in 1954 going to the Conservatives. The Conservative Party has always been the second most popular party, with third and fourth place variations represented by the Liberal Party, UKIP, or the Social Alliance. Coventry is comprised of eighteen local wards with three councillors for each ward. Our principal site for the study was the University of Warwick, ­Coventry, located about five kilometres southwest of Coventry city centre, adjacent to the suburb of Canley, on the border of Warwickshire. The youth we worked with rehearsed at the Xcel Leisure Centre (home of Canley Youth Theatre) and the Reinvention Centre at the University of Warwick. They shared their public performance with the community at Millburn House, University of Warwick. Our research visit coincided with the Brexit referendum held on Thursday, 23 June 2016. The United Kingdom was deciding whether to “leave” or “remain” in the European Union (EU), an economic and political partnership of twenty-eight countries that was formed after the Second World War. The EU has its own currency and acts as a “single market,” allowing goods and people to work, move about, and trade as one country. Unexpected by many, the “leave” vote won by 51.9 per cent to 48.1 per cent in the United Kingdom; England voted 53.4  per  cent “leave” to 46.6  per  cent “stay,” with a voter turnout of 71.8 per cent. Prime Minister David Cameron stepped down immediately, and former home secretary Theresa May stepped into the role of prime minister, subsequently being re-elected on 8 June 2017. At the time of writing, Boris Johnson is the prime minister of the United ­Kingdom, having formed government on 24 July 2019 following the resignation of Theresa May, who stood down as leader of the ­Conservative Party following the UK Parliament’s repeated rejection of her Brexit withdrawal agreement. In a snap general election in December 2019, Johnson led the Conservative Party to their biggest victory since 1987 (under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher). Following the election, Parliament ratified Johnson’s  Brexit withdrawal, and the United Kingdom left the European Union on 31 January 2020, beginning an eleven-month transition period. An economic crisis was predicted, and the pound



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currency did indeed drop, remaining about 15 per cent below the euro. The financial crisis seems to have been short lived, according to many, as the UK economy grew 1.8 per cent in 2016, second only to Germany, whose economy grew 1.9  per  cent in the same period. Of concern to many is the resulting instability for UK residents across these twentyeight EU countries in terms of work, familial, legal status, and rights. At the time of writing, December 2020, the negotiations between the Boris ­Johnson–led United Kingdom and the European Union had gone down to the wire, as the current arrangement was to end on 31  ­December 2020. The Brexit transition period then ended, and once the deal was ratified by both sides, it officially entered into force on 1 May 2021. Much is at stake; the deal was not easily achieved; and it remains to be seen about how life, work, and trade will unfold between them. Our research visit in 2016 coincided with Coventry’s bid for City of Culture 2021. Warwick University, under the leadership of Dr. Jonothan Neelands, was playing a significant role in the preparation of the bid (Coventry, UK City of Culture, n.d.). City of Culture is a competition run by the Department of Digital Culture Media and Sport every four years. Previous winners include Derry in 2013 and Hull in 2017. The Coventry bid was submitted in the spring of 2017, with four shortlisted cities being taken forward to a final round in autumn 2017. The winner was announced at the end of 2017, and we learned that Coventry had won the bid. Coventry was then to spend the following years preparing to host one of the largest events in the UK calendar, as the world looked on. Their bid included the following central idea: We weren’t sent to Coventry; we chose to come. Coventry is a city of welcome, a city of peace and reconciliation, a city of innovation and invention, a City of Culture (see https://coventry2021.co.uk/). Canley Youth Theatre and the Belgrade Theatre – History and Context Canley Youth Theatre is one of seven youth-centred theatre groups that are run as part of the Community and Education sector of the Belgrade Theatre. The Belgrade Theatre has continued to be a major arts and cultural centre since its establishment in 1958. The Belgrade is credited with pioneering the theatre in education (TIE) movement, begun in 1965 and now practised worldwide, which uses theatre and drama as a creative way to provide innovative learning opportunities and inform education through pedagogy and curriculum. The mandate of Canley Youth Theatre, as with all Belgrade ensembles, is to “deliver original and quality productions that give a voice to the experiences of the range of individuals and communities that make up Coventry.” This ideology

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is echoed in numerous practical and political ways. All youth groups are open access and free, and the Belgrade works to develop sustainable partnerships to meet the needs of their “in-house” and “outreach” programs. These agencies include, among others, I­ ntegrated Youth S ­ ocial Services (IYSS), the police, the Local Education Authorities (LEA), Age UK, and more recently, the University of Warwick through its Centre for Education Studies. One of two outreach programs offered at the Belgrade, Canley Youth Theatre is housed in the Xcel Leisure Centre on the outskirts of both ­Canley and the University of Warwick. When Rachel Turner-King was describing to me the difference between her university campus and the Xcel Centre in Canley, where the theatre program was carried out, she said: We’re only eleven minutes away by walking, and yet we were so far apart. We didn’t know each other at all, and that was partly my inspiration for bringing this project together. To make those connections between ­Warwick students and Canley Youth. And what was really powerful for me, when you step into that Leisure Centre, the first thing I saw – ’cause it’s a leisure centre with a swimming pool – was a man in his trunks, and I thought, have I come to the wrong place? And then the smell of chlorine and all of that hits you. I was thinking, I’m not sure. And then you walk into that youth room, and you meet Angela Evans, and you meet Jouvan Fuccini, and everything is just fine. The first thing I remembered after the smell of chlorine, the first thing I heard was laughter. Laughter! (Post-performance conversation, 29 June 2016)

The Canley Youth Theatre was under the artistic direction of Jouvan Fuccini, who worked closely with youth social worker Angela Evans (IYSS). Participants range in age from eleven to sixteen, with significant opportunities to provide mentorship roles as returning members who can work with Junior Canley Youth Theatre. Beyond lessons in acting, directing, writing, and production, and the gratification of rehearsal and performance, the focus of Canley Youth is on activating youth voices, building resilient identities through social skills and communication, and fostering responsibility through civic engagement. A ­recent partnership – created by Justine Themen, the Belgrade’s associate d ­ irector, and Dr. Rachel Turner-King, University of Warwick professor, and funded by Warwick’s Institute for Advance Teaching and Learning (IATL) – focuses on research in drama pedagogy: “Unlocking Living Stories of Hope, Care and Civic Engagement in Campus, Canley and Coventry.” These invigorating partnerships between the arts, l­ocal communities, cultural organizations, academics, students, research, and



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the public give Canley youth opportunities to see first hand the ­import and potential of their work in their own community and beyond. Economic Hardship Affecting Coventry and Canley: Integrated Youth Social Services (IYSS) and Local Education Authorities (LEA) The IYSS and the LEA are connected to Canley Youth Theatre, as they support and monitor the Belgrade’s outreach program. Social services youth programming is not “statutory” or “charity” but supported by the local government, making it vulnerable to political change. “Looked after” children have priority in the youth programs. The Labour government, while supportive, has also subjected the sector to large funding cuts over the last six years. Our social work collaborator, Angela Evans, is always looking for external grants and funding opportunities to augment resources: We’re not charity but we’re also not statutory, so we’re only in existence in Coventry because the elected politicians and the offices of the council appreciate and value the work that we do with young people and how much money it saves those other departments if we weren’t imposed. But Coventry, without getting political, is currently a labour-controlled council and is fully supportive, but they’ve cut back. When I started all those years ago, there were eighty of us doing the work I do. Eighty! There are sixteen of us left. And we don’t have any less number of youngsters. kathleen:  Maybe more. jouvan:  Definitely more. angela:  We’re all getting older, and so that’s Coventry. But in many cities, towns in the country, they’ve just got rid of their youth services because we’re not a statutory service. So, for example, youngsters that are in the care of the Local Authority, “looked after” kids, foster children, kids that are actually involved and their families are involved with social care, social services, that is statutory work. Our budgets aren’t, so they don’t have to have it, is the point I’m making. So, that’s why there’s so much uncertainty. We know they’re supportive of it, but it’s constantly, um, being eroded. So yeah, we don’t know do we? (Interview with Angela Evans, Jouvan Fuccini, Kathleen Gallagher, Nancy Cardwell, Andrew Kushnir, and Dirk Rodricks, 30 June 2016) angela: 

Since that time and despite community mobilization and protest, and Coventry’s successful bid for City of Culture 2021, all sixteen

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youth centres were slated to close, eliminating the free and accessible ­community spaces in which young people meet and join programs like Canley Youth Theatre. UK Education System The UK education system is divided into four sectors: primary education, secondary education, further education, and higher education. The education system in the United Kingdom is also split into “key stages”: Key Stage 1: five to seven years old; Key Stage 2: seven to eleven years old; Key Stage 3: eleven to fourteen years old; and Key Stage 4: fourteen to sixteen years old. Generally, Key Stages 1 and 2 will be undertaken at primary school, and at eleven years old, a student will move onto secondary school and finish Key Stages 3 and 4. Students are assessed at the end of each stage. The most important assessment occurs at age sixteen when students pursue their General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). Primary education begins in the United Kingdom at age five and continues until age eleven (Key Stages 1 and 2); and the secondary education system is from the age of eleven to fourteen (Key Stage 3), where students study a broad range of subjects such as music, maths, sciences, English, and so on. At fourteen, a student enters into their first year of a two-year process known as the GCSE, culminating in a set of exams that test their knowledge and skill. Most schools use the same method when it comes to GCSEs, following core subjects: English, maths, and sciences (either combined or separate biology, chemistry, and physics). Students then ­select an additional four or five subjects in which to take GCSEs, such as French, German, business studies, design and technology, music, sports science, geography, history, and other options. At state schools, students typically take five to ten GCSEs, depending on the student’s ability and drive. For independent schools, which are typically more results driven, it is not uncommon for students to take as many as eleven or twelve, ­focusing more on academic subjects compared to the arts subjects. GCSEs take a total of two years and mark the end of compulsory education for students in the United Kingdom. Once they have completed their GCSEs, students then have the choice to either move into further education (with a view to higher education) or leave school and look for work. When students reach the age of sixteen and have completed their GCSEs, they have a few options to choose from. Most schools in the United Kingdom have what is called a “sixth form” for students to enter after they have taken their GCSEs. As an alternative, there are many “sixth form colleges” that will offer the same courses for students at



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schools that do not have a sixth form. Here students study A-levels, further academic qualifications required of students before they enter higher education and a degree program. A-levels, like GCSEs, follow a two-year program, and there are two components to them: full A-levels and half AS-levels. Generally, A-levels are comprised of six modules, and AS-levels of three modules. Students will generally take between two to three A-levels, but depending on academic ability and drive, may take more. Students at independent schools may take anywhere up to five A-levels. Students who are not so academically minded still have the option to further their education by taking a vocational course that will provide them with a more hands-on experience and education. Programs include BTEC Awards, National Vocational Qualifications, City and Guilds Qualification, and apprenticeships. Given the rigidity of the UK system, spaces like Canley Youth Theatre become extraordinarily ­important, most especially for young people whose socio-economic ­position would not generally afford them access to the arts. Tainan, Taiwan: Setting the Context Tainan is Taiwan’s oldest city, formerly the “capital city.” As such, it is thought to be more conservative than other parts of Taiwan. Tainan is also known for its high number of religious temples, shrines, and sites. The population of the city is approximately 1.9 million, while the country’s population is about 23 million. Our work with the young people was situated at the National University of Tainan in the Department of Drama Creation and Application. While we were in Taiwan, youth activism regarding an upcoming ruling on legalizing gay marriage was unfolding, especially in the capital city of Taipei. In May 2017, Taiwan’s top court ruled in favour of gay marriage, so the Legislative Yuan had two years to amend current laws or pass new ones. This ruling would make Taiwan the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. Activism on this and other social issues, including the “Sunflower Movement” in 2014, was also in the forefront of young people’s minds, and several of the university students we were working with had taken active roles in the movement.  The Sunflower Movement was a protest driven by students against a trade deal with China that was perceived to hurt Taiwan’s economy and limit future employment prospects for young Taiwanese: That evening, the assembly hall of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan was stormed by a motley crew led by students from the “Black Island Nation Youth,” a

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loosely organized student political action committee formed the previous year. The several hundred occupiers repelled police efforts to eject them, escorted out the few officers on duty, and barricaded the doors with seats tied together with rope. None of them expected that the occupation, later known as the 318 or Sunflower Movement, would last twenty-four days, spawn the biggest pro-democracy protest rally in the island’s history, ­reframe popular discourse about Taiwan’s political and social trajectory, precipitate the midterm electoral defeat of the ruling party, and prefigure unprecedented protest in nearby Hong Kong.5 (Rowen, 2015, p. 5)

The activism surrounding this movement led to an event that marked the first time the Taiwanese legislature was occupied by citizens. Given the students we met, we were unsurprised to learn that this demonstration was led by young people. Communities in Taiwan Taiwan also has an active Indigenous community facing many forms of discrimination. One particular Indigenous village community was the focus of the community theatre class’s applied, community-engaged work. They performed for us a piece they had made with the community that they called See You Again, Kobayashi Village, a part of their oral history performance work in Year 2 of our study. Their performance, and the conversations they had with us post-performance, told us a lot about the commitments of this group of young people to redress the historical mistreatment of Indigenous Taiwanese communities. Taiwan is considered to have four dominant ethno-linguistic groups. It is populated primarily (figures range from 95 to 98 per cent) by people who identify with the Han Chinese ethnic group. This population is further split into three categories: Holko (“ordinary Taiwanese,” neither Aboriginal, Mainlander, nor Hakka, who often speak Taiwanese and represent approximately two-thirds of the population); Hakka (also found throughout mainland China, especially in the South, who speak Hakka); and Mainlander (who identify most closely with traditional Chinese culture; many were part of the last wave of Chinese immigration in the 1940s–50s). The fourth ethno-linguistic group is considered to be the “original inhabitants” and includes several recognized

5 In 2020, the world witnessed the implementation of Beijing’s sweeping national ­security law, which would criminalize secessionist activities and subversion in Hong Kong.



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Indigenous communities including Pangcah/Amis, Atayal, Bunun, Paiwan, Pinuyumayan/Puyuma, Rukai/Drekav, Saisiyat, Tao, Thao, Kebalan/Kavalan, Truku, Cou/Tsou, Sakizaya, Seediq, Kanakanayu, and Hla’alua. Indigenous languages are distinct and specific to the population. For instance, the students performing See You Again, Kobayashi Village learned the traditional songs by sound rather than meaning. In 2016, President Tsai Ing-wen issued a formal apology to the Indigenous people of Taiwan for “four centuries of pain and mistreatment.” Overall, Indigenous groups make up approximately 2 per cent of the population (slightly less than Canada’s 3  per  cent). Average household incomes are approximately 40  per  cent lower than non-Indigenous ­Taiwanese people, and discrimination is still prevalent (see Munsterhjelm, 2002; Barclay, 1999; Shih, 1999; Davidson, 1903; Huang et al., 1997; Kalidoay, 1999). Taiwan has a long history of colonization: the island was previously colonized by the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese (Ka, 1996; Shepherd, 1995). It is currently part of the People’s Republic of China and is not recognized as an independent country by the United Nations. While we were there, we were invited to a meeting at the Canadian Trade Office. There is no Canadian embassy in T ­ aiwan due to pressure on the United Nations from China to not recognize Taiwan as an independent state. In that meeting with the directors of education and culture, we had our instincts about young people as the leaders of important social movements in modern Taiwan confirmed by those who were studying Taiwanese culture on the ground. After our time with Wan-Jung’s class, we travelled to two other cities, Taipei and Kaohsiung, and met with education, theatre, and youth workers at two other universities. The Drama Space The young people we connected with in Tainan found in their drama space a place to speak taboo subjects, under the warm and supportive guidance of their teacher, Wan-Jung Wang. They made a sacred space for sharing their worries with each other. Their worries were considerable, as we learned how fearful they were about futures that they felt would not afford them the space to live out their “true selves” or realize their dreams. And they had many dreams. In addition to their domestic worries, financial struggles, intergenerational gaps of understanding (a clash between the “old ways” and the “new ways”), the pressure of traditional cultural expectations, and the repression of their sexual and gender identities, the ever-present threat of Chinese domination loomed very large.

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While we were with Wan-Jung’s students, we witnessed them devising theatre pieces that spoke directly and vividly to so many of their most pressing worries. The students were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and working on pieces that seemed emblematic of the worries of young people on the cusp of adulthood. We attended their rehearsals and their classes, and conducted focus group interviews and individual interviews. In the devising class, the groups were working on three performances: Money Is the Lover (A young woman navigates a difficult relationship with her father, who has money troubles); Cross (A family becomes involved with dangerous people, and a brother is forced to make sacrifices for his younger sister); and Same (A young man conflicts with his family over his sexuality). Though they translated the titles for us, we watched them rehearse in Mandarin with the helpful translation of Wan-Jung and some of her students. When we visited Kaohsiung, we spoke with other university educators who taught us the meaning of a very important concept that is central to the intergenerational struggles of so many Taiwanese young people: andrew:  And

in fact I wanted to have you, perhaps, repeat what you said to me when we were walking, we were talking about queer people or, you know, young LGBT people in Taiwan and um – bo-wei chan:  Filial piety – andrew:  versus individual, you know, uh individualism. You were talking a little bit about that tension and that there’s a shift happening around that. Can you rehash that? bo-wei:  I would say for the middle class, for the gay people here, they have a tension between a life of one’s own and a life for others. Because now they can become relatively well off because they go to the university. But unlike, I don’t know about the Western context, but like the reason they can go to a good university and get a good job is because they are supported by their family. So, on one hand, they can have a very good life, their job affords them very comfortable living, but on the other hand, they have to pay off their parents, their family. So, it’s always a tension. Particularly for middle-class gay men to negotiate a life of one’s own and a life for others. But for working-class gay men, I don’t think they actually consider themselves as gay, because it is difficult for them to come out in a hostile environment. andrew:  And if we were to broaden that idea, the tension between, you know, commitment to family or commitment to self, does that extend more broadly into, you know, millennials or young people in the country?



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I think yes. In general, the gender configuration is changing, in a sense, the younger generation both men and women go to higher education and I think now women want to have a life of their own …We don’t have same-sex marriage yet, but uh because what I study before is about the younger generation, the professional men, many of them are straight. And, I think younger generation men, gay or straight, they have a different understanding of the gendered self because of the changing gender relations in contemporary society in Taiwan. But what I understand as “filial piety” is a very powerful force in Taiwanese society. I fit this traditional value into my own life, my understanding or my own practice. But, it’s always a tension. But this is a very middle-class language. Because we’ve got options, we’ve got choices. And there aren’t many options or choices for people from disadvantaged social backgrounds … I think the younger generation, they appropriate traditional value as a very important source to construct their gendered self. And, for them it’s a meaningful practice. Tradition is not a dogmatic truth, but it’s meaningful choices. Like you don’t have to support your parents but you still want to give them company whenever you can, and you know you have a comfortable life because of your family. So, it’s always passed down to the next generation, you know? Tradition always reinvents itself in a contemporary, modern language. And that is difficult for the younger generation. They don’t necessarily think this is a dogmatic practice, they just get invited to understand or practice what tradition means to them. (Interview with scholar Bo-Wei Chan in Kaohsiung, Kathleen Gallagher, Andrew Kushnir, Kelsey Jacobson, and Dirk Rodricks, 21 November 2016).

bo-wei: 

Toronto, Canada: Setting the Context The city of Toronto is located in southern Ontario, Canada, and bordered by Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes of North America. The name “Toronto” is adapted from the original Iroquois name, “tkaronto,” or “place where trees stand in the water.” Toronto is part of the Dish with One Spoon Treaty, originally created between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas, and Haudenosaunee Nations. The most recent census data (2016) records the population of the city of Toronto at 2.7 million people. Toronto is the most populous city in the country and the fourth largest city in North America.  A large percentage (45.7 per cent) of the Toronto population was born outside of Canada, much higher than the 21.9  per  cent in the rest of Canada

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(Statistics Canada, 2016). Visible minority groups make up 49 per cent of the Toronto populace versus 22.3 per cent in all of Canada (Statistics Canada, 2016). Canada has three major political parties, Conservative, Liberal, and New Democratic, as well as a smaller Green Party, gaining some foothold in more recent years, and the Bloc Québécois, maintaining its strong presence in Quebec. The current prime minister is Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party, who replaced Stephen Harper, a staunch Conservative, previously in office for nine years. The province of ­Ontario is currently led by a populist-style Conservative premier named Doug Ford. The current mayor of Toronto is John Tory, a centrist who in 2015 replaced a n ­ otorious populist Rob Ford (brother of the premier, Doug Ford), who had a polarizing effect on Torontonians in his role as mayor from 2010 to 2014. Toronto prides itself as the most vibrantly diverse city in the country. In the cover letter of the application to garner the new Amazon Headquarters in Canada, the bid stresses the importance of what it calls Toronto’s “uniquely tolerant society,” including a high percentage of foreign-born residents, and the number of languages spoken in the region. “We build doors, not walls,” it reads (Toronto Global, 2017, p. 2). The Indian Act, created in 1876, is the policy document that governs how Indigenous peoples receive resources and recognition from federal authorities. It has been revised many times to reflect shifting views by the settler Canadian government on what constitutes Indian status, which has drastic material effects on Indigenous people. Metis writer and educator Chelsea Vowel (2016) writes: “The Indian Act ushered in administrative systems in First Nations communities that displaced traditional leaders … These are purely Canadian creations, and First Nations people have been given no choice in their design or implementation” (p. 265). The country has been in a fraught and, some would suggest, largely failed process of “reconciliation” with First Nations since the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) ­report in 2015 with ninety-four calls to action for respecting Indigenous sovereignty and committing to Indigenous rights. Recent accountability updates point to the government’s recognition of “symbols” of ­reconciliation but its failure on the more important matter of carrying out the substance of the calls to action, with only eight of the ninety-four calls to action implemented in 2020 (Jewell & Mosby, 2020). Among other things, the TRC report shone a powerful light on the historic “Indian residential school system,” which is the worst shame in Canadian history. Shimo and Barmak (2017) report: “The first residential schools were established in the 1800s, and the system reached its



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peak around 1930, with 80 schools housing a total of 17,000 children. In 1979 there were still 15 residential schools in Canada, and the very last one – the Gordon Residential School, in Saskatchewan – didn’t close until 1996.” Many children died in the schools or in attempts to escape from them. Residential schools were government-sponsored religious schools established to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. Their mission to “educate” and “assimilate” Indigenous children into mainstream culture was carried out through policies of psychological, physical, and spiritual abuse and the suppression of language and culture. They are now widely recognized as an apparatus of cultural genocide of First Nations in Canada. As recently as the spring of 2021, the unmarked graves of over 1,300 Indigenous children on the sites of former residential schools have been unearthed with more likely to be found using ground-penetrating radar surveys commissioned by ­local First Nations. Indigenous communities are retraumatized by what they always knew to be true but is now confirmed, while the rest of the country responds with a sense of horror and disbelief. Canada is officially a bilingual nation, recognizing English and French as its official languages. Many Indigenous people question the exclusivity of this policy, as it denies the existence of their languages and further entrenches the project of colonization. One sign of change, however, came in July 2021 when the Canadian government named an Indigenous woman, The Right Honorable Mary Simon, as Canada’s thirtieth governor general. From Nunavik, Simon is fluent in English and Inuktitut, and plans to learn French. The chasm between progressive rhetoric and full inclusion and equity has given birth to many important social movements in the country. For instance, the nationwide Idle No More movement of 2012 increased awareness of Indigenous rights. Black Lives Matter Toronto is an active social movement that staged an intervention in March 2016 when they occupied the Toronto Police Headquarters for over twenty days; in June 2016, they brought the annual LGBTQ Pride Parade to a halt in order to demand the removal of all police, military, and detention centre representatives from the Pride Festival. Later that year, the Pride Festival committee accepted their terms. At Regal Heights, the school where our research is situated, these movements loomed large in the students’ minds as they explored the issue of police shootings of Black people. Toronto is a city alive with political protest and expression, with frequent demonstrations on topics such as housing and income rights, gender equality, Indigenous rights, anti-Black racism, anti-capitalism, opposition to the Trump presidency, xenophobia, and other issues.

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As in many parts of the world, since late 2016 white supremacist and Islamophobic groups have gathered to protest at City Hall and have made threats to Muslims and their places of worship. A progressive activist community continues to exhibit counter-demonstrations at these gatherings. The Education System In Canada, there are approximately 15,500 public schools serving 93  per  cent of students, or 5.3 million children and youth in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2016): 10,100 elementary schools, 3,400 secondary schools, and 2,000 mixed. There is an average of 350 students per school.  Public funding for education is determined by the provincial or territorial government, with the exception of First Nations reserves, which are funded through the federal government.  Education is a ­provincial jurisdiction in Canada. Public elementary and secondary schools employ approximately 310,000 educators. Most educators have four to five years of post-­ secondary study, including a specialized degree for secondary school educators.  Kindergarten programs are available in some form (half/ full day, mandatory/voluntary) in every educational jurisdiction. In most cases, students aged six to sixteen attend compulsory schooling, with some areas requiring that students start school at age five and others requiring that they stay in school until age eighteen. Approximately 98 per cent of elementary students go on to the secondary level (­Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, n.d.). National secondary school graduation rates are second in the world (behind the United States) for Canada’s working-age population. Notably, graduation rates increased by eleven points (77.7  per  cent to 88.4 per cent) between 1997 and 2010. Job qualifications have become more competitive, and social norms increasingly emphasize the value of education (The Conference Board of Canada, n.d.).  The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) staff include some leading international experts in education and research, such as national leaders in environmental education programming, who designed and launched Ontario’s first EcoSchool in 2003, and educators/experts who established the first Gender-Based Violence Prevention office in Canada in 2009. The district also boasts a large number of alternative schools with ­specialized ­education programs, including two leadership academies, the O ­ asis Skateboard Factory, arts schools, and  an Afrocentric  school.  Over 80 per cent of the students who graduate from the TDSB are accepted to university or college (Toronto District School Board, n.d.).



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Toronto-based advocacy group People for Education’s (2017) annual report, Competing Priorities: Annual Report on Ontario’s Publicly Funded Schools 2017, based on survey results from 1,101 elementary and secondary schools in seventy-one of Ontario’s seventy-two school boards, representing 22  per  cent of the province’s publicly funded schools, ­reveals that educators are struggling to deal with competing priorities, “policy overload” (p. 1), a lack of resources, and inequitable access across rural districts (especially in northern and eastern Ontario) and within urban school boards.  The report also emphasizes the value of the local school as a community hub, serving its constituents during and beyond regular school hours. People for Education, founded and led by education activist Annie Kidder, is a very important advocacy and watchdog group in Ontario. Their accessible research provides important understanding for the general public. They have studied, for instance, the challenges in mental health support in schools, a very relevant topic for the young people we worked with. Their research reveals that 61 per cent of elementary schools and 50  per  cent of secondary schools report that they do not have sufficient access to a psychologist to adequately support students, while 47 per cent of elementary and 36 per cent of secondary schools report that child and youth worker services are not available.  In People for Education’s (2017) annual report, they further underscore the important relationship between creativity, academic achievement, and leadership: In a commitment to prepare students to solve the complex problems of a globally  connected world, the Ministry of Education has identified creativity as a key competency  through which curriculum, pedagogy and ­assessment should be focused. As stated in the  Ministry of Education’s 21st Century Competencies: Discussion Document, there are substantial and important connections between creativity, high academic achievement, ­economic and social entrepreneurialism, leadership, and problem solving. (p. 14)

The report also illustrates how the arts curriculum has become increasingly challenging, while schools have less access to specialized arts (especially music) teachers:  41  per  cent of elementary schools have a full- or part-time specialist music teacher, a decline from 48 per cent in 2007–08; elementary schools in the Greater Toronto Area are 2.5 times more likely to have a music teacher than elementary schools in eastern and northern Ontario; 40 per cent of elementary schools have neither a specialist music teacher nor an itinerant music instructor; and only

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8  per  cent of elementary schools with grades 7 and 8 have specialist drama teachers. The Ontario Secondary School Arts Curriculum guides the content and aims of drama classes. The core values stated in the curriculum document include developing creativity, communicating, understanding culture, and making connections. The curriculum emphasizes preparing students for success in creative careers and for a depth of understanding in, and appreciation for, aesthetics and the sociopolitical aspects of dramatic works. Arts teachers follow two formalized pedagogical structures: the creative process and the critical analysis process. There is a dual focus on creative production and on connections between the artistic works and society at large. Based on the expectations outlined on a more granular level in the course descriptions, the grade 9 and 10 curriculum prioritizes cognitive and identity development and acquiring social and critical thinking skills (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010a). The grade 11 and 12 curriculum engages students in examining and applying the relationships between aesthetic choices, critical cultural awareness, and drama engagement with a social purpose in community and in the workplace (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010b). I previously undertook an examination of the Ontario Drama Curriculum, concluding: The curriculum in Ontario seems determined to engage young people in activities and experiences that invite them to contemplate the diverse world in which they live and learn, to examine and question perspectives, and to consider issues of power and exclusion. This is a good beginning. But making social relations well, confronting those many moments of discomfort and disconnection that are bound to occur in any lively and diverse drama classroom, will require the ongoing efforts of skilled teachers and their students poised to examine the joys and frustrations, the highs and lows, and ultimately the value of making drama together. (Gallagher, 2016, p. 34)

Theatre in the Larger Canadian Context According to the Canadian Arts Presenting Association (EKOS Research Associates, 2012), three in four Canadians attended a performing arts performance by professional artists in 2011, 44  per  cent of whom attended a theatrical performance, such as a drama, musical theatre, dinner theatre, or comedy. A large percentage of Canadians (79 per cent) say they would miss it if there were no live, professional performing arts available in their community (21  per  cent to a moderate extent and 58 per cent to a high extent). The current COVID-19 pandemic has



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certainly wreaked havoc on the arts industry, and arts consumers have come to vividly understand what life without access to a professional arts community would mean. It may be a long while still before people can once again gather in performing arts spaces. In the meantime, companies and artists have been experimenting with a wide range of digital forms of theatre-making and communication. While this work may fill some gaps, the real meaning of live encounters with theatre, through its absence, is being newly considered. The economic impact of the performing arts industry is vast. According to Statistics Canada (2021), the live performance domain contributed $2.9 billion to the Canadian gross domestic product, while the live performance domain accounted for 71,100 jobs in 2018, up from 55,000 jobs in 2014 (Nanos Research, 2014). Nearly nine in ten ­Canadians (86  per  cent of the population aged fifteen or older) attended an arts activity in 2016 (Hill Strategies Research, 2016). The average Ontario arts and culture tourist spends twice as much per trip as does a typical tourist – $667 per trip versus $374. Many businesses and skilled workers (65 per cent) agree that a thriving arts and culture scene is a driving factor when considering relocation (Canadian Association for the ­Performing Arts, n.d.). The performing arts also offer vital public benefit and social impact. Eight of ten Canadians believe that live theatre is important to making communities vibrant places to live. Nine in ten Ontarians strongly agree or somewhat agree that arts experiences help bring people from diverse backgrounds together as a community. Just under nine in ten Ontarians strongly agree or somewhat agree that participating in arts  activities builds a shared sense of community identity (Canadian Association for the Performing Arts, n.d.). Research shows a connection between the performing arts and health. People who attend theatre, pop music concerts, or cultural festivals are up to 32 per cent more likely to report very good or excellent health, even accounting for other factors. People who attend concerts, theatre, or film are significantly healthier, have lower anxiety, and are less subject to depression (Ontario Arts Council, 2017). But not everyone has the means to attend such performances, nor are there performances available that meet the interests of all communities. That is why young people encountering drama in schools becomes so critical. Regal Heights The staff and students at our research site represent over seventy countries. Of the 843 students at Regal Heights, 48 per cent speak a primary

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language other than English, 6 per cent have lived in Canada for two years or less, and another 7 per cent have lived in Canada for three to five years. The school population is comprised of 51 per cent female and 49 per cent male students. The school is renowned for its programs for students with developmental delays, providing an independent living program and giving educational support to approximately 30 students in a fully self-contained environment; physically disabled students with varying physical challenges are given support to meet their physical and learning needs, and students with learning disabilities are also provided support. The school has a “Seniors in Cyberspace” program, in partnership with Toronto Intergenerational Partnerships  (www. tigp.org), a program in which seniors from the neighbouring community come to the school at lunch on a weekly basis to learn basic internet skills from students. Students in all grades can participate in this intergenerational program in which computers are the vehicles to bridge the generation gap. Regal Heights has also offered the two-year ­International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme since 2007, which is characterized by its rigorous academic curriculum and focus on critical thinking skills and community involvement. The school was founded in 1964 and includes grades 9 to 12. It identifies as a global school committed to a focus on social justice, international development, environmentalism, and multiculturalism. The foundations of its social justice program include human rights and peace ­education. Regal Height’s artistic extracurricular clubs include Concert Band, Drama Club, GLEE, Stage Crew, and Vocal Ensemble. In recent years, enrolment in drama has decreased, and some classes have had to combine multiple grades. Our time at Regal Heights brought to vivid light the ways in which mental health concerns and larger societal issues of economic precarity, uncertain futures, and racism are negatively affecting young lives. The students’ creative work explored many of these topics, which they wished to communicate to their broader school, families, and communities. We were enormously privileged to witness their sense-making and their creative capacities to address the issues looming large in their lives. Like so many of the young people in all the sites, their drama-making always had an audience in mind and usually one they felt an urgent need to communicate with. They were taking responsibility for educating their own communities, which is a powerful “­calling” that young drama students often feel. In devising their scene, one group had the intention to show their broader peer community how to support friends who may be wrestling with mental illness, drawing attention to the fact that the subject is still not discussed openly enough, nor do people



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necessarily have the skills to help; “getting educated” and being able to “help out” their peers was clearly on the minds of many in the group: I feel like before we do anything, we need to research a lot more about it because it is a topic that is very sensitive and a lot of people … well … one of the things it brought up is that it is such a taboo topic that no one really talks about so no one gets educated on it. And even in our group, we were talking about things and I learned something I didn’t know before. … And so, because it’s not talked about, when it gets brought up, people don’t know how to help. They come from a good place but they’re not doing it the right way. Like people will say to, like, people with depression, “It gets better. Get over it. Don’t be sad anymore.” And that’s not how it works … So, in the play, if there is a person who goes through a panic attack, or something, we can show both sides. There are the people who aren’t educated enough so they don’t know how to help. And there are people who … well, Xaviar brought up a great story about how, he, well, you should just tell them.

marcel: 

(She asks Xaviar to re-tell his story about a panic attack that they would like to use in the play. He had shared this story earlier in the class during the small group work time.) I had an anxiety attack one time. And it was me and my friend Keenan. And I was like freaking out, and just like, just felt like I had just never felt before. And he was very comforting, like he gave me a hug and he told me how his Dad had told him that hugging could really help with this kind of stuff. And it really helped me out. He was just like a really good friend to me and very comforting. marcel:  So, we just want to establish, like, that is a better way to go through it. (In-class brainstorming session, Marcel, Xaviar, Katie, Mr. L, Nancy Cardwell, and Kathleen Gallagher, 24 November 2016) xaviar: 

3 Ethnography and Its Ecologies

It was always my interest to think sites alongside one another in the doing and the writing of this ethnography. After these brief contextual mappings, it will be helpful henceforth to lean into the concept of “sites” as “entangled relationships” in the manner articulated by ­anthropologist Tim Ingold (2008): “The environment comprises not the surroundings of the organism but a zone of entanglement” (p. 1797). Our research objectives come very much from this important sense of place as ecological entanglement. In this multi-sited, global research, across these fascinatingly different sites, we set four clear objectives for ourselves. We wanted to • examine for whom and about what students most care, and how hope and care as practised are related to democratic citizenship for youth; • determine whether and how hope can be intentionally mobilized within schools, and particularly within drama classrooms, in a ­context of increasing social and economic instability and inequality; • clarify how and why the temporary culture of collective theatremaking works and how specific models of collaborative work in the drama classroom/workshop cultivate affective sensibilities and prime democratic participation across differences with the potential for catalyzing broader civic engagement; and • clarify how translations of ideas across cultural and linguistic ­borders, differing pedagogies, cultural aesthetics, genres of media, and knowledge mobilization practices build capacities for intercultural dialogue and civic engagement for youth in a global context. In thinking about storytelling as the central modality of this study, in our case intercultural storytelling through theatre, Hannah



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Arendt’s (1982) important theoretical notion of “visiting” others’ stories, as opposed to simply consuming them, was central. The story, she argued, presses its audience to “go visiting”; visitors are invited to converse with the perspectives they find, to consider how they are different from their own, rather than to simply assimilate them (see Gallagher, 2011). More importantly, Arendt challenged us to work in such a way that critical categories are not imposed on, but inspired by, one’s e­ ngagement with phenomena (see Disch, 1994). Thinking beyond t­raditional concepts – or in our case cultural stereotypes of youth – is seeing past the categories and formulas that are deeply ingrained in our minds (Arendt, 1979). Performance studies scholar Jan ­Cohen-Cruz (2010) argues that the “story” is the most potentially powerful form of social intervention and way of generating new knowledge through group interaction. We have found that storytelling through theatre is a powerful way to reach others and to interrupt our own normative understandings. This research makes a contribution to knowledge in the field of research methodologies by both using, and representing with more complexity, models of drama practice to explore storytelling as a ­robust mode of research. Situating students, teachers, and artists as ­co-researchers and storytellers, the research draws from drama methods and ethnographic methods to apprehend social relations, pedagogy, and civic engagement within and beyond schools. The global nature of the project required digital media and communications platforms alongside other modes of research, including participant observation, semi-structured individual and focus group interviews, arts-informed artefacts, discourse analysis, and a quantitative survey. Our quantitative work was not in some effort to generalize from our findings or abstract our ­understandings, as quantitative work is often called upon to do. Instead, we sought to elucidate how those statistics, analysed through analogies of directing/theatre-making and the literal “space” of a stage, revealed how those numerical data, too, communicate relationships and power to an audience. This performative stance is how we came to make sense of our quantitative findings and to bring them into a deep and sustained relationship with five years of qualitative data, in-person and digital experiences. Our social science study of youth using drama was also about studying what might be, not simply what is: the “truth” of young people’s experiences, as accessed through what gets imagined, created, resisted, and performed. In the recent edited collection of our study, which included eleven collaborator voices (Gallagher et al., 2020), I  gave a particular example to help readers understand what we mean by

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“performative methodologies” and how we aimed to work collaboratively and creatively with the young people: When Andrew Kushnir visited Regal Heights in the first year of our study, our secondary school research site in Toronto, he led us in a movement ­exercise that had us moving throughout a large auditorium in silence, up and down the aisles, on and off-stage, acknowledging the passing of others in our movement but staying our own course. Along with the creation of a shared experience, the discussion that resulted from that silent, embodied exercise helped us to surface how complex it is to work together and apart, to walk our own path in light of those around us, to be together and apart in our sense-making, to be dependent upon each other’s movement, yet solitary in our choices. It created for us an aesthetic of practice that we could return to when words and voices and difference pulled us apart. It also, critically, set up a mode of engagement between researchers and youth participants where “experiences” would be collectively debriefed and where researchers would be in the mess of making sense, the thrill of participation and chance, together with the young people. (pp. 34–5)

An Overview of Data Generation Data were generated over four years, working with three different classes at our Toronto site and through international fieldwork in Lucknow (March–April, 2016), Coventry (June–July, 2016), Tainan ­ (­November, 2016), and Athens (March, 2017). In addition, a quantitative survey (n = 195) was administered across all sites in 2017 (Year 3). Traditional data analysis, as well as video/performative data analysis, was undertaken. A Word about Ethnography Joining other humanists who celebrate the necessary and indissoluble link between art and life, ethnographers present performance as vulnerable and open to dialogue with the world. – Dwight Conquergood (2013), p. 66

Clifford Geertz (1998) famously suggested that ethnography constituted “deep hanging out” with people as they carried out their daily lives. In this spirit, we too joined our research collaborators and participants in their spaces, but as a collective, we brought ourselves into that space and always foregrounded the idea of being of benefit to the people in that space. Sometimes it meant wholly joining in, even planning



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Table 3.  Overview of data generation Toronto

Lucknow

Coventry

Tainan

Athens

Participant–Observation (days)

62

7

10

10

6

Participant–Observation (hours)

110

74

33

80

48

60

0

8

2

5

3

5

11

4

5

5 (41)

5 (22)

Interviews (students) Interviews (teachers, artists, administrators, social workers) Focus groups (number of students)

12 (56)

5 (56)

4 (11)

Hours of video footage

71

69

14

47

30

Number of storytelling artefactsa

41

6

14

6

10

Quantitative survey by age (n = 195)

Under 12

12–14

14–17

Over 17

3 (1.5%)

62 (31.8%)

69 (35.4%)

61 (31.2%)

a

These artefacts include things like scripts, objects students brought into the oral history unit, other props that held significance in their performances, music, and other stimuli for their creative work.

with artists and teachers and taking leadership roles. Other times, it meant being quiet or even absenting ourselves, recognizing that we were always guests in those spaces. This kind of research involves clear communication and delicate sensing. It demands privileging the ­micropolitical and relationality of spaces and acknowledging how ethnographic practices are always already knotted in cultural, historical, and political histories and processes. I have long referred to my work as “collaborative ethnography,” which rightly sounds like it is in opposition to “uncollaborative” and more historic and positivist/structuralist forms of traditional ethnography, a research methodology that grew up in the field of anthropology but has been imported into many other disciplines across the social sciences. Anthropologist Luke Lassiter (2005) has argued that all ­ethnography is collaborative to some extent, as it unfolds in communities, but that its collaboration is “taken-for-granted,” unlike collaborative

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ethnography, which positions the collaboration at centre stage: “We might sum up collaborative ethnography as an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration at every point in the process, without veiling it” (p. 15, emphasis in original). In its early forms, ethnography was a discourse of colonization, naming and categorizing people with impunity and without regard for its potentially harmful practices of objectification. Of course, the colonizing discourse of ethnography has been critiqued by many across a range of fields (see Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) and especially by feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial scholars (see Elie [2006] and Clair [2003] for a historical overview of the four waves of colonial conquest via the practices of ethnography). Donna Haraway long ago coined the term “the god trick,” which rendered all positions subjective e­ xcept the ­all-knowing researcher; separating the scientist from the thing observed, she argued, is an illusion, or a “god-trick” (Haraway, 1988). Feminist enquiry has long made the case for situated knowledges in research, a rebuke of “objectivity.” My own further insistence on situating my knowledges in conversation with the knowledges of others (collaborator researchers and practitioners, artists, research participants) has been fundamental to my own evolution as an ethnographer. Some call this kind of work community engaged, which of course it is. Community-engaged research has its own long history of underscoring the importance of the voices and authority of those participating in research with outsiders to their communities. My critical, collaborative ethnographic practice is akin to many of these theoretical and epistemological shifts in ethnography but further positions creative collaboration with others, and the relationality and new understanding that can spring from such creative collaborations, as central to the processes, practices, outcomes, and impact of ethnographic research. In short, my own ethnographic imaginary is so deeply influenced by the voices and creative practices of others that it may constitute a cultural change in the methodology itself. Like other critical practices, it takes a materialist view by considering the power relations of those involved in the research and the material and social circumstances of its enactment, and especially the material consequences for those living in the “sites” of the research. William Rawlins (2003) puts my desired ethnographic stance well when he writes: “Differences are regarded as enlivening, as always ­arriving in and through relationships, and as constituting the basis for self – as well as other – recognition ... The differences, which make us all who we are, are respected and sustained. They are not transcended or merged through a self-ordained empathy” (p. 120). Mutual learning, rather than knowledge of “the other,” is what comes into play in



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the kind of collaborative work our global team has engaged in, and these long conversations among us always placed in the foreground questions of power and privilege, the unequal North-South relations of power in a globalized world that are clearly tilted towards those with global capital. And we have done so with humility. These same asymmetrical power relations and histories of colonization and conquest are re-enacted every day and must be accounted for every day in local contexts too. I appreciate feminist geographer Niharika B ­ anerjea’s (2015) understanding of “critical collaborative ethnography as a way to practice accountability in social research” (p. 1058), arguing that “all collaborative ethnographies share an overlapping commitment to complicate the subject/object and self/other binaries in anthropological traditions” (p. 1062). Recently, ethnographers have argued for the value of studying the materialities of spaces. Engel and colleagues (2020) put it this way: The mundane materialities of classrooms can do crucial but often unnoticed performative work and a focus on the relationalities of practices, of things and bodies, objects and subjects, also makes it possible to suspend conventional differentiations between micro and macro levels, both by providing an opportunity of not focussing on the context but instead investigating contexts within relational processes ... and also taking ­ ­aspects of historicity, materiality and social power into account. (p. 267)

This kind of perspective was especially valuable to our study of the oral history performances created by the young people across all of our sites. Its reliance on building creative work from material objects of importance to participants provided a powerful gateway into a deep exploration of objects and subjects and the primacy of relationalities in the perception of contexts. There is a branch of ethnography, called aesthetic ethnography, which also comes into play in this work. Robin Patric Clair (2003) argues that we cannot write or speak of culture if we have not “perceived it in a sensitive fashion. Aesthetic ethnography necessarily and simultaneously contains the aisthetikos and logikos – the listening and speaking; the perception and the expression” (p. 88). These debates regarding aesthetics and logic from ancient Greece onwards are especially pertinent to this study since it has privileged the art made by young people as special insights into the symbolic expressions, the cultural production, of their thoughts and their feelings. In this way, the study has used theatre as a method of data creation, whether these were through performances made by young people, and the teachers and artists with whom

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they worked, or though improvised, in-role activities that the youth engaged in with us, the research team. And lastly, from this ethnographic work has come a piece of theatre created by an artist embedded in our research, who has built his own relationship to “the field,” to the research participants, and to the researchers. We all became his subjects, his muses, and his collaborators in a piece of art about the art and the life going on in the spaces of our research. Our aesthetic ethnography creates culture, therefore, as much as it reflects it. Our fieldwork, and Andrew Kushnir’s ultimate translation of that work, is both imaginative and accurate, but accurate in the sense that Caroline Fusco (2008) uses the word. In grappling with how to enact a theoretically robust postmodern ethnography, she challenged the idea of “­truth-telling” in ethnographic research, offering instead to make some “accurate comments” about the everyday world, using the word “accurate,” “not in the positivist sense as it is often used – that is ‘correct in all its ­details’ – but more in the sense of sixteenth-century uses of the Latin word ­accuratus, which translates as ‘done with care’” (p. 163). In the end, we sought to veer towards Clair’s (2003) notion of aesthetic ethnography, which “asks ethnographers to set aside past dictates to categorize, and analyze, while taking up, in a rigorous and creative manner, a vulnerable, sensitive, dynamic, and pulsating engagement with cultural ways of being in the world” (p. 92). Finally, theatre and collaborative ethnography are, to me, an ideal marriage of paradigms. To have used theatre to conceptualize this study, to build its methodology, and then to create data with young people “in the field,” sharing different genres of theatre with them so that they could, in turn, use the language of theatre to communicate a vast range of important ideas to us, their audience, their witnesses, speaks to the web of relations that this research represents. Brown (2004), considering critical ethnography in particular, calls it a “relationship conscious and place-conscious mode of inquiry” (p. 309). T ­ heatre and collaborative ethnography as we imagined it are dialectical practices of interdependence. This research has substantially benefitted from the ethos of theatre practice in which it was situated. It is only right that, in turn, the ethnographic, documentary, verbatim play at the end of this book becomes its powerful expression, ready to be met – in text and in performance – by future, new audiences. The gift, then, of this work to the human sciences is its confidence in the imagination – to speak truths; to speak of what might be, not only of what is; to lay emotions, bodily and affective experiences bare; to find metaphor to express a difficult experience; to use symbol to communicate thoughts or desires when words fail. Ethnographer Dara Culhane



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(2017a) writes of the “perpetually generative nature of the concept of ‘imagination’ as its unruly potential – not as errors to be corrected by theory or as obstacles to be overcome by practice” (p. 13). Anthropologist Stuart McLean’s (2007) definition of the imagination, this unruly and ineffable thing, as “an active component of experience and perception, engaged in a constant interchange with the material textures of the existing world” (p. 6) is a compelling one. For me, it speaks to how coherently enjoined art and collaborative ethnography can become, both the richer for their public ethos, attention to tacit or sensed understandings or quiet truths, and collective knowledge-building.

4 The Qualitative Landscape: Care and Cultural Citizenship

Art making takes place in a series of relational acts, some more explicit and intentional than others. Where an ethics of care focuses upon the values inherent, exhibited or perhaps desired within these human interdependencies, the aesthetics of care seeks to focus upon how the sensory and affective are realised in human relations fostered in art projects. – James Thompson (2015), p. 436

Athens, Greece A Workshop in Care Yes. He’s a father of a child who is, the daughter is eight years old. And he’s educated, but he lost his job. So, he works occasionally as a builder. But building these days you can work one day and not the other days, because they call you according to the demands of the work. And this is a very heavy job. So, once his daughter came back from school and she told him, “I want this pair of Nike shoes.” And he told her, “OK, we will think about it.” And she cried, “All my classmates have these shoes” and blah blah blah. So, on Monday, he woke her up at six o’clock in the morning and he told her, we are not going to school today, you are coming with me at the work. And he made a space for her to sit for ten hours while he was working. Carrying up very heavy stuff. And when the person came to the desk to put the day’s salary, as we say that, they entered in the car. And he told her, “This is the money, take it and now we are going for you to buy the shoes.” And the girl said, “Oh, I don’t want the shoes.” Yes. Unfortunately, we have many stories like that. So yes, this can be a good example of what crisis is. ’Cause

myrto: 



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Figure 2.  Images in Athens

it takes it to many different levels. Economical, relationships. Yes. (Individual interview with Myrto Pigkou Repousi, 25 March 2017) Daring to Dream in Greek Austerity The day we landed in Athens, we were whisked directly to a theatre by our collaborators, suitcases in tow. We were not to miss a big performance that had been months in the making. The Greek education system had decided that the situation with refugees was becoming untenable, as schools were rapidly filling with children, some unaccompanied by adults, as they landed on Greek shores. There had been reports about problems and growing tensions as the Greek population, itself devastated by years of austerity measures and economic hardship, were called on to welcome the most vulnerable. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) had reached out to the Greek

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Education Department proposing that a program be implemented to help Greek children be more hospitable and welcoming. The children were, it was thought, hearing negative things about the refugees in their homes, within their families, themselves suffering unemployment and financial hardship. The Hellenic Drama/Theatre Education Network, as one of the most important and organized associations of professional educators in Greece, became the chosen organization to partner with the UNHCR to develop a program of “sensitivity training” for Greek children and youth. If the program was to succeed, they would need to have teachers on board, and if the pedagogy was to be effective, it would have to be driven by drama. The program was aptly called “It Could Be Me; It Could Be You.” Our collaborator Nikos Govas was at the helm of this initiative, working with hundreds of teachers across multiple cities in Greece and on the overcrowded Greek islands. They received four times more applications from teachers to join the training than could be accommodated. The approach was deceptively simple: invite the refugee children to share their stories with the Greek children and ask the Greek children to create a piece of work to share with all the newcomer children in a huge theatre festival to take place in different spaces across the country. The imagined process was full of promise for its potential, many thought, both to build “empathy” in the Greek students and to create a platform for the voices of the marginalized refugees. But such work is also rife with potential dangers, what Julie Salverson (1999) has called an “aesthetics of injury.” Peggy Phelan (1997), too, has written about the impulse in theatre to “bear witness” to stories, often the stories of unheard communities, and in that process it becomes critical not to reduce theatre’s “testimony” to a simplistic and potentially damaging interpretive frame. As I have argued here, the act of listening is powerful, but it must not reduce or usurp the stories heard, or the liberatory potential of listening can merely reproduce victimhood and pain and reinforce unequal power relations, bringing more to those who hold the balance of power than to those who have so generously and hopefully offered up their lives. I did find myself a little worried about what might unfold and how I would be a witness to it. I was also jet lagged, so my critical judgment was waning. The young refugee children who had shared their stories sat together at the front of the theatre as “their stories,” interpreted by the Greek children, unfolded on a darkened stage. The auditorium was packed, but the room was quiet with anticipation. We made it into the last row, having arrived just as the event was beginning, dragging our suitcases behind us. What evolved over the next hour was remarkable to me. The “interpretive” frame had been avoided, as had the simply



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literal one. Instead, I saw movement – groups of young people as ocean waves – and sound – the commotion of life in the city centre. The language was spare, out of respect for the language challenges for the nonGreek-speaking refugee children. This event was not a performance with refugees but for them. Their stories had been shared with the Greek students through translators, but in this case, it was the bodies of the Greek students that needed to “speak.” Emmanuel Levinas (1985), in Ethics and Infinity, argues that we are always already “hostage” to the other and have an infinite, but “unassumable,” responsibility towards them. Despite these conditions, he maintains, we must strive to assume our responsibility, contending that it is difficult to remain silent in another’s presence (p. 88). In his work on performance contexts and refugees in Australia, Tom Burvill (2013) suggests there may be a powerful “Levinasian dramaturgy” that “strives to keep open the space of indeterminacy in order to stand against the closed said” (p. 209), that is to say, the closed and determined discourse about refugees as pronounced by governments, institutions, the media, and even in private homes. Burvill’s imagined dramaturgy is borrowing from Levinas’s “active, responsive, corporeal encounter with alterity, that is so pertinent to ethical responsibility” (Burvill, 2013, p. 210). I do not know what the pedagogy was in the schools nor what the encounter between the Greek children and the asylum seekers had entailed, but I do know that what I saw on that stage was powerful in its simplicity and its respectful abstraction of difficult emotions and pain. There was a burst of applause and the familiar sound of joyful children in the audience at the end of the performance. We all shuffled out of the dark theatre and fell into the brightness of the narrow street outside. The cobblestone roadway and both sides of the street filled with young bodies and smiling teachers. We stood crammed on one side of the street, and I caught, out of one eye, the look of recognition coming from a group of middle school students looking at a group of refugee students who had gathered in the middle of the road together, perhaps just finding each other accidentally. Suddenly, a few of the Greek children began to wave their hands in the air, the silent wave often used in Deaf culture, a silent applause expressing appreciation. Within a moment, the entire crowd of young people all had their hands in the air, expressing mutual appreciation. The adults present followed their lead. It was a powerfully arresting moment. Michael Balfour, in his formidable book on Refugee Performance, puts it eloquently when he writes: Conquergood’s ... discussion of de Certeau’s adage, “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across” ... highlights the transgressive boundaries

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between formalized ways of knowing, “the map,” and the subaltern, ­embodied knowing of “the story.” In the context of refugee performance, in which individuals and groups in a new “host” country attempt to survive, remake homes, make sense of traumatic past experiences and locate themselves in new cultures, the story can become the site of both negotiation and resilience. (Balfour, 2013, p. 215)

In the days that followed and with the middle school students with whom we came to work, we discussed the plight of the refugees alongside the plight of Greek society – two stories that needed to be shared, stories that were intimately connected to one another. These Greek children and their families were “the hosts,” trying to overcome their own enormous struggles while also attempting to make space for the unimaginable stories of the refugee families crossing the Mediterranean Sea, seeking refuge. Here, they found a broken Greece and an exhausted people. When, in a focus group interview after our week together, I asked some young people in the group some questions about this context, I was again struck by the candour and the hope, the tragedy and the desire wrapped up together. “we did our best” So, I have a last question, and it is two parts. In one hundred years, when the history books are written on this refugee crisis – one: what will the books say about Greece and two: what do you hope, they say? What would you like history books to say about Greece? Maybe it’s the same. Maybe it’s not. kostas:  That Greece received a huge wave of refugees during summer, during winter, all the time. They will write that we tried to do our best, but they will also write that our best was not enough. Of course, we have to deal with many economic problems and that’s why we couldn’t, we couldn’t respond as well as we would want to have. andrew:  And what is the hoped for [version]? myrto:  This is the right thing to write, what he already said, because you cannot impose to history your own feelings. That’s what happened and that’s what he believes should be written. diamantis:  Hopefully they will write about our hospitality, and they will also write that whatever happens in Europe, Greece always helps. kathleen:  Is this what you want or what you believe? diamantis: Both. angelo:  That we did our best. That what will be written, not what we want, but that we did our best. And this I want them to write, kathleen: 



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and for this to have happened, that Europe countries will change their position regarding Greece. So, yes, for the European Union to change their attitude regarding Greece and receiving refugees and, ok, if the war stops, they will want to go back to their homeland. (Focus group interview, 23 March 2017) “Maps” and “stories” came to dominate our experience in Greece. In 2015, when the collaborators first came together for our week of work in Toronto, our collaborator Nikos prepared a presentation that laid bare the reality of Greece: First, I would like you to see the map of Europe as it is today. It wasn’t like that a few years ago, and probably won’t be in the next few years. And these are dangerous times when maps change. Dangerous times is the economical crisis, it is dangerous times for us. Twenty-five percent unemployment, pensioners trying to find food in garbage bins. Forty-nine percent of the young people unemployed. A large number of people impoverished. These are dangerous times for us. When markets rule instead of people, these are dangerous times for us. When you’re having a police state, these are dangerous times for us. And when there’s not much democracy around, this is even worse because you don’t really know how to handle this. How can you handle when people vote and then you got the markets who say: “No, ok, we don’t really care what you voted, but you have to follow that rules. You have to follow that program no matter what you have voted.” So, these are really dangerous times that influence our work as you can imagine. So … um … Is there any hope in this? I can’t see anything like that. (18 November 2015)

Regarding the economic crisis and art, Nikos shared with us what was happening “on the ground” from where he sits. Within the context of the economic, political, and social collapse, “art collapses too, as everything else.” With a 27 per cent unemployment rate (49 per cent for young people) and large numbers of people impoverished, some say that “art is a luxury the country cannot afford”: fewer festivals and no funds for museums, for archaeological sites, for music, for theatres. It seems instead that the available money is sequestered around a small number of private institutions, which, with the choices they make, “­define the cultural products and what current culture is.” Regarding education, Nikos shared with us how, similarly, there is no money for artists in education. Art subjects are devalued and considered a “non priority.” Teachers, themselves facing enormous financial troubles, cannot pay for their ongoing professional education; they

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cannot afford to go to the theatre or buy books. “Teachers must teach universal human values in a hostile and antagonistic environment and need to teach at two and sometimes three different schools just to survive and pay the bills.” Nikos also brought to vivid life the plight of refugees in Europe, which he preferred to call a “humanitarian crisis” rather than a “refugee crisis,” as the media tended to report, noting that the refugees had the problems, they were not the problem. “People leave their homes because they cannot stay there. They don’t have a choice, actually,” he explained. Nikos then displayed a slide of a child’s drawing from a refugee camp in Lesbos, where he had carried out a project with refugee children entitled “Monologues across the Aegean Sea.” This child’s picture showed two aircraft dropping bombs, with dismembered dead bodies below the aircraft. “So, these are dangerous times, when children draw these kinds of pictures. Trying to represent the life they live in.” For Nikos, and many teachers and artists with whom he worked, the refugee crisis belonged to the whole world. He wondered: Would we have xenophobia or solidarity? Acceptance or racism? Fascism or democracy? These are dangerous times … It’s even worse, when a lot of them drown. 1,800 children drowned this summer [of 2015]. How can you cope with this? When the motto is: one child drown is tragic, but many are just statistics? It’s happening there, in front of us, during the summer, having holidays in the Greek islands. We have to re-think our lives again. And not only just the Greeks. (18 November 2015)

We turned to that youth drama space to wonder these things aloud with the young people. Astonishingly, despite the harrowing circumstances in which most of them were living, hope seemed in abundance in that drama room. Those young people were practising hope every day. And they had the capacity to do so because they were creating in a context of care. They were not hiding from the harsh realities of their lives but using the space as a testing ground for understanding their realities and those of the refugees, for rehearsing other ways of being or understanding, for getting off the two-dimensional map and into the three-dimensional human and embodied story. Recall that a powerful discovery made in this research was that the drama-making activities of young people did not necessarily “build confidence,” as is commonly believed and as young people themselves often articulate it, but rather marked a managing of insecurity. This notion is fundamentally different, because insecurity most often comes from our perception of



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Figure 3.  Child’s drawing: “Children Painting Their Lives” (translation of Greek). Source: Nikos Govas

the judgement of others. Simply, when we feel secure, we feel favourably judged by others. When we feel insecure, we feel unfavourably judged by others, which often leads to unfavourable judgements of ourselves. What is remarkable about the theatre-making space is that we gain our security not so much by others’ judgements but by our own judgements, not of ourselves alone but also through our role in the well-being of others. Here is the fundamental basis of care as it can be experienced in the drama classroom. It is also, not surprisingly, what most acting manuals will tell aspiring actors: be present to your acting partner; receive their work. Or, as Andrew explains it, lifting your “scene partner” will lift you up. And then, communicate your work to others with purpose. As I explained at the outset, the drama workshop provides a meta-space where young people can watch themselves as learners and creators in relation to other people. They see themselves providing things for others. They see themselves as character witnesses, key audience members, to the emerging selves around them. They see themselves as cultural citizens. Across all of the sites, the imaginative space of the theatre-making accomplished two fundamental goals. First, it was an invitational space that welcomed into the room the troubles and joys of the world outside. Often these appearances came in the form of those things that destabilize the young people in their particular societal or community context. The drama space was one where some charge could be taken over these looming threats. The second key component of the theatre-­ making space concerned how the youth made theatre from the materials and conditions of their lives, which became a way to activate “care,” build solidarity, imagine in community, listen to individual struggles, “play the oppressor,” or mock the threat. In Athens and in Lucknow, in particular, moments of playful parody were particularly revealing. In her ethnographic study in Australia, Catharine Ann Simmons (2014)

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Figure 4.  Performing scenes as classmates look on (Athens, Greece). Photo taken by Andrew Kushnir

found how children are highly inventive in using humour and parody in their sociodramatic play in order to claim moments of power in the classroom, illustrating just how “children’s improvised drama is more than just playing. Here, popular culture and drama allow children to gain a space and a momentary power balance within a realm, the school curriculum, where they are predominantly positioned as powerless. As such, children use the space of improvised drama to practice and demonstrate their sub-culture through their peer relationships and knowledge sharing” (p. 281). Across our research sites, such playful activities could be undertaken because of the careful trust that was built in the context of, and shared sense of purpose in, “making something together.” For our research, the sites became laboratories for what we came to understand as “drama-based learning” – the particular ways in which activating a “character,” addressing a fear, mocking a reality, or making space for raw emotion made it possible to take space from or create some distance from “real” troubles in order to imagine and rehearse



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Figure 5.  Improvising playfully stories of hardship (Athens, Greece). Photo taken by Andrew Kushnir

other ways of feeling or addressing looming issues. As researchers, we became privy to the students’ thoughts and their imagined ideas, which we could often follow up on in later interviews. The in-role drama work gave us latitude to let ideas breathe, to enter into areas of speculative fiction, and to permit ideas to be taken up by others, which always challenges one’s own thinking. Paying close attention to community concerns in each site invariably brought that site into relationship with the larger global context, into conversation with what Saskia Sassen (2002) calls the invisible “architecture” of globalization, those systems and infrastructure that normally mask “the actual material processes, activities, and infrastructure crucial to the implementation of globalization” (p. 2). Below is an example of an in-role activity, where the researchers were in role as journalists from other countries, trying to understand from Greek business and public sector leaders and immigrant workers (the students in role) how to address the very pressing refugee crisis from within their current state of economic precarity. In the following exchanges, in role, we hear the local and global tension, the question of

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trust, the playful attempts to invent new ideas, and underneath it all, the students’ truthful concerns: “who can we trust?” Well, I hear that money might be the solution, but my concern is that there’s some money management problems in Greece, and so I’m wondering if there’s an alternative because Greece is already dealing with money issues and a good deal of corruption. anatola (as a hotel owner):  Yes, we have this. Sometimes the moneys are not used for the aim they are supposed to be used. For this reason, this should not be undertaken only by our government or our country. Maybe if the European Union wants to give us some money for this, maybe they can be in a control group – kathleen (as a journalist):  Who are the trustworthy overseers? andrew:  Who can we trust in Greece? kathleen:  The EU signed an agreement and then disregarded it. elena:  Anyway, they don’t want refugees. Whatever they say, they don’t want them, because they want to keep their image and their economy as it is. Maybe we can ask the help of a country which is outside the European Union? kathleen:  Like who? marianna: Germany. kathryn: America. kathleen:  Trump? We’ll call Trump up now. (group laughs) I’m sure he’d be happy to oversee. adrian:  Canada. (more laughing) We may see, they can propose something and we can see who is the most trustworthy. elena: Australia. dirk:  Why Australia? marianna:  We are just saying countries because we don’t know what to say. andrew (as a journalist): 

(panel laughing) No, we have done some infrastructures with the money we received, but the refugees destroyed them. kathryn:  Maybe Australia because there’s a strong powerful Greek community, and they can help us probably. And then Australia’s outside of all this situation so they can be more distanced and objective. petros: 



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How are they sure that it isn’t about the danger that refugees might be bringing? dinos:  No. It’s not only the economic factor. It’s also that the refugees will be different, and this might provoke problems in the German society and the homogeneity of German people. andrew:  Is that not a concern here? dinos:  Yes. We are concerned and this has already happened in some cases. It has already happened, especially in the first period. They kept coming here. We had several conflicts between the refugees and the Greek people, and sometimes the Greek people provoked that at the very beginning. andrew:  So, what I’m unclear about is how they feel about this situation. Germany has closed its borders. How do they feel about this? And can they tell us who they are also? I’m unclear for my article who is responding. So we have an immigrant that’s worked – myrto: (helping us understand what roles have been taken up by the students) He’s a businessman who is working at the same time in Greece and in Germany. He has to travel a lot for his job, for his business, and he knows the situation. It’s not a fair decision. andrew:  What’s not a fair decision? myrto:  With the border closing. kathleen:  He disagrees with what Germany’s doing. myrto:  Yes, and he’s not – kostas:  In Germany, they can do more than what we can do here, because it’s a developed country, and its economy is better, more jobs, bigger state. … kathleen: 

“german border closing” I want to know what’s so terrible about the German border closing. diamantis:  It’s impossible, a country with such a good – such a wealthy country to close the borders because these people want to go there. And they cannot stay in a country as Greece where economy is so bad because they do not have buildings for them to stay, whereas in Germany they have the infrastructure for the refugees and they will be able to find their own space quickly. dirk and kathleen: (to Myrto) And who is he? diamantis:  I’m a Greek immigrant from Germany. We had this – I have worked in Germany and now I came back – there are some years that I came back. kathleen (in role as a journalist): 

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why did he come back to Greece if Germany was so

Germany’s a place to work. (Myrto: That’s a stereotype that we have.) Germany’s a place to work, not to live your own life. It’s a place to make the money first – that’s what we mean, “to work.” kathleen:  So maybe the Syrians who are coming from the war; they’ll want to go back, too. Greece is not a place to live. So why are they so worried? It may be a temporary situation. diamantis:  Yes, that’s what he says. Germany is a place to work, not to live; whereas, Syrians will not be able to work here and make big money for their work. They have to move in another state that gives that kind of opportunities. dirk (in role):  So, I’m from France, and France is also a country where refugees are coming and wanting to go to the UK, and the UK financed a wall to be built, a fence to be built in Calais. So, if today, countries are closing borders, tomorrow they will start building walls, what do you feel about that, or fences? angelo:  I am originally coming from Greece, but I have lived many, many years in Germany. Yes, we feel bad, we feel trapped, because many countries are doing that. They can protect their borders using walls; whereas us, we have the sea and we cannot protect our borders in this way. We feel for both the refugees and ourselves; we feel trapped. diamantis: 

In addition to carrying out focus group and individual interviews with the young people after such whole group improvisations, which laid the groundwork for ideas and thoughts to follow up on, we also set up a camera behind the curtain on the stage where young people could speak any thoughts they wanted to speak at any point during our workshops. These became unedited sound bites, an invitation for the young people to express ideas when they wished to, unmediated by adults, an open forum for speaking thoughts without the intervention of a researcher. For those who wished, we also kept a few questions near the camera in case the students wanted some prompts. After the in-role session with the researchers as journalists trying to understand the relationship between Greek economic precarity and the refugee crisis, we received some powerful thoughts. One student spoke the ­following to our prompt, What is the greatest injustice that you see in the world right now? “Injustice? I think that the greatest injustice in this world are that there are many people in countries who have way more money than they need and other families are dying from hunger and



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they don’t have clothes to wear or food to eat, and I think it’s only sad that people’s lives are controlled by money.” Another replied: “I think that the greatest injustice that I see in the world right now is our behaviour to refugees. Some people hate them, literally hate them, hate the refugees, but they’re just people. So, I can be sure, yes, that’s the greatest injustice today” (Students from Speakers’ Corner). These young Greek students were experiencing, perhaps for the first time, what Hannah Arendt (1951) exposed as the illusion of citizenship in “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” a chapter in her book Origins of Totalitarianism. That work reflected on the end of the Second World War, which saw a wave of displaced persons across a devastated European continent. The refugee crisis of that period is very much like the current crisis Greece and other ­European nation-states face today. In her work, Arendt was speaking about “the right to have rights,” and through casting her historical gaze, she underscores the fallacy of universal human rights, even if those rights were imagined by liberal democracies with all the best intentions and not, generally, in times of crisis, what Benhabib (2004) called “the rights of others.” In 2017, when we were doing our fieldwork in Greece, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was ­reporting 65.6 million displaced persons worldwide due to persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations (with that number at 79.5 million by 2019; see UNHCR, 2020); 37,000 people are forced to flee their homes a day. Our artist collaborator in Greece, Nikos Govas, was unhappy with how little the young people seemed to understand about the causes of the refugee crisis. He felt the masses were being kept ignorant by the media and by the education system too. Many of the students we met in all five sites had what we might have called at another time “very adult worries.” They were not shielded from the questions of employment and survival. In Greece and India, it was especially acute. In England, Canada, and Taiwan, it was anticipated worry as young people continued to watch the stability of political and economic life unravel around them but were not yet, most of them, in the depth of crisis that young people in India and Greece experienced daily. Adrian and Manolis in Greece explained their struggles very clearly to us: In a way that, at least me, I think that when I’m older, I’m going to study abroad. I don’t think at all Greece for studying or staying here when I’m older because, ah, there are a lot of problems, um, here. I love Greece but as far as I love it, I hate what is happening.

manolis: 

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andrew:  And

can you help me understand, what is – we’ve heard the word “crisis” a lot. How would you describe from your experience, or vantage point, what is the crisis? adrian:  People are like, people you didn’t realize, there is people living in the street, and, ah, people who can’t pay their rent and lots of stuff that’s (turns to Nikos and speaks in Greek). (Focus group interview, 23 March 2017) And then we had the opportunity to interview Adrian’s mother, who confirmed our perception of the students’ preoccupations with finding a job that would allow them to make a living and survive: He likes theatre, he likes drama school, and he told me, “In the future, I would be actor.” That, I saw, you must study all the books … The theatre, to be an actor, I believe as a mother, have no future. Must be very good, the best, to have work, to give money to it.

adrian’s mom: 

Adrian’s mother taught us a very important word in Greek: “philotimo.” It means care for others but also the pleasure taken from giving care: The word “philotimo”; it’s not the other country in words. Philotimo. andrew: Philotimo. adrian’s mom: Philotimo. Only in Greece that word is. andrew:  And what is philotimo? adrian’s mom: Philotimo is when some one person wants to give us all from heart, to give, advice, to give you food, to give you spirit – kathleen: Love. adrian’s mom: that word is “philotimo.” adrian’s mom: 

Their teacher, Tania, was enveloped by questions of care. She was observing how family economic struggle, community hardship, and institutional (school) underfunding were having an impact on the mental health and well-being of her students: They are very stressed about everything. They have their own stress about the way the education system is, and then they have the stress of their, uh, families, they’re always – and the, and the media, of course. Every day is a big disaster in Athens, in ah, Greece. I don’t know how we are surviving, you know … In the beginning it was very different, very difficult. The children were very stressed. They could not focus in the beginning five years ago. It was really

tania: 



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bad … and the children – five years ago, seven years ago now, it’s been too long, we didn’t have so cold in the, in the building. Now, it’s a little bit better. In the beginning, no, no, not at all. Because everyone was like, “I’m not spending anything because I don’t know what will come next day,” and everyone was ah, freeze, ah, frozen about everything. And the children, ah, some of them that didn’t have to eat, we could see that – we tried to, we trying to have, and this area is not bad area. There were children in other areas of Athens that were fainting – of ah, hunger. One of the important things we learned in Greece, then, was that giving and receiving care could not be easily separated; care is relational, often spontaneous and uncalculated. Whether it was teachers or students or parents, there was a mutuality to the care, just as our quantitative study uncovered. Tania was volunteering after school hours for no extra pay or professional credit because she was also being cared for by her students. She felt useful in her acts of caregiving and saw herself as doing something extremely important in a time of crisis. The students knew they were caring for their teacher and for each other, and even caring for their parents, when they achieved or were joyful despite their circumstances. The parents supported these students in their drama club, even though it is an unrecognized subject in the Greek education system. The care circulated and begot more care. It was a kind of cultural citizenship that few Greeks could enact in the larger context of austerity and crisis. It was a haven. The parents of the students brought delicious home-cooked food to the school every day we were there, for us – the researchers – as an act of care, philotimo. Michael Weinman (2018) takes up Arendt’s argument in Origins and offers a new conception of norms that, he argues, better form the basis of one’s rightful expectations of membership and hospitality, offering that membership and expectations of hospitality ought not to be based on either a nationality or humanity but rather on political personhood as such. In his work, he defines “political personhood” as a way to “­untie the “Gordian Knot” of “man and citizen” that Arendt identified in ­Origins, which still torments and befuddles the theory and, more importantly, the practice of human rights adjudication for “others” (p. 133). Weinman writes: “Whatever the express provisions that a n ­ ation’s existing law or constitution might have regarding minority rights, the practice of de facto statelessness voids whatever legal responsibility the state contracts itself to in their regard and thus delegitimizes the expectations for even the most basic recognition those minorities, now effectively stateless, have” (p. 135). Weinman is creating an argument

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for political personhood, rather than legal personhood or humanity, as the normative and practical basis of the legitimate expectation for recognition. He offers a persuasive argument for how legitimacy of expectations held by vulnerable persons (non-citizens of various kinds) is to pay attention to these justice criteria, which in turn requires attending to the political and not merely the legal aspect of personhood. Next, I attend to what was learned about “political personhood” in India, a political personhood that impressively grew from a context of care, solidarity, and drama. Lucknow, India A Workshop in Care arzu:  A girl

had come to get water. My uncle was having a bath and he said that she should only leave with an empty bucket, so he took her bucket and threw it into the lake. And he raised his hand as if to strike her. And because I was standing there and I said, “If I make the call, you can go to jail!” The other ladies then started to say that she [the girl looking for water] comes every morning and takes buckets, and that she shouldn’t come here to do that! I said, “Pick-up the bucket, or I call the police! Remove the bucket and give it to her! And in so far that this is a government tap, then as much it is your right, then it is hers.” He said, “It is on my land.” I said, “It is not yours. The land is the government’s and here, everyone can fill water. It doesn’t hurt you. She eats and works nicely like you. She is just not like you. That’s the problem.” Then, the elders felt bad [for him] and got angry at me saying, “She’s so small and she’s talking to her uncle like this! You’re just a girl and you dare to speak to your uncle like this!” They got very angry. Then, he lifted up the bucket and gave it to her. I took the phone and stood there until he did. (Interview with Arzu and Nita, sisters and Prerna Alumni, 4 April 2016; translated by Urvashi Sahni) Misfit Citizenship and Political Personhood in India: A Methodology of Critical Dialogue and Rehearsed Futurity

Recognizing the prevalence of inequality in so-called shared humanity, especially for minoritized and/or marginalized people, Weinman (2018) introduces political personhood as conceptually distinct from human beings as members of a “kind” or species; political personhood, he contends, is rather “participants in collective practices of meaning-making action, even if such participation has been disrupted



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Figure 6.  Images in Lucknow

or abrogated” (p. 128). What is particularly key in this view for our discoveries in Lucknow is that, whereas legal personhood rests on the granting of legitimation by an institution, political personhood begins with “the seizure of legitimation by individual human beings who, whatever their legal status, demand access to what Arendt ... dubs ‘the space of appearance’”(p. 128, emphasis in original). Patriarchy, our collaborator Urvashi Sahni argues, is the single greatest threat to girls and women in India across class and caste. Her struggle, then, is against patriarchy in all its manifestations and structures. But patriarchy is not a monolith, and as I write about the work of my Indian collaborator, the reader should be wary of any totalizing concepts and the impulse to see the struggles of Indian women and girls as detached from the history of colonialism. We are well reminded by Maitrayee Chaudhuri (2012) that “colonial rule, the humiliation of the subject population, the impact of Western education, the role of ­Christian missionaries, growth of an English-speaking Indian middle class all led to an intense and contested debate of the women’s question

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in the public sphere” (pp. 23–4). It requires, Urvashi insists, naming these often-horrific manifestations of patriarchy fearlessly yet still to equally draw from what Tara Yosso (2005) has referred to as “community cultural wealth.” In India, girls are not equal persons, not equal members of humanity, but through their activist and theatre education, the young women we met demand the “space of appearance” as a way to claim and act from their full personhood. The pedagogy of this work is explicitly political, and in the context of Gomti Nagar, it is also dangerous work. Urvashi Sahni (2017) writes in her book on this extraordinary experiment of daring education for girls: Prerna School has constructed a strong network of supportive relationships, between the teachers and students, amongst student peers and between the school and the community. Teachers are mentored and trained to take a gender perspective and to be caring and sensitive of the students’ needs and home backgrounds … Similarly, the teachers feel equally cared for, respected and responded to by a supportive, sympathetic, nurturing, consultative school leadership. Together they have turned the school into a universe of care. (p. 219)

Because the students use drama as a mode of working in all their classes, they have a beautiful familiarity and ease with the language of theatre and take an obvious pleasure in “make-believe,” in creating fictions and exploring and rehearsing different roles. In March–April 2015, fourteen Prerna girls used verbatim theatre to create and perform the play Izzat (meaning “Honour” in Hindi/Urdu/Sanskrit languages). In this work, they were exploring the ways in which their gendered identity and control over their rights and freedoms was taken by others through forced marriage, which Urvashi calls “slavery” for these lowest caste girls, arguing that the term “marriage” dignifies a practice that is, according to her, nothing more than imprisonment and rape for so many girls. In 2016, Urvashi wrote: Girls in India are unwanted, unequal and unsafe. Every year a million of them are killed in the womb. One third of the world’s child brides (read girl slaves) are in India. They live their lives in a grim, complex context where gender, poverty and caste intersect. They face domestic violence and sexual abuse regularly. Many of them are forced into child labour at home and outside. (Sahni, 2016, p. 134)

The Toronto team, while there in March 2016, took the opportunity to engage with the girls in role, inviting them to help us understand how girls’ bodies and personhood are repressed by the forces of patriarchy.



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Figure 7.  Prerna girls in role as their oppressors (Lucknow, India)

We watched a large group of grade 7/8 girls (twelve to fourteen years old) jump into role, playing their “oppressors” with glee and a startling accuracy, and then taking on their heroes, women who speak out against such practices, like Urvashi herself. In role, they resisted and spoke politically charged ideas. The students’ development work on Izzat included improvisational scenes that were shared with us via video prior to our arrival. In that

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Figure 8.  Performance of Izzat (Lucknow, India)

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video, we saw how the groundwork is laid for seizing legitimation. ­ Urvashi asked them to put forward definitions of “honour” from their social contexts, their lives, which included realities like not speaking to boys or not going out unless to work, while their brothers enjoyed all the freedoms of childhood. Then, she asked them to step into role and play themselves and talk back to these social norms, “Ok … so talk back to the community and tell them how you feel and what you think about their norms for honour”:

Honour! Honour! Honour! Do I have no desires? What about those? Why can’t I own them and [name] someone I love? dubey:  What is honour? When you are drunk and abusive, how come you don’t lose your honour? And if I so much as speak to a boy, who is just my friend, we all lose our honour? moni:  Should I be looking at my own house and life or thinking about the whole community? When I want to do something for myself according to my own wishes, they tell me it’s dishonourable. This is absolutely wrong thinking!! rama:  When a girl fights for her own rights then everyone’s honour is lost. Why is everyone’s honour linked with us, girls only? (Translated by Urvashi Sahni) preeti: 

In a context such as Prerna, the girls could loudly speak their indignation. They could, as Urvashi often said, “use drama to perform things they cannot speak.” And she knows that the pedagogy is working when the students demand care because they feel entitled to it. U ­ rvashi and I have elsewhere elaborated on this drama pedagogy as one that is ­interested in creating a kind of “misfit citizenship”: They used drama to embody and re-imagine their lives as fully ­entitled and autonomous beings. Ahmed ... also speaks about “alternative f­ utures” when “alienation is a burning presence” where “revolutionary consciousness” springs from an estrangement from the world as it has been given. This is the experience of the Prerna School girls in becoming misfits in the world as it has been given; they cannot “adjust to the world,” as Ahmed says. The Prerna School girls quite literally acted out what it is to be a misfit in their environments, to be i­ ll-fitting in their own culture in order to transform it …



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­ rerna School’s manufacturing of “misfit citizenship” ruptures most tradiP tional notions of civic engagement and it accomplishes this re-definition or new imaginary through a robust praxis of Freirean-like dialogic education – to name and dismantle structural inequalities – and then to playfully but honestly embody alternatives in the ­interest of producing and inhabiting a different reality. This often-intimate performance work is further housed within a school philosophy, and set of governance, pedagogical and administrative structures, that privilege the autonomy and rights of every child … The real lesson to be learned from the performance work at Prerna School, then, is the profound value placed on the imagination and on the fearless resistance of life-limiting circumstances in the service of imagining a new social order within a “universe of care.” (­Gallagher & Sahni, 2019, p. 12)

What is critical to understanding this expression of “misfit citizenship” or “political personhood,” as Weinman (2018) would have it, is its collective expression. In his paper “Acting Together: Ensemble as a Democratic Process in Art and Life,” Neelands (2009) argues persuasively for the pedagogy of the ensemble in drama as a rehearsal for participation in broader democratic processes. It is a creative process in which the play-building, or creative process work, is undertaken by the collective, and decisions are debated through a process of consensus-building. This kind of consensus-building or collective creation, in the context of Prerna, uses Freirean-style dialogue to name realities in order to transform them. While we watched the girls work, we were sure we were observing a powerful kind of sisterhood, born of the hard-earned, courageous, embodied, and dialogic power of drama in all its forms. This observation was in line with our quantitative findings that unearthed from the youth an understanding of care as responsibility to others. Nita and Arzu, whom we interviewed while we were in Lucknow in 2016, were sisters and both graduates of Prerna. Nita had applied to law school at the time of our interview, explaining: “So I’m going to do this because I feel there’s lots of people who suffer lots of injustice, and there’s nobody, it’s very expensive. Legal action is very expensive! So, I would like to take up law and help people.” The two young women gave us clear insight into how the school’s pedagogy connected with their lives, how the dialogic methods were giving voice to often unspeakable but shared experiences of girls, and how this work fueled the performance work that had the larger mission of educating their families and communities. C ­ ommunity and public pedagogy is an e­ xplicit goal of the school, and the girls form activist groups to engage their families and to take their ­demands to the streets. “Theatre occupies a significant place in any revolutionary

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political strategy that has as its objective a radical transformation of society … Street theatre as a cultural artefact offers space for a democratic discourse in ­order to create an active public sphere in the corresponding society,” writes Adakkaravayalil Yoyakky Eldhose (2014, p. 340). Pedagogically, the critical dialogues are central to the creation of the theatre pieces and also to the public pedagogy and dialogue with their communities. from Hindi) In critical dialogues, the problems that the kids have, whichever topic is taken, it is discussed, a play is developed, so that they can understand what their problems are. The children, they face things, but they can’t connect what they face. But when we open these issues in class and discuss them, then they realize that, “Oh! These are the problems that also occur [for others]!” So then, the issues come out, the worries and troubles and challenges come out about how we can fight them. Critical dialogues enable us to know life challenges and how to fight them! nita :  In my opinion, critical dialogues are when – for every issue, there isn’t a chance to speak one on one with everyone. But sitting as a group, together, with a particular – in our lives, we have a lot of problems – so taking one problem and talking about it, and in doing so, we learn a lot of new things that come out. And for a lot of people, they have never known about these new things. And sometimes even we learn about what happens with each other. I teach them a few things and they teach me a few things. arzu : (translated

I asked Nita when she felt most hopeful, and she said: “When we were doing Izzat, there too we discussed many things. And so that’s where you learn as you discuss these things. So that’s when I feel most hopeful – when I’m learning!” Arzu wanted to be a teacher so she could work at Prerna (she would not be the first Prerna graduate to return as a teacher). When I asked her what might get in the way of her hope and the realization of her dreams, she said: from Hindi) The biggest factor is money. And with family, from everyone, my father can be the problem! urvashi:  But then dad has now become okay, right? arzu:  Yes, he’s been okay but from time to time, his inner animal is awakened. urvashi:  Is awakened, and…? arzu: (translated



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The day before yesterday, he was saying, “Take all of your computers away from this place, I won’t allow you to keep it here!” Then, I removed it, because I felt it was okay, he can be like that and it isn’t worth it. Mummy was angry at him. And I told her, “Leave it, it’s not worth it!” I say something, and he gets quiet, and on his own, he comes around. So Auntie, he can be a hurdle. Besides that, no one can stop me. Even he can’t stop me, whatever happens. Whatever I want to do, I will do. urvashi:  For teaching, why do you need money for teaching? Teaching will actually earn you money, no? arzu:  Yes, Auntie. I will earn from teaching, but Auntie, I have family as well and I have to look out for them. urvashi:  So, you have to look out for them. Okay! (To Arzu) You got a computer? arzu:  Yes, Auntie! urvashi:  And I think you’ve put money towards a plot [of land], right? arzu:  Yes, Auntie! urvashi:  How much have you put down? arzu:  Auntie, 50,000 rupees [approx. CAN$1,000] urvashi:  Already put down? And anything has happened on it? arzu:  For now, no. The government has put down a fence around it. It took approximately 6,000–7,000 rupees to build that. urvashi:  Okay, Nita is saying that “money is my worry too because now I’m going to study law!” So I said, “Hey! You’ve forgotten that you’re getting that scholarship!” She said, “Yeah I forgot!” She had forgotten! kathleen:  What scholarship? urvashi:  I give them a scholarship when they finish their undergraduate degree. If they are applying for a master’s [program], we give them 20,000 rupees each. arzu: 

There is every expectation that Prerna girls will complete high school, attain an undergraduate degree, and go on to complete a master’s ­degree. The majority of graduates manage, against enormous odds, to follow this path. It is nothing short of astonishing. I conclude our interview by asking the girls what their hope is for girls and women in India: Freedom. Education. Empowerment! I wish that all of India’s women, not just India, but from wherever they might be, that they may be free from

nita: 

arzu: 

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injustice, that they need to live with their rights, know what those rights are, and how they can get them. (Interview with Arzu and Nita, 4 April 2016; translated from Hindi by Urvashi Sahni) In fact, a group, founded by the Prerna girls themselves, Veerangana, meaning “women’s empowerment,” has produced street plays to accompany community education campaigns about the rights of women and girls to live free of domestic abuse and child marriage. Here, political philosopher Jayne Waterworth’s (2004) conception of hope makes much sense. She writes: “Hope is built into the very structure of agency” (p. 74). In this way, hope is tied to action. We saw this concept made manifest with the girls at Prerna and in the other sites too. ­Further, Weinman’s (2018) argument for political personhood is c­ ritical to the mission and success of Prerna, as they use the pedagogies of ­theatre and performance and “creative resilience” (see Gallagher et al., 2017) to demand legitimation: We use Critical Feminist Pedagogy at Prerna Girls School to enable girls to take a feminist stance in their lives. It helps them to discover who they are, to understand the oppression they face every day and develop a deeper understanding of this subordination. Critical Feminist Pedagogy equips them to face the challenges that life is going to throw at them just because they are girls. It attempts to enable the girls to resist discrimination and rise above it. Prerna Girls School has built a curriculum around Critical Feminist Pedagogy that uses multimodal tools such as critical dialogues, drama, digital stories and, music. (Study Hall Educational Foundation [n.d.])

As I have elsewhere argued (see Gallagher, 2017), the temporary present of theatre-making holds in it great potential for bringing ­together creative imagining with political intervention. First, the temporary present of their ensemble – theatrically devising the telling of a personal story – fixes its eye on a different social order that could only be dreamed in the first instance because of the pedagogy of critical dialogues that the young women and their teachers engage in. Then, they use their bodies to naturalize new modes of being and relating, and new relationships to space and to each other. Finally, they turn their activist art into public education for their communities. It is a model I have not seen realized in any other place in the world and particularly within such extreme conditions of oppression. The pressure for these young girls to marry very young and work as domestic servants is unrelenting. It is a reality that could not be overcome without the



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community support, the political consciousness, the seizing of legitimacy, and the practice of radical hope that this project sought to better understand. Hope, then, for many of these Prerna students is a radical one that is lived in the present moment. Hope, for them and for many other young people across the globe, is also a daily negotiation. When we found ourselves in a community-based youth theatre-making space in Coventry, England, during the week of the Brexit referendum in the spring of 2016, we received another education in radical hope – hope in the context of adult abnegation of leadership and care – that would become an exemplary case study in the radical possibilities of theatre, adult allyship, and the creative activism of youth.

5 The Qualitative Landscape: Hope, Performance Pedagogies, and Democratic Citizenship

The theatre is not a disseminator of hope, but a provider of versions. – Howard Barker (1989), p. 45

Coventry, England A Museum of Living Stories Scene 2: The chorus use the objects on the stage to tell the audience about the story of Truth and Story. A long time ago in a country far away from here, there was a village. Overlooking this village, on a hilltop, stood Truth and Story. Truth challenged her friend Story to a contest. “Whoever is made the most welcome in this village will win.” Story agreed, and off they both went. Now Story was big and bold and beautiful, and she wore the most ­exquisite cloak made from all of the finest threads from across the lands. When the villagers met her, they welcomed her into their homes and fed her their delicious food and wines. She kept them company for hours by their firesides. So much so, in fact, that she had forgotten about her friend Truth. She went out into the village to search for her. The villagers ­followed Story, beckoning her back into their homes. “My dear friends,” she said, “I will join you shortly but I must find my friend Truth.” She noticed how the villagers started to dart glances at each other, but she carried on searching for her friend, until finally, she saw a figure shivering and alone under a huge oak tree. “Truth!” she exclaimed. With that, each of the villagers scurried back into their homes, closing their doors and windows.



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Figure 9.  Images in Coventry

“My dear Truth, whatever has happened to you?” Story asked. “Why is it that no one will welcome me into their houses?” sobbed Truth. “Nobody wants me!” Now, Truth looked desperate. She was naked, and her hair had grown wild. Taking pity on her, Story had an idea. That night, when Story was sat beside the villagers in their homes, she slipped Truth under her magnificent cloak and fed her the morsels of food. And so, it was said that, from that night onwards, for Truth to be heard, she had to be cloaked in Story. (Scene excerpt from Canley Youth Theatre’s oral history performance script: A Museum of Living Stories).

A Workshop in Hope Hope is the crack in the present through which a future can be glimpsed. – Terry Eagleton (2015), p. 44

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canley youth theatre’s missive to the world – listen There was something about our experience of being with the C ­ anley youth, social worker (Angela Evans), Belgrade theatre director (­Jouvan Fuccini), Warwick graduate students, and researcher (Rachel ­Turner-King) that now, in the midst of the COVID-19 global health pandemic, makes a powerful kind of sense. Our Toronto team of ­ ­researchers felt confounded, often, during our time in Coventry, wrestling with the depth and power of the hope we were witnessing and feeling every day in a small theatre studio. Writing recently on the global health crisis, Vafa Ghazavi shed some light on aspects of our experience with the Canley youth and their theatrical storytelling. In a blog for the Hedgehog Review out of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, he wrote:

Ultimately, there are two kind of moral work to be done. One is to identify the excellences of the new, post-crisis world, and the second is to urgently make these real, to give them not only a conceptual meaning but practical ones. Neither task can be left to an elite cadre of moral visionaries, public leaders, and the like, but must spring from ordinary people, in their everyday lives and commitments. A moment of collective crisis calls on each of us to become moral visionaries: to create a world we do not yet know and cannot describe. (Ghazavi, 2020; emphasis in original)

We had to check ourselves often, worried that we were romanticizing the brilliance and creative playfulness of this group of young people. How, in the midst of what could only have felt like a cultural collapse of the world as they knew it, did they tap into their capacity to listen to one another with care and to fiercely and collectively create another vision of the world as they would wish it to be? It is because they were “ordinary people” practising hope and practising their commitments to a better and safer world. The one they were experiencing looked nothing like the one they were imagining. They had been exposed to the terrible and divisive rhetoric of the Brexit campaign, a propaganda campaign of lies. And somehow, even as many faced new or worsened vulnerabilities, they created an imagined world they “did not yet know and [could not] describe.” Instead, they built it. With one another. To share with their communities. How does one practise hope? How did hope manifest in this particular community? It was apparent in the ways in which they paid attention, how they listened, how they brought their cares and vulnerabilities into the room, how they fortified each other when that was needed, and how they built an ensemble from which to create. The



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oral history performance work that we were watching in rehearsal and then in performance the week we were with them surfaced for me an idea about the careful pedagogy I was witnessing, a pedagogy led by the researcher and artist adult leaders but also by the youth. At the time, I called it a “pedagogy of the invitation.” The oral history work invited the young people to bring personal objects into the space and to share with one another the very personal stories that were contained in those objects. We proceeded from the work of our Taiwanese collaborator, Wan-Jung Wang, who brought her oral history performance practice to the larger group. Each of the genres of theatre-­ making (verbatim, oral history performance, and devising/ensemble) used across the five sites was led by one of our international research collaborators. Dr. Wan-Jung Wang, our collaborator in Taiwan, coordinated the curriculum materials on oral history performance that were shared with all sites and adapted by the local practitioners. Oral ­history performance involves working with material taken from the creators’ lives, often inspired from material objects. The “creative circle” is a critical pedagogical tool for sharing this material. According to Wang (2010, p. 566), this way of working is “a strong aesthetic practice that creates a community of learning” and, from my observations, recognizes the value of listening and dialogue. Wang maintains that “the question and answer process sustains the interview quality of oral history and maintains the dialogical and collaborative aspect of the creative process … an important measure for countering triviality [and] for exploring the story’s more minute and meaningful details” (pp. 568–9). The dialogic creative circle also invites an active presence, to share and receive stories. Creative pieces are then built, individually and collectively, from this sharing, and that is how A Museum of Living Stories came to be. In Coventry, their theatre-making process occurred over ten weeks. One of the techniques used to prompt a deeper thinking about memory, place, and identity was the use of “story-sharing” – a kind of sharing circle that began each week’s session with the group of “memory-makers.” Here, each of the participants in the circle would share something about themselves from the past week. It could be something they did, an interaction with someone, or something they were thinking about. This story-sharing process proved to be pivotal because it helped the group rehearse “acts of listening, absorbing other perspectives, and ­being open and curious about ‘the other’” (King & Clemson, 2015, p. 120; see also Greig, 2008). What is important to understand about the youths’ capacity to listen was that it was an embodied practice; they listened in a full-bodied

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way. Rawlins (2003) captures well the “active passivity” and the gravity of listening: Hearing others is not a passive enactment of being-in-conversation. ­Hearing voices, it says something about you that is critical. It identifies you as someone who has postponed speaking, someone who is reserving and respecting the space of talk for (an)other. It announces you as someone ­potentially open to the other’s voice, at least in this moment when he/she is speaking. Listening in this way is a committed, active passivity. It is an opening in practice, conscientious listening … Even so, this speaking constituted by your listening matters only if you actually do hear, only if you allow the other person’s voice and stories to reach you, to change you. For if you really hear what the other is saying, you cannot remain the same. You are not the same. Something of value has been shared with you. Hearing the other’s words, stories, concerns, and particulars tells you this. (p. 122)

At the first meeting of the group following the success of the “leave” vote, the adult facilitators were very worried about how to facilitate the session, not knowing how the young people might be feeling. Rachel was labouring over how to lead sensitively. The young people came into the room and clearly wanted to talk. Max led off the conversation: Um, so Saturday, most of the morning, well no, yesterday, yesterday I had a day off which was amazing so I, most of the time I just, I was staying in bed and I completely forgot about the EU thing and then my Mom came in and she was like, “Bad news,” and I was like, “Ok we’re leaving the EU,” and she was like, “Yeah.” And then, like, for about an hour, I watched the stream of the BBC news talking about it on my phone and yeah, because I was really into that because my Dad works for Jaguar/Land Rover which obviously – rachel:  I was going to ask you about that. That they were for remain right? max: Yeah. kathleen:  What is that? rachel:  Jaguar/Land Rover is a huge car plant, and Max’s Dad is an engineer for that. So it’s – max:  And they would be, it could be that, we don’t know yet, the possibility that they, I don’t know, move to a different country. Dad would like either change job or stay with them and we move or something like that. kathleen:  Oh wow. max: 



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It’s ... yeah. We haven’t put that out there in the room but since seeing you on Tuesday, you know, the world has shifted quite a lot. Just give me a sense as to, you know Max, that’s obviously a big thing for you because it’s so close, it’s with your Dad. How about the rest of you? Have you been listening to, hearing about – How are we feeling about it? Just give me a sense.

rachel: 

(Murmuring around the room.) I don’t know too much on the issue, I only know a little bit but I, since I heard about the referendum, I thought it was a bad idea ’cause I definitely don’t think we should be leaving. I think it’s like, another form of separation which just shouldn’t be happening in the world as a whole. And I think if there was even really a need for a referendum, there’d be one to support the people calling for a referendum in the first place. Except we have this really close vote and I wasn’t even expecting there to be a referendum. I didn’t see the point. It’s happened now so we need to move on and try to make the best of the situation and just carry on with our lives. … rachel: Ophelia? ophelia: What? john:  Did you want to say something? neena:  You voted leave? ophelia:  Yeah, I voted leave. rachel:  Can you vote? ophelia:  No, no. I mean like we did it at school and I said “leave.” Loads of people in our school said leave. john:  Can we just hear your opinion why? Though there’s no problem – ophelia:  Yeah, I don’t know, ’cause I just thought, like, it’s a change and I don’t know what’s gonna happen so I just, my Mom and Dad voted “leave.” I saw what they were voting for so I just sort of thought I’d follow them, trusting them. Like if I do it, it’s not really gonna – my vote won’t be counted anyway but I just voted “leave” because I’m at quite a young age and it’s gonna take time anyway so I thought by the time we, like, by the time it’s all getting sorted out, I’d be like at university, so I’ll be like not even at that bit yet. So, I just voted leave to see what’s gonna happen ’cause I’m quite young yet so it might already be sorted out by the time where I can actually get a job and that so I just voted “leave.” rachel:  Let’s hope so. john: 

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ophelia: 

…

Yeah. (Brushes hair from her forehead in seeming relief.)

I took part in this, like there’s a petition on the internet to say that we should host, England should just host another referendum and see how it goes there. There’s like a massive, yeah, petition online with like loads of people signing it, saying that we could hold another thing [referendum]. rachel:  Another one? max:  And this time not have the politicians like say, try and like, manipulate, not really manipulate us but tell us what to vote. Choose what we want to do or maybe just get all the politicians in the EU, have them all sit down, could be tea and biscuits – to discuss it nicely. max: 

(Cheering and laughter. Max and Ophelia fist bump in agreement.) Ok, they sat down with their tea and biscuits. What do you want to happen? max:  Just them to discuss it and just have a vote with them. Why couldn’t it stay the same in the first place? What caused, why did we need to have it in the first place? I mean things were fine as they were. rachel:  I think there was a, there’s been a lot about, you know, when you vote, when you participate in a democracy, you have choices don’t you? And the only two choices we had here were “remain” and then “out.” … And I’ll tell you this as well. The other stat, statistic is that the young people who could vote, so eighteen to twenty-five, that group of people, they were the highest proportion of people who wanted to remain. jouvan:  Seventy-five percent. john:  But I think it’s, me and Luke were discussing this at lunch, but it’s those people who will be living in this future, those people who will be working in this future so it’s their opinions that should definitely matter the most. jouvan:  New system: two points the younger you are. luke:  I think that sixteen and older should have voted because if we’re not actually gonna leave the EU till 2018 or something, I’ll be over eighteen by then. (Story share circle, 25 June 2016) rachel: 



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When reviewing the video of this “story share” circle at the opening of the session with the Canley youth, I could not help but be impressed by where the young people took the discussion. Prior to the meeting, R ­ achel had spoken with me about her concern regarding how to sensitively ­facilitate the first day back together after their immediate world had so completely changed. I told Rachel that I thought the youth would take it where they needed it to be. We had probably assumed there would be general support for the “remain” vote and most would be disappointed by the outcome. But that was speculation and maybe projection, given that all the adults involved with the program had voted to remain in the European Union. Max was not joking when he suggested that the politicians might “sit down, could be tea and biscuits – to discuss it nicely.” It is not only what he thought could have happened but what should have happened. Cutting through the fierce divisions of the campaign, Max thought the politicians just needed to listen to one another. And when Ophelia shared that she had voted to leave in a mock referendum at her school, the youth who had already expressed their feelings about wanting to remain, ever so kindly invited her to explain why. They genuinely wanted to understand. They listened as though there was still something to learn. They were u ­ nthreatened by her different views. And the whole event concluded with a fist bump between the boy whose father may lose his job or be moved to Europe and the girl who didn’t quite know why she had voted to leave beyond following in her parents’ footsteps or generally wanting “a change” of no particular description. It was the quality of their listening that revealed the level of care and even hope that we knew we were witnessing. The students who felt strongly about remaining in the European Union opened up space with ease for the voice who admitted to voting to leave. They made space for Ophelia, even when it was very clear that she held a minority position in the room. They “postponed [their own] speaking … reserving and respecting the space of talk for (an)other.” Richard Sennett (2012) argued that certain models of working – an architecture of cooperation – may establish political togetherness in the wider public sphere. He reasoned that the nub of cooperation “is active participation rather than passive presence” (p. 233), and that this demanding sort of cooperation is earned. It was clear to us that the ensemble-building and rehearsal process of the Canley youth had laid the groundwork for complex forms of cooperation that could leave open different views, even when those views had attached to them important real-world consequences. On this most difficult of days, we knew, as researchers and facilitators, that we needed to think about modes of hope and hoping differently (see Hage, 2002). Philosopher Richard Rorty (1999) coined the

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term “social hope.” The Canley youth ensemble in that room was not prepared to easily divide around a most divisive issue. They believed they could create the social conditions under which a more hopeful outcome could be found. American verbatim theatre artist Anna Deavere Smith (2003) wrote: “The theory of the play is that an actor has the ability to walk in another person’s ‘words,’ and therefore in their hearts” (p. 7). The rehearsal process had taught these young people something fundamental about how to give “difference” and divergent views air to breathe in both a creative process and a social one. Drama theorist Baz Kershaw (2007) asserts that drama has the potential to create “currently unimaginable forms of association and action” – “the transcendent sense of the radical” (p. 69, emphasis in original). The story share circle on this warm day in June was a powerful lesson in living hope in the present; indeed Sara Ahmed (2010) argues that hope guides action in the present, in line with Brian Massumi (2002), who argues that a hope of the present actually builds from how we connect with, and care for, others. Fittingly, for political theorists and philosophers Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (2002), the idea of hope is linked to the existence of political alternatives. The youth speaking their dreams constituted, that day, a new mode of hoping, as they opened the floor to debate so that ideas could be understood and questioned. In a conversation with social scientist Mary Zournazi, Mouffe and Laclau (2002) ask what more global notions of hope and human emancipation might be, and what “radicalization” of democracy is necessary in the dimension of politics (p. 122) to realize such emancipation. Philosopher Isabelle Stengers (2002) argued that we become more hopeful when we find solidarity and connection to others, what she imagines as a different kind of ­political ecology, where the “cosmos” becomes a landscape for thinking and feeling – outside of individual ways of seeing the world and in the potential for connecting with others. “This is about an adventure in life and thinking – the events and relationship that could emerge in scientific, cultural and political practices” (p. 244) and, I would add, in creative practices too. In my interview with social worker Angela Evans and youth theatre director Jouvan Fuccini, I came to understand the bigger picture of social services for youth, and particularly “looked after” kids, as well as the landscape of arts funding for the kind of community-based, youth-focused work that Jouvan was involved in. All of this brought much further important context to what was at stake in the Brexit referendum for both the defeated left and the populist right, what Mouffe and Laclau (2002) have called the “economic rationalist forms of capitalism that operate today, and how they produce alienation in both personal and social terms” (p. 122).



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Just coming back to the youth work. We’re not charity but we’re also not statutory, so we’re only in existence in Coventry because the elected politicians and the offices of the council appreciate and value the work that we do with young people and how much money it saves those other departments if we weren’t imposed. But Coventry, without getting political, is currently a labour-controlled council and is fully supportive, but they’ve cut back. When I started all those years ago, there were eighty of us doing the work I do. Eighty! There are sixteen of us left. And we don’t have any less number of youngsters. kathleen:  Maybe more. jouvan:  Definitely more. angela:  We’re all getting older and so that’s Coventry, but in many cities, towns in the country, they’ve just got rid of their youth services because we’re not a statutory service. So, for example, youngsters that are in the care of the Local Authority, “looked after” kids, foster children, kids that are actually involved and their families are involved with social care, social services, that is statutory work. Our budgets aren’t, so they don’t have to have it, is the point I’m making. So, that’s why there’s so much uncertainty. We know they’re supportive of it but it’s constantly, um, being eroded. So yeah, we don’t know do we? jouvan:  No, I think it’s every three or four years we get ... I don’t know if they still call it a National Portfolio Organization but we used to be, if that’s the right word. And we are part of a system where we get money on a four-yearly basis from the arts council. So, we know we have a fairly certain future for that amount of time but I can’t remember when that’s up. I think it might be 2018, that’s the next one, and so the business plan will be looked at and there’ll be conversations about how much money will be available. angela:  And Brexit has changed all of this. jouvan:  Yeah and Brexit. We don’t know. kathleen:  The level of uncertainty seems enormous, unprecedented. jouvan: Massive. angela:  Because the whole leadership and all of that stuff is so unknown. In terms of who is going to take us through all of this, lead us through. jouvan:  And the opportunity to apply for European funding to do projects, which we’ve done. The money to do that will be gone. kathleen:  I was reading about that this morning. There’s been such an influx of money and they’re saying that this is a death that people had not fully anticipated. angela: 

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angela: Contemplated.

That, as well, but what was scary is before the referendum on the Thursday, I saw a TV interview and the guy’s main reason for voting “leave” was the European Union had just spent 14 million on arts and that ... kathleen:  That was appalling to him. jouvan:  That was appalling to him as well. I think, and that’s the government’s saying, it’s consistently said that, um, arts and culture is not um, is not important. jouvan: 

The day of the referendum result, Warwick University – where we were lodging – had its “Open Day,” a day where students in their last year of secondary school, sometimes with their parents, visit the campus to assess it as a possible destination for tertiary study. Andrew, our playwright collaborator, decided on this day that he wanted to go out onto the campus and interview some of these campus visitors to get the “general public” to weigh in on the result. Over the course of several hours, Andrew conducted nearly thirty interviews around the Student Union building. He would approach people and say: “Hi, I’m a playwright from Canada, and I’m speaking to people on campus about the referendum result. Can I speak with you for a few minutes?” He found that people wanted to talk. He spoke to nearly thirty people, mostly youth, some parents. He called it mainly a portrait of grief, uncertainty, shame, bafflement. “So how are you feeling?” he would start. Andrew told us: “There is a special sting in hearing a young person say, in response to the question, ‘Gutted. I feel gutted, actually.’” Towards the end of the day, Andrew spotted an unusual couple, a man likely in his fifties and a boy of seventeen. He recalled the older gentleman as being red in the face, wearing a puffy vest with no shirt underneath, holding an open beer in his hand, and possessing a dog – a Shih Tzu – tied with a rope to his ankle: Hey gents, I’m a playwright in from Canada, and I’ve been interviewing people in this square over the past few days about, uh, the political events in your country, and I was wondering if I could speak to both of you about – older man:  We were talkin’ about it! (laughs) andrew:  So, how are you both feeling today? older man:  I’m fuckin’ happy. I’m celebratin’! andrew:  You are? older man: Yeah. andrew:  Ok, why? older man:  Because, eh, it affects all the, all the cuts and all that, that David Cameron has brought in over the years, students, making andrew: 



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them pay to study and all that. Police forces, you name it, cuts, cuts, cuts. And then he asked us to stay in the EU! ... I’ll grab his gun and I’m willing to see Boris Johnson take over. andrew:  Where’s your head at today? young man:  I’m quite the opposite. older man: (laughs) young man:  I’m distraught, basically, at how it’s turned out. I’m ashamed that our country is so arrogant to think that we can survive without the EU. Look, the pound has dropped by so much in one day, I don’t see a positive side. Investment’s gone, our currency is gone, you know, our government is now in tatters, with David Cameron leaving. I think that what’s happening with leaving the EU, it’s just complicated. Something’s going to have to be done about it, there’ll be a new prime minister, it’s going to be someone that is going in favour of leaving the EU, but I don’t think that anyone is actually really qualified to deal with this. I think it was much safer to stay in the EU when we knew it was working, rather than face the unknown. When Andrew asked the younger man about whether seventeenyear-olds know enough to make this sort of huge decision, he r­ eplied: “Some of us do, some of us don’t. But you know what? I don’t see how adults are any different.” The older man was most concerned about all the cuts, calling Cameron a “bully.” He wanted to stop all the cuts, and this vote seemed to be the one kind of control he felt he had over that. As he explained to Andrew, “I’m the lowest rung on the ladder. Any lower and I’d be homeless.” Andrew asked him finally, “Did you vote with your anger?” “I did,” he said. A Pedagogy of Hope The hope we saw arise in large and small ways while observing the work of the Canley youth, and while reviewing those micro-moments much later on video, continued to flesh out Mouffe and Laclau’s (2002) idea of the “radicalization of democracy.” But it also made the very idea of democracy a deeply personally embedded one. The oral history performance of the youth, as I have explained, came from personal objects they brought in to share with one other and to surface an important memory. Their play was then built upon the pillars of those memories that the youth had shared. Bruce, one of the young men who was one of Angela’s “lads in care,” brought in a Nintendo DS as his prized object. Rachel confessed to us that initially she’d found a games console a disappointing choice and wondered why Bruce had not brought in

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something more significant. She realized, when he shared his story, how wrong she had been. The Nintendo DS was something very meaningful, everyone could feel that, and it became a central and evocative scene in their Museum of Living Stories: bruce’s nintendo

He sits in the spot closest to the audience. He is possibly sitting in the audience. He looks like he’s Figure 10.  Bruce being just playing the Nintendo, but he then tells his lifted in A Museum of story. Living Stories (Coventry, This is my Nintendo DS. I got it in 2011 England) about three months after I went into care. It’s cool because lots of people pooled together to get it. I took loads of pictures on it. I like to look back at them as memories because … they are pictures of someone out there I don’t see anymore, some people, memories, places, and stuff, like an archive of memories. Through Year 6 and Year 7, I was getting bullied in school because I was taken into care. I started to do like dance and drama to build my confidence to help ­myself. I had councillors that I confided in … We played games and talked … I didn’t feel embarrassed anymore to say I’m a foster child. Did you know that in dance there’s this move that you do where you can like, lift people over your shoulders? With that, the group lift Bruce up and carry him. As they do, Ben starts playing “To Build a Home.” The chorus join in. Blackout...

This is the richest example I have seen of Rancière’s (2011) idea that theatre embodies the “living community” as opposed to “the illusion of mimesis.” It is, as he goes on to say, a form of “aesthetic constitution” of the community and “the body in action as opposed to a mere apparatus of laws” (p. 6). Shortly after our time in Coventry, the cuts to social services and arts programming hit hard. In fact, the youth theatre group held at the Xcel Leisure Centre each week was set for closure, and ­Angela’s job and her whole organization were also poised to be cut. When Bruce came to understand what was unfolding, he used all that he had gleaned from his collaborative theatre group, where he had managed his insecurity like he never before had, where he had learned so much about how to listen, how to give and receive care from others, how to create as an ensemble, and he turned his anger and outrage towards activism.



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bruce’s letter to mp jim cunningham

Jim Cunningham MP, House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA

20th October 2017

Dear Mr. Jim Cunningham MP, Subject: My views on the Coventry City Council Proposals to cut Youth Services I write to you to ask for your urgent support in opposing the proposed cuts to Youth Services across the city of Coventry. I am a participant in the Canley Youth Theatre (a partnership between The Belgrade Youth Theatre and Youth Services) and a regular user of the Canley Youth Services at the Xcel Leisure Centre. The proposed cuts will mean that this service in Canley will cease to exist. This youth service offers support for vulnerable children, just like me, through the workshops or evening youth club sessions, to help the troubled or conflicted children socialise and express how they’re feeling in a positive way. My confidence has grown so much since I started there over a year ago. When this news was announced, in July, I was devastated. My Nan showed me the story reported in the Coventry Telegraph. I couldn’t believe it. By the next week, I set up a petition on Change.Org. Please see here: https://www.change.org/p/coventry-city-council-stop-coventry -youth-centres-from-being-closed-down-and-turned-into-family-hubs As you will see, this matters to me and my friends so much. Cutting and destroying such provisions is an unwise thing to do because it will restrict our social development skills and remove environments where we feel safe and can have fun in a judgement-free zone. If youth provisions are cut, how will we continue to grow and develop into the best versions of ourselves? How will we ever learn to be both individuals and team players? Where will we go to make friends, learn new skills, try things we’d never before dreamed of doing? Imagine if this was you: youth clubs that you love and attend every week crippled and destroyed in the blink of an eye. The current proposals to create Family Hubs will mean that there is only funding for 1-to-1 sessions with “vulnerable” children. These sessions will make them feel more vulnerable because they’ll be excluded and singled out from kids they could potentially get along with. Where

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is the evidence to say this will help them? Isolation c­ annot help troubled kids. They need to release their problems by being able to have fun instead of sitting in an intimidating office being asked ­personal questions. Given what we could lose here, surely you must begin to imagine how short sighted these cuts seem. Please: look at your community, look at Canley and the rest of the city. Remind yourselves of some of the amazing activities and projects that have happened because of these provisions. Please do what you can as my MP to convince the Government and the Council that this will cause a domino effect on the entire community. Coventry is applying to be the City of Culture in 2021. What culture will be left in 2021 if such provisions for young people like me are ­removed in 2017? I understand that the people making these cuts have very difficult decisions to deal with but these particular cuts should be seen as unthinkable. Thank you for your time. Yours sincerely, Bruce (If you wish to contact me to discuss further opinions or details I will be delighted to hear any form of response, just shoot me an email at [email address]. Thank you for taking your time to read this. I hope you have realised how these cuts will affect someone like me.) The letter got Bruce an invitation to Downing Street. Bruce was working on his rightful inheritance of a democracy-to-come. He was taking civic responsibility seriously and forcing it to live up to its promise. Nick Couldry (2010), a scholar of media and communications, positions voice as a value, moving beyond giving an “account of oneself” and towards a mechanism to be used to advocate for certain social norms that push back against the dominant discriminating structures of contemporary life. In March 2017, when I was in Switzerland, I received an email from Rachel in Coventry. She began: As you know, there have been several “consultations” with Youth Services users since the proposed cuts were announced last July. Bruce has been front and centre of the youth forum campaign. We have written letters to his local MP (please find letter and responses attached). Alongside this, he has been part of a silent protest walk around the city. Two weeks ago, he was invited to speak at a cabinet meeting in Coventry Council. This was because his petition has gained over 800 signatures. I wasn’t able to attend the meeting but Angela told me that he did a brilliant speech saying that “he is a better human being as a result of his



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Figure 11.  Ensemble rehearsal for A Museum of Living Stories (Coventry, England). Photo taken by Andrew Kushnir involvement.” The Councillors were very impressed and, by all accounts, there was even talk that they might be able to help prolong the life of Canley Youth Centre. Bruce (and another youth member from a different group) were also invited to go to 10 Downing Street to share news of their campaign! It was all incredibly positive. On Tuesday 7th, Councillor Ed Ruane came to visit our session. Whilst he was genuinely very engaged in what was going on, he explained that the cuts to Youth Services were final and the move towards “­Family Hubs” was definite.  This means that Canley Youth Services will cease to exist from around September (this is yet to be confirmed). Angela has ­effectively lost her job as the role no longer exists. However, she has been asked if she wants to retrain to become a social worker! She doesn’t want to do this. I’m attaching the letter that was given to all parents. So, it looks like Bruce’s invitation to Downing Street was a token gesture...

Token gesture or not, the seed was planted, and the tree will grow. The voice was activated through theatre’s ensemble-building, just as

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Neelands (2009) imagined it: a pedagogy of the ensemble to model “a better version of the real world on an achievable scale” (p. 187). This story would be a much better one if Bruce’s actions had managed to reverse the cuts to the services he had depended on and thrived within, but that was not to be. This time. Nonetheless, Bruce’s actions had a powerful impact on the other young people and adults in the Canley theatre group. His actions stimulated what Judith Butler (2015, p. 207) has termed “a sensate democracy” for a more just, mutually supportive “assembly” of the whole. And in Butler’s view, the action is always tied to a kind of performance, the performativity of one’s social and political location and our ultimate interdependency. It was not only anger that fueled Bruce’s budding activism, but his joy and laughter in that Xcel Leisure Centre, where beautiful theatre was created, an ethics of care was enacted, and enormous life lessons were grasped. Tainan, Taiwan Scene from the devised play Same (translated by Wan-Jung Wang) SCENE CHANGE. Son sitting at computer. What are you watching just now? Let me take a look too. What is this? What is that? son:  It’s just a series drama on TV. dad:  What’s it about. son:  It’s just a play, a drama. dad:  Why are they kissing each other? Two men. son:  It’s just love, father. dad:  Didn’t I tell you normal love should be between a man and a woman? son:  But normal love should be between people who love each other. dad:  We cannot say that men can marry an animal. It’s all rubbish. son:  Why rubbish if I’m not the same as you? dad:  Are you talking back to me now? I have told you a long time ago, you cannot see this abnormal stuff. You spend all the money I give on you to watch this? mom:  What’s wrong? dad:  Take a look at what your son has been watching. mom:  Try to explain to your father, apologize to him. son:  But I didn’t do anything wrong. Why do I have to apologize? dad: 



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We spoil him and now he talks back to you. He’s turned so terrible. son:  Is gay so terrible to you? dad: Yes. son:  What’s wrong? What’s wrong with being gay? dad:  I don’t understand you at all. Where are you going? If you go out, you will never come back. dad: 

Son leaves.

Figure 12.  Images in Tainan

A Workshop in Hope tainan students making the world they need

In 2014, the theme “Save Your Nation, Save Yourself” referenced both the two decades since the studio’s rescue from demolition and the so-called “Sunflower Movement,” which had emerged onto the political scene earlier that year. Once again, the crane lifted political activists and artists high above the

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studio to encourage activism among Taiwanese millennials who had previously been dismissed by their elders as apolitical consumers of the “Strawberry ­Generation” – pampered children, easily bruised. – Catherine Diamond (2016), p. 136

In Taiwan, we most confidently came to know the young university students with whom we worked through their artistic work, their d ­ evised theatre pieces. Our conversations and interviews often h ­ appened through student translators. Our sense of direct conversation with the students was limited. But when they performed their plays for us, or allowed us to watch their rehearsals, I usually had Wan-Jung in my ear, giving me simultaneous translation. It worked this way in Lucknow and in Athens too, but in Tainan there seemed to be a cultural norm that privileged young people’s voices being “translated” through adult voices that was different from the other non-English-speaking sites. Of all the sites, then, our greatest proximity to the young people came through our reception of their plays; our most direct sense of them came through their theatrical storytelling. It was a very interesting mode of communication because it left many “gaps” in understanding, and, unsurprisingly, it also gave us access to their cares and concerns through embodied, metaphoric storytelling. We saw a lot of theatre in Taiwan. We saw the three plays the ­devising groups were creating (Money Is the Lover, Cross, and Same), and we saw a performance of the play they created in their applied theatre oral history course of the previous year, where they collaborated with an Indigenous community (See You Again, Kobayashi Village). We further took in several cultural events. We attended an arts festival and saw a play performed in Mandarin and Japanese called Notes Exchange ­Dostoevsky at the Tainan Cultural Centre Native Theatre. We visited a nearby historical cultural centre, Anping, and climbed the Anping Treehouse. We visited a Confucian temple. We also saw a theatre production in K ­ aohsiung called Boys Love, described to us as avant-garde, which was a homoerotic story based on Japanese anime characters. And we hiked a large monkey-covered mountain. We went to the National P ­ alace M ­ useum in Taipei, and spent one very memorable evening at the f­ amous Night Market in Tainan with the young university students. Many of our ­ethnographic experiences in Taiwan happened through cultural events and sites, and through the theatrical storytelling of the students. It was in these productions where we learned about their political commitments and their activism. The young people we met could not have been easily “dismissed by their elders” as Diamond suggests above; they were reacting to a stereotype about them by strongly putting their worries, their struggles, and their dreams on full view.



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We arrived in Taiwan in 2016, the year the Taiwanese people had overwhelmingly elected a president and legislature that seemed to stand strongly for Taiwanese independence. Hope had been sparked, especially for young people, as their efforts to thwart a trade deal with China that was widely understood to be very bad for their future employment prospects were realized through their groundbreaking ­Sunflower Movement. Our collaborator, Wan-Jung, however, was less optimistic about the stability of the Taiwanese position vis-à-vis China: The government thinks, because now we have the cultural relationship, so we can exchange students, and also have lots of commerce and business with them. They think it’s lessened. But from my perspective it’s not. But the government thinks so. kathleen:  But you were saying with the new president in Taiwan, there’s an increased threat because she’s more outspoken about China, so there are less students [interested in an exchange program with China]. wan-jung:  They are limiting the number. kathleen:  It’s always tenuous, right? You can’t ever feel comfortable. wan-jung: No. kathleen:  It’s greater or lesser degrees of concern. wan-jung:  Greater or lesser degrees. I think the government policymakers and businessmen are just taking it too lightly. China is still a big threat. I think they’re just too busy making money now. If they have been more stable, if we are not listening to what they say we have to do, they will still have war with us. andrew:  Do the young people you work with talk about that anxiety or is that not on their radar? wan-jung:  Some people, some young people will talk to me about that. They’re worried. But not all of them. (Interview with Wan-Jung Wang, 18 November 2016) wan-jung: 

One thing we began to notice about the theatre practice of the students in Taiwan was the overt attention they paid to the affective aspects of their work. Curious to us, the Canadian team, was how every piece of theatre they made was musically underscored. And the music was selected from compilations of music and sounds that were meant to evoke particular emotions. The young people explained to us in the interviews we did that their plays were taking on important social ­issues for Taiwanese society and they needed their audiences to “feel” the right things. For them, “feeling” was a key pedagogical component of their artistic work as they sought to educate their own families and

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communities, and each other. Our Lucknow collaborator, Urvashi Sahni, in her drama pedagogy adopts a pedagogy that balances b ­ etween the need for a clear performance of self and the collective needs of the group. Students, she contends, need to individually and collectively develop “understanding [that] lead[s] to ways of overcoming the oppression,” then shift to creatively discovering “the skills that you need,” “your voice,” and “your agency in the set of circumstances that you find yourself in” (Interview with Urvashi Sahni, 19 November 2015). Recently, a group of New Zealand researchers set about to study successful aspects of civic education in schools through focusing on the skill sets of teachers and their pedagogical choices. They concluded that, in order to “prevent the drift in active citizenship programmes towards muted and apolitical versions of social action,” teachers’ pedagogical efforts “required a delicate balance of intervention and surrendering authority; providing guidance to pull projects back from uncritical action and arduous ‘schoolified’ reflection; and the gentle navigation of student spontaneity and emotional engagement alongside critique and a focus on long-term and structural change” (Wood et al., 2018, p. 266). These researchers argue that paying closer attention to the pedagogies of classrooms is crucial to understanding how to support critically ­engaged citizenship for young people “to enable both freedom of thought as well as promote criticality about some of the world’s most complex issues” (p. 266). For Wan-Jung, drama was not a magic bullet, but it was a step towards understanding collective and committed work: Can I ask what impact this might have on your democracy? And citizenship? Like people becoming citizens, or citizens within a democracy? wan-jung:  Big question. (laughter) I wouldn’t assume if they attend, uh, drama class they’ll become a better citizen. Or become very democratic and take part in the politics, uh, directly. But I do think they embrace collaborative work and respect each other in their debate. More. After the class. (Lunch meeting with Wan-Jung and university administrators, 15 November 2016) andrew: 

The student work we observed in Tainan was carefully “held” by their teacher, Wan-Jung Wang. What the pedagogy of drama afforded in that space (as was so much the case in Greece, India, and England) was the implicit needs of “the ensemble,” the students moving together as a group despite differences of creative and social desires. In fact, when we arrived, one of the devising groups (for their play Cross) was



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experiencing artistic differences and struggling to work through them. The lead “playwright” for the piece had felt that her vision had been overshadowed by the lead “director,” who had taken the piece in an ­unanticipated direction. In a focus group, Andrew asked them to talk about this moment they had called “hopeless” and how they moved through it. Wan-Jung (translating for Xiao-Yi) said: “Sharing – I think that’s the key point why they felt so good in this rehearsal this morning, because sharing our inner feelings together as a whole group, it’s releasing our pressure and it feels liberating for the whole group.” For the T ­ aiwanese young people, the affective register was the glue, not something that merely consolidated differences or restored consensus but a complex affective register that contained Howard Barker’s (1989) “versions” of truth, a theatre that did many different things at once. This classroom work resonated with the larger cultural productions we had seen outside the classroom, where affect was a window onto complex thoughts and ideas. The work they shared was not only about the “­social issues” they sought to explore (homophobia, poverty, family struggles) but also revealed the larger struggles of young people in the global political economy of neoliberal capitalism. As in Lucknow, their work was privileging the broader structural terrain upon which individual subjectivities configure themselves. These are relational and community-building pedagogies we witnessed in Lucknow and Tainan. The musical underscoring was one way to tie us up together in the narratives, even though systems and structures were being displayed and interrupted in their work. Their desire to be a community with audiences was a powerful guide in the work they were making. As emerging young adults, this group of young people were aiming, through their creative work, to draw the relationship between institutions, economies, social movements, and their own emerging identities; structural inequalities of social class, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender were in plain sight. With the threat of China looming large in their lives, and trade deals that would severely affect the labour market in Taiwan, the Taiwanese young people, through their activist art and their social activism outside school, allowed us to better understand the relationship between global capitalism and the construction of young adults as an identity group. The university administrators we spoke with were clearly aware of the specific threats young Taiwanese university students were facing and, within their own institutional constraints, found themselves taking up actions of allyship: Taiwan, I feel like a lot of students, because in our history, right, we’re pretty oppressed. We’re really, really oppressed as a

yi-ren: 

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group of people and the government tells us not to be involved in politics. You should not be worried. The government tells us not to get involved; it’s not about you. You just be a doctor, you be an engineer, you know nothing about politics. So, I think especially like my parents’ generation might as well not talk about it, it’s not a thing, because you know like my grandfather fought political oppression, disappeared for a couple of days. So that’s something that is in our history. wan-jung:  Social, intangible. yi-ren:  But I feel like in Taiwan we have come a long way. Students can engage in things or protest things. wan-jung:  Sunflower Movement. yi-ren:  I feel like we are actually very open – it’s just whether the student actually cares, you know. So, a lot of people really don’t – they would say, like, well you don’t see hope so you don’t see the use, you know. So that’s, I feel like that’s – mei-chun:  Like, uh, one or two months ago, some of the students wanted to go to Taipei to … university students – wan-jung:  All went into it to protest it. What’s it called? – yi-ren:  Change in – (speaking in Mandarin) Commerce. Commerce and trade contract with mainland China. wen-ling:  And the, the ruling party at the time tried to pass it just in a second without any legal voting. kathleen:  So the students are protesting? all: Yes. wen-ling:  They just entered into the Legislative Yuan and controlled the whole Yuan. Occupy. Yeah. mei-chun:  And that’s the success of it. wan-jung:  And the government conceded. kathleen: Really. wan-jung:  And they have the renegotiation about the issue with the student leaders and all the legislative representatives. kathleen:  So, tell me what the issue was with mainland China. wan-jung:  It’s the trade and commerce contract. kathleen:  And how was that affecting university students? wan-jung:  It will affect their work in the future. Economic law. They’re opening the job market. They’re opening to farmers, vegetables, and goods. And many industries will be threatened, wan-jung: 



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especially the manufacturing industry. Because now they have lowpaid, low-paid workers [in China]. So, it will be very competitive. kathleen:  So, workers have more rights here than they would in mainland China? mei-chun:  Of course! And they won’t get into jail I think. kathleen:  Because they’re unionized or? And because you’re a democracy. mei-chun: Right. kathleen:  So that kind of “free trade,” open trade is a major threat to you. mei-chun:  Like you can choose if you want to stay in the class or go protest, and I won’t say that you missed the class. It’s okay, go to the – we have these discussions – wan-jung:  We allow them. Yes, we have this discussion at the department meeting, how are we going to let them go to the protest? Because our school cannot openly support them. dirk:  Like “excused absence”? wan-jung:  We excuse them to go to the protest if they think carefully and they will protect themselves from being used by the political parties behind these demonstrations. kathleen:  So that is a democratic citizenship education if there ever was one. (Lunch meeting with Wan-Jung and university administrators, 15 November 2016) These quiet supports by institutions, like universities, are crucial to the growth of youth social movements, especially in places like ­Taiwan, where years of colonization and oppression have not nurtured a culture of protest. In their book, Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock (2015) argue for increased attention to be paid to collective and organized movements, across generations – especially for those who “seek to transform the social, political and economic order, as distinct from everyday instances of agency and resistance” (p. 139). The story for these particular young students who were in a theatre program included certain realities that were difficult to contend with. Overwhelmingly, the students articulated worries over whether they would find a job in the future. This worry was exacerbated by an expressed need to be responsible to their parents who may need care in the future and who had high expectations of them and would prefer that they go into an area of study perceived to be more stable. This discussion brought to light Bo-Wei Chan’s notion of “filial piety” and Taiwan’s economic uncertainty, particularly in the arts sector. The adults we interviewed

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stated conclusively – especially Wan-Jung – that it would be unlikely that her students would be able to make a living as artists. She in fact felt she should better prepare them for “reality.” Wan-Jung used the phrase “survive first.” She used the phrase to describe how important she felt it was that the students knew they would need many skills and would be unlikely able to support themselves as actors or directors alone. The students had feelings about this; Wan-Jung, translating for Wei, said: “The government is out of touch with the thinking process because thinking is the important motivation for art and philosophy. The government emphasizes only on the economic side or technology or self-interest. They don’t care about thinking, which should be the source of our progress. That’s why I feel hopeless for that.” The students described how they didn’t want to be famous movie stars, but they did want to be artists. They were modifying their dreams. As B ­ o-Wei ­describes, he believes the young generation just wants to have a “good life, a good job.” The young people are curbing their dreams in order to make them achievable. They are, as he says, “managing tradition.” The Self, the Collective: Theatre and Social Change As across all of the sites, we were left to ponder what the relationship is between “the self” and “the collective” in the drama classrooms, and how this world, under the careful and caring guidance of a teacher/ facilitator, can invite novel voicings of the self within the social nesting of the collective: creativity as a multifaceted construct (Pope, 2005). ­Helpfully, Richard Schechner (2006) defines performance as action that emphasizes “showing doing” (p. 28). In addition, in Tainan as elsewhere in the study, we saw exploratory social performances being brought into meaningful relationship with aesthetic performances – individual selves finding collective expression and making creative abstractions from “real life issues” in order to understand and communicate them newly. What was especially revelatory across sites, and that was eloquently articulated by some of the Taiwanese students, was just how much the young “actors” considered their important relationship to an imagined “audience.” A communication was necessary, but as we can hear in the following conversation, the young creators were conceiving their audiences as partners in the grappling with ideas – partners, not receptacles, and collaborators in the mission to “change the world”: Is there any relationship that you see, in how you’ve done the drama process now, and what you can learn from it, in figuring out some of the problems in the world? Do you see some connection?

dirk: 



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He said, making drama is a way for them to express their cares about the world. dirk:  Why? How? superjet [translated by fei-fei]:  We talk about audience, and maybe one day the audience can receive our ideas. And maybe some days they can figure out what we are talking about in this drama and that will touch [their] heart. And I think that we can make it a better world, together. dirk: OK. jia-jia [translated by fei-fei]:  They put those issues that they care about into their drama. Now they don’t know how to deal with these kinds of issues. But they can express the ideas to the audience, and make an influence on them. And maybe some among the audience can really figure out how to deal with the issues, to help them. (Focus group interview with the devising group members of the play Money Is the Lover, 16 November 2016). superjet [translated by fei-fei]: 

Long ago, Michael Balfour talked about a “theatre of little changes,” which was an important tempering in the drama literature about questions of “transformation,” where a great many claims are often made without much empirical evidence. Balfour (2009) challenged the prevailing notion of change as monumental, world-altering, and instead spoke to those small changes that matter, often in highly localized ways. On this question, we got an important perspective from Ah-Cheng: andrew:  And

so let me ask, are there any sort of things that you’ve discovered through drama, through your practice of drama, that may be applicable to these struggles in your society as young people? ah-cheng [translated and spoken by wan-jung]:  Thank you. So, the reason he wants to make a play is that he believes they cannot – he cannot alone change the world. But maybe the audience comes to see the show and they make a small change on the audience. Small change. That’s possible. That’s what he wants to do. (Focus group interview with devising group for the play Cross, 16 November 2016) A very interesting collision was happening between the same-sex marriage legislation in the courts and another of the drama group’s devised pieces. The play Same was attempting to address the conflict in Taiwanese society to recognize marriage equality, as they called it.

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Figure 13.  Focus group discussion with Cross devising group (Tainan, Taiwan)

The group was telling the “real-life” story of one of their peers who had greatly struggled with his family’s response to his sexuality. He had been forced to “come out” to his family, who received the news with tremendous hostility, but while the real young man had not committed suicide, the devising team felt that they wanted to change the “real” ending in order to “educate” their audiences. They felt that life doesn’t “get better” for so many queer young people, and they wanted their imagined audiences to feel the pain that so many feel. They took liberties with the truth (with, of course, the permission of their peer whose story was being explored) in order to do the pedagogical work with audiences that they felt strongly about doing. This play was certainly the most didactic piece because it had become a vehicle for their great sense of responsibility. But again, it was the emotional terrain that they felt most responsible to. Wan-Jung explained to us in her interview: “It’s, it’s not the factual or facts that I’m looking for with the stories that students share and also in the creative process. I always tell them, ‘We are looking for the emotional truth.’” Do you have marriage equality? Can gay people marry here? shuan:  It’s in the process. Not yet. kathleen:  Not yet. What about just, can young people in schools come out? several students:  No, no. kathleen:  Is it dangerous? pei:  They suffer bullying. kathleen:  They get bullied. Yeah. Is there anywhere, is the school, are the schools concerned with that? Do they try to educate students to be more accepting? (students nodding) They do? How do they do that? shuan:  They have gender equality classes every other week. kathleen: 



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kathleen:  Ah,

so does gender equality deal with questions of sexuality as well? shuan:  It doesn’t really go very deep. It stays on the surface because of our culture. We are more conservative. We don’t want the Junior High School students to know that much. kathleen:  Right, right. So, there is a question of it being inappropriate for their age. Well, what about in university? You are not children anymore. Does your university make efforts to be inclusive? To make sure that students are not suffering? Do you know of anything that your university is doing? hao [translated by shuan]:  Students don’t have a platform for discussion or awareness of the topic. kathleen:  How come? hao [translated by shuan]:  Maybe the school or the students don’t speak out much. hwei [translated by shuan]:  She is saying that people follow the media and what the government says blindly, and some may support the gays and some may not, and some may not even know what that means – they just follow the media blindly. She is saying that the process of making this drama, the communication should be applied to real life, because sometimes there is conflict and people just support whatever the media tells them, support something blindly, but they don’t know what, because they lack the ability to communicate with each other. … pei [translated by wan-jung]:  At first, we wanted it to be a happy ending. After his conversation with his mother, he regained his hope that his family might be able to accept him. This is the [real] end and they don’t want that. bai [translated by wan-jung]:  Because we don’t think that’s what the real life is. Life is not so perfect all the time, and we wanted to have a controversial ending, for people to take away to think. (Wan-Jung talks to Bai in Mandarin.) We want to reflect what the reality really is, as we know. These kinds of families, parents cannot accept their children as gay or lesbian. The ending is always not so good. So, we want this ending to happen, for everybody to understand that words can kill, especially words from your beloved families. We want this ending to reflect the reality more. (Devising rehearsal for Same, 18 November 2016)

bai [translated by wan-jung]: 

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Figure 14.  Rehearsal for Same (Tainan, Taiwan). Photo taken by Andrew Kushnir

Team member Scott Mealey and I have previously attempted to theorize the dialogic, pedagogical movement between self and collective, between social and artistic performance, and between performer and audience in a piece we wrote on selfhood as we looked across the sites of this study and at the young people in very different and unique contexts. In the verbatim, oral history, and devising practices that we observed, after individual stories were shared, deconstructed, reimagined, we witnessed how students created together as an ensemble, drawing in their breath collectively and exhaling possibilities into their space. This kind of pedagogy relies upon a different notion of expertise in which the young person is the expert, the theorist of their own life. They hold both a deep expertise in their material and experiential world, and a deep capacity for growth (see Gallagher & Mealey, 2018). And they ultimately feel a responsibility towards educating their communities in order to change their world, little by little, step by step, imagined story by imagined story.

6 The Qualitative Landscape: Interdependency against All Odds

Interdependency … becomes a touchstone for intimate forms of human justice, where the arts can be an occasion for developing those resources of care that make collective dignity more likely. – James Thompson (2020), p. 226

Toronto, Canada

Figure 15.  Images in Toronto

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Precarious Hope So, my plan after this whole show of high school is to go to law school and stuff. But ideally, that’s not what I really want to do. I would love to go to theatre school, and I would love to have like a coming to riches story. “Like I used to be roughing it in the Toronto theatre scene and then I made it to the Oscars.” (laughter) But I don’t know. That’s like my dream but I just know that ideally and just ’cause of the family that I’ve come from, it’s not going to happen. My family won’t pay for me to go to theatre school. So, it has changed. Like maybe, not maybe – I’m hoping that when I’m in post-secondary for the almost decade that I’ll be in there, like, that I’ll keep up with the theatre scene and stuff. (Individual interview, Estelle, 18 January 2016)

estelle:

My grandma’s actually in the hospital right now so my Mom’s been pretty stressed out about it and, like, as you see her condition getting worse and worse, it’s getting harder and harder to hope for the best for her. That’s part of it, but yeah, we used to be really hopeful and now we’re accepting it and part of being hopeful is knowing when it’s not worth hoping for, when it’s just false. (Individual interview, Josh, 18 January 2016)

josh:

I do [have big hopes]! But it scares me sometimes to think about the future. It’s crazy that it’s all happening so fast. So, people are always like, “I hope this happens!” And it’s like, “Yeah! I do hope that, in the future, I have a house and a stable job, but it doesn’t always turn out that way and it’s a scary thought.” So, I think having little hopes day by day will hopefully, gradually, get me to have huge hopes in the future. But as of right now, it’s kind of scary to have grand hopes …’Cause I feel like also too – hope can be like if, say for example, I hope I have two kids in the future and let’s say by the time I’m forty-five [years old], I have none. I feel like I might be sad about that. I’d be like, “I really wanted two kids!” And it didn’t work out that way. So, I just kinda don’t really want hope that you can’t really be in charge of. Like I don’t know what will happen in twenty or thirty years from now. So, I just kinda go day by day having tiny hopes. (Individual interview, Mindy, 13 January 2016)

mindy:

Voicing Toronto Stories for a More Equal World The students at Regal Heights in the east end of Toronto, a school in a gentrifying neighbourhood, came from all walks of life and all corners of



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the city. As I look back upon the three years with students there, I came to see each year as representing, in a different way and with different drama storytelling tools, the struggle to be a group, to feel like a collective, and to tell the stories that mattered for a very wide range of people. Despite the strength of the drama program and the commitment of the drama teacher, the drama students brought a sense of marginalization into the room vis-à-vis the larger school and society, speaking feelings of alienation within that larger school and society. But they also often used that perceived space on the margins to speak their frustrations and disappointments, and to find solidarity in their sense of isolation or disenfranchisement as drama students. Mr.  L, their drama teacher, gave them great latitude to find their stories and work out their struggles as a group. Many students read that as a kind of respect for their autonomy. Within the classrooms we worked in over each of the three years, we witnessed conflict and companionship both. These classrooms of diverse students operated with considerable creative and pedagogical independence, which also meant that dialogue was a major pedagogical modality for these groups. I think back to Coventry, where young people with opposing views on the Brexit campaign sat in a circle in order to listen to each other and to respect their different political views, and Lucknow, where “critical dialogues,” that is, unpacking the ­structures and systems that shaped the young women’s daily conditions, formed the pedagogical exchanges. In Toronto, we saw how the culture of the classroom turned leadership more fully over to the students. As with the others, they sat in a circle too, until they broke off into their smaller groups to get on with the independent development of work. They were grade 12 students, older than the others, but also of a North ­American culture and education system that situates these senior students in “culminating” projects, where the skills of the previous years of high school should come into play as they draw from that previous learning. They also had a teacher who clearly preferred to take a step back and encourage students to take up their artistic leadership and work out their troubles on their own. It is worth considering for a moment why dialogue, in all of its culturally specific forms, is so central to the drama classroom. A liberal humanist view of dialogue is founded on principles of active listening, empathy, and common ground, whereas a pedagogy borne of more poststructural ideas (see Bakhtin, 1981; Derrida, 1973) imagines conflict, dissonance, and indeterminacy as essential to the power of dialogue, where communicants can be involved in making new meanings, not simply understanding the meanings assumed to be held inside individuals. And because language is also embodied in a drama classroom,

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dialogue itself takes on a kind of performative quality that can both aid and hinder self-other relations. All the drama classrooms of this ­research were more poststructural in their approaches, and nowhere was that more true than in Toronto. Communications scholars Stanley Deetz and Jennifer Simpson (2004), taking a poststructural perspective, offer that the fundamental notion of otherness means that any possible label or conception of self, other, and world is capable of being questioned. They go on to say: The point of communication as a social act is to overcome one’s fixed subjectivity, one’s conceptions, one’s strategies – to be opened to the indeterminacy of people and the external environment to form an open redetermination. This we believe is the basis for “voice.” Communication in its dialogic form is productive rather than reproductive. It produces what self and other can experience, rather than reproducing what either has. Self-expression is misleading not because people do not or should not try to express their experiences but because such expressions in a dialogic view are the raw material for the production of something new rather than the product of self-interests. Process subjectivity becomes possible in the responsiveness to a pull from the outside. (p. 142)

While dialogue is critical to the healthy functioning of a theatre-making space, those dialogues about creative work and imagining are tethered to political views and material experiences in ways that are not always clear or perceivable to those engaged in the work. Such divergent views and experiences can make the work of creating a challenge, especially when the creative work is based on so-called real life. But even in those challenging instances, much can be learned. Over the three years of our work at Regal Heights, there were many impressions and experiences that marked us, or as Andrew would say, “punctured” us as researchers. As we spent three years in these classrooms, much more time than could be spent in any other site, we have accumulated a tremendous amount of data and have a longer trajectory of first-hand experiences with the space and the people. There are many stories, then, that could be written about this Toronto site, but my “true north” stories about each of the three years settle upon three significant findings: Year 1 taught us lessons about race and racism in schools, gender and schooling, and the incredible challenges of creating from “real life” (that is, verbatim theatre) through the inequalities and injustices of that broader world as it encroaches upon the microspace of a classroom. Year 2, through young people’s oral history performances, taught us about the delicate space between one’s personal story and



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its collective and public expression, both the power and the hazards of theatre that makes the very private, public. Year 3 was an object lesson in the flexibility of the drama curriculum and an agile teacher when the concerns of the world beyond the classroom and the needs and mental well-being of young people overturn the anticipated work of that classroom. The devising form of Year 3 and the suppleness and support of Mr.  L, together, made for an experience of young people making the stories they need. The Territory of Race, Racism, and Gender in Verbatim Theatre Creation When we arrived in the fall of 2014, we worked initially with an ­International Baccalaureate (IB) group of students, a highly academically committed cohort who had opted for drama as one of their very few optional courses in a program otherwise highly structured and academically focused. It was a very small group of about ten students, all white and an even mix of boys and girls, and they seemed to enjoy each other’s company. Andrew Kushnir came in and offered them a workshop on verbatim theatre, after which they interviewed each other about their ambitions. Being with this group helped us get a sense of the streaming in the school. This program was one of several different academic streams and one that was, arguably, the least representative of the school’s diverse population because these students were selected for this elite program and came to the school from across the city. In the second semester, we encountered a very different group, another very small group of grade 12 students opting into drama from across the other streams in the school (university, college, open). The grade 12 class of Year 1 second semester at Regal Heights was predominantly female-identifying, with only three male-identifying out of eleven students. There were seven students of colour. All four of the white students were female-identifying. The three male-identifying students were racialized. Throughout the seven weeks with these grade 12 students, working on verbatim theatre with them, we observed a spatial divide in the room in what appeared to be along lines of race and gender. The racialized male-identifying students situated themselves outside of the drama circle, with the white female-identifying students tending to lead enthusiastically from within the circle, to direct the dialogue of the room. The racialized female-identifying students tended to engage when specifically called upon. This observation was contextualized further in an interview with one of the racialized male-identifying students. We learned from Jamal that, in the previous school year, there had been a bus incident while on a drama class field

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trip that led to a “physical divide between the Black students and others [white students] … Like a lot of the Black kids in the class would stick together. And – or the white people that hang out with Black people more. So we’d be together, and all the other people would be by themselves, like they would be together on, like, the opposite side of the class” (Individual interview, Jamal, 25 May 2015). No one really wanted to talk about the “bus issue,” but we knew that the seating on the bus had been “segregated,” and that seemed to be replicating itself in the classroom a year later with this group.  This context of previous histories and relations predating our research encounter helped us make some sense of what we were observing. This space was a complex and overdetermined social space and one suggestive of two related realities that Marianne Dovemark (2013) describes as “private everyday racism and public racism denial” (p. 16), which, in her ethnographic study in Sweden, led to unequal and discriminatory educational experiences, despite the dominant public discourse of “integration and inclusion,” because schools do not exist in a vacuum. Mr. L in Toronto began with wanting to explore the verbatim theatre unit by turning to “the news” and current events, to set the group off through exploring what is called docudrama, where the group works from an actual news source. In this case, the Black students expressed an interest in exploring the recent shooting of the young American Black man Eric Harris. Their work would then be a fictionalized drama, based on real people. Jamal, who regularly sat outside the circle, told us that he believed his peers felt he was a “joker” and “did not take school seriously,” saying of himself: “I think I’m the one that’s just not serious about anything. Yeah, and my friends have pointed this out too” (­Individual interview, Jamal, 19 May 2015). He became a deeply committed performer in the docudrama on Eric Harris. When it came to an exploration of police brutality, Jamal saw himself inside the story, considering police brutality a personal and pressing social issue: I don’t speak up on problems a lot, you know? With this issue, it’s completely wrong for police to be abusing their power. And, you know, be killing people. And not being punished for it. So, you know, I think, so that project sort of wanted me to step up and like add – like if I hear anybody talking about this issue and they’re sort of justifying what the police, what the cop did, I would step in and be, like, that is wrong. You know that person had a life and a family, you know, and then just try to speak about what was wrong with that issue. Try to bring that up into the light … Usually with that with that side of me, like if I get really angry at an issue, I sort of

jamal:



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ramble. And I don’t tend to stop. I just keep talking, and going at it, and – so I don’t really like to go at it, ’cause then sometimes what I end up saying doesn’t make sense when it comes out, but it makes a lot of sense in my head. The way it comes out – ’cause of the anger – is all jumbled up and nobody can understand it. (Individual interview, Jamal, 25 May 2015) Jamal took an uncharacteristic leadership role in this unit. We learned in our interview with him that he felt called to educate his peers about the realities of police violence against Black male youth. We recognized it as yet another instance of curriculum that situates Black people as victims, as obvious targets of violence. Rarely are such stories deconstructed in ways that point to the systemic causes of such violence. And even though this narrative was a tragically familiar one, Jamal nonetheless knew his leadership would be critical to the storytelling and to the possibility of making an intervention and waking others up to a reality he felt very close to.6 We observed, as the planning ensued, how some of the white girls in the classroom were working hard to steer the group discussion back to the task at hand – how to dramatize the assigned article – and they turned to the blackboard as the space where thoughts and ideas could be organized. This simple turn away from difficult dialogue and passionate participation tamed the discursive space. The girls, themselves products of a neoliberal system that encourages them to gain the competitive edge – what Anita Harris (2004) called “future girls,” referring to those who are able to adapt to the neoliberal order without much

6 Six years after this experience, I am reflecting upon it after we witnessed Minneapolis burning and large groups of activists across the United States, Canada, and Europe taking to the streets in grief and protest over yet another death of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, under the knee of a police officer, who has now been convicted of second-degree unintentional murder. At the same time, an investigation was underway in Toronto concerning the circumstances surrounding the death of twenty-nine-year-old Regis Korchinski-Paquet, who fell from her twenty-fourth-storey balcony while engaged with police officers who were called by her family to their home to make a mental health–related call. Toronto-based activist and journalist Desmond Cole (2020), speaking on CBC radio, insisted that we must stop talking about the “relationship” of the police to Black communities and start talking about the systemic subjugation of Black communities by policing and state-sanctioned violence. Such incidents and the protests that have followed, during a global health pandemic, make me imagine how Jamal and his classmates are likely now finished post-secondary schooling, and I wonder what they are thinking. “Why hasn’t it changed?” was Jamal’s refrain in that classroom in 2015.

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complaint – took charge and reclaimed their sense of themselves as “leaders” in the room. I’m a bit of a control freak. I really like things to go my way and I’m trying to rein that back a little bit, but I do tend to take on leadership roles a lot and that does come from the fact that a lot of other people in the class just don’t talk. I’ll start talking because no one’s talking. Like DJ Abraham Lincoln and I especially both do that. There’s like the group of like four of us that are the ones that are always talking. (Individual interview, Scarlet, 25 May 2015)

scarlet:

Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997) has also written about how, when faced with difficult knowledge such as the history and operation of racism or sexism, students (and educators too) may often actively, if unconsciously, reject what they are hearing or experiencing, or in the case of this ­classroom, take control and divert the conversation or fill in the uncomfortable silences. In their research in Sweden, Per-Åke Rosvall and ­Elisabet Öhrn (2014) found that, despite schools being “democratic” spaces with classrooms offering relatively open environments where students frequently present their views and influence classroom pedagogy, controversial issues were still rarely raised, regardless of students’ stated concerns about nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. Limarys Caraballo (2019), studying raced, classed, and gendered discourse and academic performance in a diverse US middle school, found that certain kinds of white, middle-class norms are considered “neutral” responses, while other kinds of responses from high-achieving lower income students of colour are disproportionately regulated by achievement discourses. Not only was Jamal in our site interested in talking about an issue of great importance, but he was doing so loudly and passionately, and in ways that troubled the equilibrium (read raced) norms of the room. This space, infused with tacit expectations regarding “talk,” made it especially difficult to speak one’s passion in ways that were legible and not disconcerting to other non-racialized bodies. The final verbatim project had the students interviewing each other about issues they felt were pertinent to their lives, where some uncomfortable dialogue unfolded. They became the researchers of their worlds and found some shared concerns and some greater understanding of the different material realities they were living. In these peer-led interviews, the issues of race and gender emerged. Then there came the work of whittling down the verbatim interviews and creating monologues from them. Once all the students had created a monologue from their interview data, they turned their collective efforts towards



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creating a whole piece and finding a narrative arc for their verbatim performance, which would be shared with peers at the school. It was not surprising that the interview data had surfaced feelings about race and racism, about sexism, and about shared anxiety concerning gainful employment and stable futures. Research about disenfranchised young people in Australia revealed similar concerns, expressing strong desires to be “normal,” articulating hoped-for futures marked by traditional indicators: a job, home, and family. Their narratives of future, the ­researchers Joanne Bryant and Jeanne Ellard (2015) hold, were specific to the minimal opportunity structures available to them. In Toronto, Scarlet, who wanted to pursue a future in theatre, exclaimed in her interview when we were discussing possible futures: “It’s terrifying. Very, very foreboding. It’s just like, ‘You’ll never amount to very much, so good luck with your life – your mediocrity’” (Individual interview, Scarlet, 25 May 2015). However, not all the young people had the same experiences. Their lives were materially and experientially shaped by gender, race, sexuality, (dis)ability, and socio-economic status. Yet, across these social differences, they clearly shared a fear of the future that became an underlying theme of their final verbatim performance. But the turning point was when Jamal chose Astrid to speak his words about racism in the final scene of their play. When they started with the docudrama, all the students agreed that people should play characters of their own race and gender. But by the end of the class, they actively chose their peers across lines of race. This development was a considerable victory, given where the group began. Later Astrid, who spoke Jamal’s words in their play, shared with me in a focus group interview what she felt was learned through their process: Awareness of racism. I don’t think people are aware of the, uh, mentality. First thing I think about when I think of Canada, Toronto specifically, is that it’s multicultural, but we need to stop automatically thinking that there is no racism. If you stay here long enough, there is. We need to stop thinking that we’re this perfect country because we’re not. We should stop judging people. We should stop comparing. We should just accept who we are. This is where you live. This is something you need to accept. There’s so many other bad things that should have more attention, like starvation, the economy, but we need to be more aware firstly of our environment. People automatically think there is no racism and therefore we are more open to judge other places where racist acts are more open and, uh, more visible. Basically, we need to stop

astrid:

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racism, and I think standing up for and to people; we tend to be really passive as a society. And life would be better – life would be better if we stood up for people, stop listening to the media being fake. (Focus group with Astrid, Liz, Lindsay, Michael, Samira, 5 May 2015) In an early warm-up exercise in that class, the group stood in a circle and were asked to put a sentence or two into the room, and the person next in the circle was supposed to replicate what was said, paying attention to expression, tone, style of speech. In a memorable moment, Jamal offered a comment with a very strong Jamaican patois accent. It was playful and maybe a subversion of the activity too. Astrid, standing next to him, said: “I’m gonna sound super lame. How could someone like me say that without sounding racist? I am literally too white to say that.” Jamal replied: “Alright, I’ll try to lessen the ‘Black’ in it.” There was laughter all around, and it did look like the playfulness had landed well. There was possibly even a sense of relief at surfacing the very real feeling that this activity had made visible how people speak differently, how power is always a consideration when it comes to questions of language/accent, and how it requires considerable trust to give your “voice” to another for their “interpretation.” This particular experience stands in interesting contrast to research carried out in Britain by Rob Drummond (2017), who, after studying language and vernacular among young people in an urban classroom, challenges the notion of “white kids sounding Black.” “Both academic descriptions of modern urban youth language and comments from the young people suggest that this distinction between white and black speech is becoming less and less meaningful or, arguably, even perceptible” (p.  657). It was not the case in our classroom, but the playfulness in our drama context may have made the surfacing of such challenging and power-laden phenomena more possible. Following the work of local theatre-makers and educators in Malaysia and Singapore, Charlene Rajendran (2016) argues for the importance of play in making space for difference in youth theatre. Amid “changing global conditions that reiterate reductive norms,” young people’s playful work in the arts, she argues,“[shift] towards more empowering options that incorporate cultural mix and permeability. Even if these do not become part of a mainstream imagining, they provide significant expressions of how young people grapple with critical questions related to living in pluralist contexts polarised by official policy” (p. 443). After a long unit of verbatim practice and the missteps and initial lack of trust the group began with, the final performance shed some light on



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Figure 16.  Rehearsal for final performance of That’s What I Would Say (Toronto, Canada)

how the practice of verbatim and the considerable trust and leadership the teacher placed in his students’ hands had ultimately landed for the students. In what is commonly now referred to as a “post-truth” world, Petar Jandrić (2018) concludes that, in the context of post-truth, emotion and instinct are often more powerful than truth and reason, and in such a space, trust often becomes more valuable that truth. The rehearsals and writing and collaborating led to a decision where Jamal and Astrid would share the scene about Jamal’s “story,” which included the real-life shooting of his brother. Astrid, who initially evaluated herself as “too white” to say his words, was chosen by Jamal to embed the issue of structural racism in the telling of his story through the performance: The first thing I think about when I hear “Canada,” well, Toronto specifically, is it’s very multicultural, but we don’t seem to talk about the racism that’s totally prevalent. jamal: When my brother got shot, yeah, like, everyone came close. Now I’m like the man of the house, I’m like the role model, and they have to look up to me, you know? astrid:

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We need to stop pretending we’re this, like, perfect country because we’re not, we’re not perfect. (Script for final verbatim performance, performed for the public in June 2015)

astrid:

No one watching would necessarily have understood how earned that moment was. But those of us in the room knew that the choice was not made initially and ultimately symbolized quite a long journey travelled by twelve young people who found their segregation around race and gender “safer” at the beginning of the class than at the end. The pedagogical style of the teacher also, undoubtedly, leant itself to this kind of group decision-making. Mr. L’s impulse was to stand back and let the group wrestle with difficult social and creative hiccups in the room. He was not a “fixer” nor a controller of the artistic work. Mr. L is also a Black man. Travis Bristol (2020) studied the experiences of Black male teachers in schools in the United States where there were other Black male teachers and where there were not. He found, unsurprisingly, a considerable difference in their sense of social isolation and disconnection from colleagues among Black men who did not have a cohort of other Black men in their school. Further, he found in his study that Black men working in mainly white institutions were hyper aware of societal perceptions of Black men as angry, which changed their interactions with colleagues (p.  298). Not only were these things true for Mr. L, but in addition, he was the teacher co-moderator of the school’s ­Afro-Canadian Club (of which Jamal was a member). The club, we came to learn, was the centre of much school controversy; it was a club that had been sanctioned by the administration for its Black ­History Month presentations and was perceived by the administration and some teachers as “too radical.”7 Below is an excerpt from a long interview we had with Mr. L in that first year of the study: Yes. You know it’s interesting to me also because there are a few students in the class who are also part of our Afro-Canadian Club. Like Maliky. And that is a completely different realm, one that is keenly aware of race and how that sort of plays into their lives in school.

mr. l:

7 At the time of my writing (June 2020) during COVID-19 remote learning for students in Ontario schools, I heard from Mr. L who was holding his final Google classroom “Afro-Canadian Club” meeting. He wrote: “Kids were so grateful to reconnect, share, vent, and organize.” I replied that I knew that space would have been critical to so many of his students at this time.



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Who is that moderated by? Is that an extracurricular? It is an extracurricular piece that I’m a co-chair of. Yes, so we have those discussions, and it’s really interesting because they are keenly aware of what’s happening. But you’re right, when you bring it into the classroom, the context is different so they don’t – they don’t engage it in those kinds of situations. kathleen: And they’re also in a situation where they’re going to be evaluated. mr. l: Yes, I think that’s part of it, too. And it’s also more of a safe space in the club (kathleen: Right.) where you can talk about issues of race explicitly, and I don’t think they feel they can bring that in to the classroom without being controversial. scott: Yeah, because that was a big thing that I tended – I felt like I was seeing that, or you can challenge this if you want. It seemed like, if the students were white, if they felt that they were being – if they felt misunderstood, their response was to talk. Whereas the students of colour, if they felt misunderstood, consistently in the interviews, they felt like, “I’m not going to talk. If there’s no way I’m going to be understood, then there’s no point in me talking.” mr. l: I think a lot of that I think is systemic. I think most Black students in the school have just, have followed that pattern. kathleen: It’s a hostile environment. mr. l: Yes, and they just feel very marginalized. Some of them will make an attempt. If they get shut down, that’s it. You know, I’ve – we’ve talked to students in the classroom who will sit with their hoodies up, hunched down, and there’s assumptions made about those students by their teachers right away, and they just deal with those assumptions and it’s like, “Ok, that’s the way it’s going to be.” And there’s situations when they’re not exactly helping themselves by putting their hoodie on and sitting in the back of the classroom. They’re perpetuating some of those stereotypes that are being thrust on them, but yeah, that happens a lot across the system, I find. So, it’s not really different, it’s just a microcosm of what’s going on, I think, in schools in general. kathleen: Because you’re saying this, can I ask you a more personal question and you don’t have to answer it. How do you, as a Black man, when you see that dynamic playing out that you know is based in historical inequalities, how do you – is it a case by case, where you say, “Here I need to do this, now I need to do this”? Is it a constant evaluation for you? mr. l: It’s a constant evaluation, because I really feel like I only feel like I have control over what happens in my classroom. Like I try to kathleen: mr. l:

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make my classroom as inviting as possible for all groups, but you notice even from that there are still some of those dynamics. But I find with those same students that they do have a voice and they are able to maybe use it more often than not, even though there are cases where they don’t feel like they can as readily, but I think it is a case-by-case basis. It’s (deep exhale) dialogue with staff, it’s trying to raise awareness. I was on the Equity Committee for a number of years, and the people working in that group were keenly aware of some of the things going on. But again it’s – the findings that we do the work around on that gets filed into a report, and it’s usually given to the administration. The administration largely doesn’t even read it. That’s been the case with equity [initiatives] recently. kathleen: Or it doesn’t change hiring practices. (mr. l: Nope.) I mean, how diverse is the staff here? mr. l: Not very. (kathleen:  Right.) But that’s, that’s pretty much typical. kathleen: That’s typical of the system. mr. l: So you know, we do what we can. We enjoy Black History Month and try to embed stuff into the curriculum, as well as this sort of jumping through the Black History hoops, getting the assembly speakers, sorts of things. But with the club itself, it’s about having those discussions, having them have those conversations, and then try to equip them with strategies in other classrooms for what they could potentially do. Ashley Woodson and colleagues (2020), in their study on Black male social studies teachers’ perspectives on Blackness, masculinities, and leadership, recognize that “individual (Black) teachers make decisions about how cultural esteem is afforded, how the politics of voice are performed, how contributions to Black advancement are recognized” (p. 332), but also recognize, as many other researches in their studies do, the symbolic, political, and cultural value of Black teachers and a clear correlation between access to Black and Black male teachers with an improved academic and behavioural performance for Black students (see Easton-Brooks et al., 2010; Eddy & Easton-Brooks, 2011; Egalite & Kisida, 2018; Gershenson et al., 2016). As ethnographers in the room, we could easily see the value of Mr. L’s presence and authority at the front of the room for the students of colour in the class, and for the Black boys in particular, whether that came out on different days as a kind of “tough love” or a silent look of understanding and acceptance. These perceptions were confirmed in our individual student interviews. But the white girls in the class also



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imagined that they shared a special and important relationship with Mr. L. Each one had something to say about his mentorship and support that they felt was particularly for them. Despite the challenges and tensions we witnessed in the room, it did not come as a surprise to us: Well I have a bit of a different relationship with Mr. L than other people do because I’m also his stage crew captain. So, we end up talking a lot more than other people do, and we really know each other and stuff like that. And I think he is a very, very caring person. He really is invested in people’s lives, and I think that’s a really good thing. Yeah, he invests a lot of care – like he doesn’t take anybody’s crap. Mr. L will tell you if you’re doing something badly, or if you are doing something or being stupid about something regardless of your relationship with him, which I think is very important. So, he cares about that. He cares about his students in that kind of sense when it comes to like grades and, like, messing around in class and things like that. There also is some emotional support that he lends occasionally, and you can always – you can always go to Mr. L if you need it. (Individual interview, Scarlet, 25 May 2015)

scarlet:

Um, like Mr. L does care about his students, ’cause like I know a lot of other teachers that, you know, like if you miss an assignment that’s it, it’s too bad, you missed the assignment. Mr. L, he will give you another chance to hand it in. And yeah, that’s like really important ’cause for some students they’re not really organized, you know. Like me, I’m not really organized. In the past and this year he gave me a chance to do an assignment after it’s been handed back and that’s actually, like, really rare. (Individual interview, Jamal, 25 May 2015)

jamal:

I think he’s a caring teacher like even outside, I can see, like especially for me. Like he always helps me with my spoken word. Like a lot of the places that I’ve went to or performed was because he told me about them. And he’s always trying to, like, get me different opportunities and stuff like that. And like I had a show a couple of weeks ago, three weeks ago I think, and he came out to watch it. Like, he’s come out to auditions with me, so that’s cool. And also with Scarlet and Astrid, he helps ’cause they do productions outside of school too, and he always asks them about it and he’s always helping them and stuff like that. So, so yeah, obviously he’s a caring teacher. And it’s not just in the classroom, yeah. (Individual interview, Maliky, 25 May 2015)

maliky:

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Mr. L’s care was not lost on his students. They perceived it as genuine and beyond the boundaries of the classroom. They both felt his care and noticed his care for others; they saw him as a complex teacher who made space for their autonomy but stepped in with personal support when they needed it. That characterization would persist through Years  2 and 3 of the study with the extremely different groups of s­ tudents we would meet in those years. Visible and Invisible Vulnerabilities in Oral History Storytelling I’m from Aboriginal descent. We get told a bunch of stories that aren’t actually in writing so I think it is, like, important to, like, pass it on. To tell people, because stories practically are from someone’s writing or mind or something and they pass it on to the next … Because youth don’t really get a say in things, like they don’t get their voice out there and stuff. So, when they get it out there, they feel so much better about themselves; they feel they are able to do stuff and they are important, I guess, when people listen to them. (Individual interview, Kathryn, 12 January 2016)

kathryn:

We’re a close-knit family, dysfunctional, but close-knit. (Individual interview, Estelle, 18 January 2016)

estelle:

In Year 2 of our study, we met a split grade 11/12 class of twenty-eight students, with a few grade 10 IB students joining. In this year, the students would explore the genre of oral history performance by engaging with the pedagogical work shared with us by our Taiwanese collaborator, Wan-Jung Wang. The students spent eighteen classroom hours on their oral history pieces. As students in the other sites had done, they, too, began by bringing in objects from their lives that mattered to them and sharing the story of the object with the class. That candid sharing of personal stories went to unexpectedly vulnerable places for many of the Regal Heights students. For some, it was a deep experience of bonding, while for others, the vulnerability was unsettling. It was really awkward, because I don’t like when people cry around me, I’m just a happy person, so I’m just like, when people are sad, just (twiddling his thumbs and looking to the ground back and forth) “Look, great. I’m just gonna leave…” So, it was kind of just weird, I was uncomfortable in the situation where everybody was like sad and crying, and I was like, “Oke doke,” but then, once I shared my story and it was a happier moment, I felt like, “Ok, I’m

xzibit:



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different. That’s cool. It doesn’t matter. We’re not gonna choose my story.” But then, I was like, “Wow – everybody else’s story is so sad and mine is so happy but they have the same – I don’t know what the word I’m looking for is – but, they have the same power. (Individual interview, Xzibit, 26 November 2015)8 In her field notes of that day, Rachel, one of our research team members, made note of Xzibit’s discomfort: Xzibit expressed feeling awkward and disconnected from the group during the intensely sad and pained sharing session from the previous class. That took a lot of courage to name … The stakes are high and, as Xzibit showed, trust in disclosure is not universal. (Field notes, 26 November 2015)

Canadian theatre scholar Julie Salverson (1999, 2001) has long contemplated the ethics of such storytelling from real and raw personal ­material, arguing that an “aesthetics of injury” through an insistence on the literal or the fetishizing of pain can often re-traumatize vulnerable participants. Other students, in a focus group interview, spoke openly about the sense of release they felt in the sharing experience with their classmates. They broached the difficult terrain of “feelings.” Drama’s a place where I can just release all that and everybody else is releasing too and that makes me feel like I’m not alone … It has taught me how to empathize. While importantly drama is a place where I don’t have to be “perfect,” where I can just be who I want to be. greg tran: Well, I guess besides just general skills you develop while being in drama, you can also make friends in drama, you can learn to become closer with people, and like I said, you can become more expressive, you can become more social, more charismatic and confident in the way you live your life. cameron: And I think it’s because we get to talk more, like, especially about, like, our feelings, which sounds really gross to say, but – scarlett: Aww, your feelings. cameron: (laughs) And when it’s like an open comfortable space, and you know you’re not going to be the only one who’s going to, like, katrina:

8 It is very difficult to revisit Xzibit’s words and feelings. We learned that he died suddenly in 2019 from an undetected heart defect. He was a strong presence in that drama classroom and a student who worked hard to bring positive energy to the room. He is deeply missed by his drama friends and all of us.

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share something personal and everyone’s going to look at you like, “What a weirdo.” Everyone’s going to be like, “Oh, no way. That happened to me,” or like, “That happened to my sister,” or like, someone’s gonna, like, I don’t know. And I feel like only drama – what she said (pointing to Jessika): only weirdos take drama. No normal person would take drama. jessika: Good weirdos. cameron: In a good way. The best way possible. So, I don’t know, I feel like drama class is the most social class, in a way. (Focus group interview, 15 December 2015) Mr. L repeatedly reminded the group during the sharing that the stories were “sacred” and that it was a collective responsibility to keep each other “safe.” We witnessed a lot of group support for one another. Research team member Dirk wrote in his field notes: Mindy brought a Polaroid picture of her siblings in an album. Katie had a photo album of her family trip to South America. Xzibit brought a stocking that was meant to remind him of the holidays and Christmas, and in that moment there was definitely a connection between Mindy and X ­ zibit  – there was a look of almost, “I get you. I totally get you” in terms of the family stuff. Xzibit mentioned something to the effect that he doesn’t get to see his family a lot, and that resonated with Mindy as well. Phil M ­ cFarlene, Julia, and Reigna were not present. Greg did not bring an o ­ bject but he talked about an accident his mother was in and said that it probably would have been the ring of the telephone if he had brought something in. Then it was the Passover Bear story, which turned into a very emotional story about the death of Katrina’s uncle. At that point, Pippi and Zoe comforted her. Zoe brought a white stuffed rabbit. Pippi brought a worry doll. (Will check back with the video to see whether Pippi spoke of anxiety since this is a struggle for her.) Much of the hour and fifteen minutes that we had was dominated by Katrina’s story. She took a long time to tell it. Xzibit just stared straight ahead, not reacting to the story. Katie and Mindy did not respond at all. Their faces seemed to say, “Ok this is happening but there are other people there to help. I’m not going to go over.” It became very clear that it was something very fresh for Katrina, and it happened very quickly and she hadn’t processed it. There’s something about the embodied telling of it that brought out emotion that I think surprised even her. I don’t think she was prepared for it. (Field notes, 30 November 2015)



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Ultimately the class was broken up into three roughly even groups. They were advised to choose one of the “real” stories to create their play from. Group 1 decided to make a new story that would somehow include aspects of all of the students’ stories into a kind of episodic tale. They had quite a satisfying experience working together. Max explained: When we came down to picking what we were going to do, we kind of all, it kind of, all wrapped around the fact that we wanted to tell multiple stories and how were we going to tell multiple stories in one go and that’s going to be that they all have something in common. So, which multiple stories have the most things in common and then ours were picked and then we were like, “Ok then we can use Evangeline as a catalyst that will kind of connect all of us, embody all of our different things.” (Focus group interview, 17 December 2015)

max:

Group 2 chose one student’s story that they unanimously agreed was the best story to tell. They, too, felt pleased with their story but were disappointed by their audience’s reaction when they ultimately shared it. All of the stories were shared at an assembly for the entire school and in the evening for families. Group 3 merged two stories into one, or perhaps more precisely, used one story (Xzibit’s story of family and ­Christmas) as a lead-in to the story of Katrina’s uncle’s death. This group had considerable trouble reconciling the stories and suffered from power struggles in the creative process. The students and the teacher and we, the researchers, all felt that a lack of time and a press for efficiency led to a too-pressurized creative process. But most drama teachers will recognize this issue as the bane of drama classrooms. ­Creating takes time and does not adhere to schedules and bells the way other subjects might. Long ago Harold Osborne (1970) wrote on the perils of such modes of efficiency and utility in children’s creative processes, contending that children’s artistic abilities are often blunted by a way of life that is too firmly circumscribed by regard for what he calls “utility” (p. 4). By definition, most schools amplify that force much to the detriment of creative environments. What was further observable to the research team were the ways in which listening became compromised. But listening, as I am arguing, is the most fundamental skill of collaborative creative processes in theatre-making. Focused listening is extremely hard to sustain, but without it, the creative process can quite easily break down. Drama classrooms are particularly susceptible to such challenges. There are, however, many practitioners and researchers of drama spaces that have

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empirically studied the creative process and, despite its challenges, still posit that this kind of difficult and sometimes chaotic work is the very way that collaborative leadership, agency, and empathy can be built (see Bishop et al., 2017; Lehtonen, 2015; Lang, 2007). In our context, some of these important skills emerged despite the challenges. In the following section, I will share a closer look at Group 2 and their choice to tell one single story of one classmate, and the complexity of the joyful and difficult learning that ensued. muckles’s story of hearing and being heard Reflecting what Scarlett said, whenever you write something, or something, you, or act in something, for it to be good it has to come from someone’s actual experience. It has to come from the real world. It has to, it has to be the truth only maybe bent a little. When you write, you write from your experiences, and when you act, I think one of the most important things, and the reason this was so successful is we heard Muckles’s story and we saw that video of the kid hearing for the first time and we really got the, um, the emotional feeling. We actually got a sense of, maybe, of what the story was really about, what it actually felt like to, um, for this to happen. muckles: I felt there was nothing better to announce my story than this group, uh, last week, right then. Nothing better! They made me comfortable on stage. I felt comfortable because they always had my back. I, I need people who have my back. I don’t want people who criticize me; that’s one of my pet peeves. I don’t want people who criticize me. That’s, that’s kinda my thing. But they always had my back. That’s number one ... And that’s why I felt like, “I need to do this story.” (Focus group interview, 16 December 2015) paul:

Muckles was born deaf and received a cochlear implant as a young child. Before his sharing of this story at the outset of the unit, none of Muckles’s classmates knew any of this history. We knew, then, that Muckles’s decision to share this story represented an enormous act of trust on his part. Aiming for sensitivity, his classmates wanted to perform everything right and accurately. That was the way they felt they were “taking care” of the story and of Muckles himself. I think a really big important thing to do when doing an oral history performance is, like, getting to know the actual story. And with, like, every time we had an idea we had to, we had so

cameron:



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many questions for him [gesturing to Muckles], and he had to go home and like ask his mom. Like, we literally made a list for him to go home and ask his mom questions. So we had, like, details and stuff. (Focus group interview, 16 December 2015) The group wanted to “get it right,” to follow all the details. They were striving for “truth” and “accuracy.” The problem was that this goal made them adverse to any deviation from “the facts,” adverse to any kind of experimentation or symbol or metaphor in their storytelling. Muckles, playing himself, basically re-performed his experience of receiving a cochlear implant as a young boy, and the rest of his group members took on roles that included his parents, doctor, and nurses. They even included the operation in their play, with a makeshift operating table and classmates as robed nurses and doctors. But playing himself was extremely important to Muckles: I wanted to see myself on the stage telling everybody. That’s where I just see myself, more than just, just being in the wings, or just looking at it. I felt I needed to be on the stage. That’s what I needed to feel … I took on being the storyteller. I wasn’t really the director; Sophie did a very good job of that. But I was the one who told the story. I want to be myself in telling my own story … ah, ah I just felt I needed to be onstage to tell the story … and, and … I didn’t know they were going to pick mine per se … There were a lot of other great stories in my group so I was kind of surprised when they picked mine … So when they picked mine, I really thought I had to be myself … I couldn’t think of anybody better to do, play like myself. But I would have to say the role of being an actor brought me probably closer to my parents because seeing my parents, if they had seen somebody else it might have confused them, but seeing me on the stage they kind of thought this is my story, so yeah the role of the actor really helps … I don’t have to say it. I can act it out. (Individual interview, Muckles, 12 January 2016)

muckles :

In their play, the students incorporated the sound effect of an actual hearing test used to diagnose hearing impairments, and they used Muckles’s real family photo album as a highly personal and “real” prop in the show. Muckles himself directly addressed the audience, breaking the fourth wall, to describe exactly the scene they were attempting to replicate, for example, “Muckles is one year old, playing with toys in the kitchen.” It was as though they did not want any confusion or

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Figure 17.  Muckles and his group working on the script for The Stories We Tell (Toronto, Canada)

misinterpretation of this deeply personal story that Muckles was now sharing with the entire school. Holding the photo album, he would open to what the audience might imagine would be a photo showing the scene about to be re-enacted, then close it and step into the scene. The acting style was theatrical realism, the dominant performance style of Stanislavski. Paul, the student who played Muckles’s father in performance, describes his process. I mean, I just, I had never actually met him, but I – met, uh, Muckles’s dad – but I just kinda decided, well, how would I feel if I had a kid and he was deaf? How would I feel if he was going through an operation? How would I feel when he heard for the first time? (Focus group interview, 16 December 2015)

paul:

In the sharing of his story, Muckles had carefully described how his father had wept uncontrollably when he first called his son’s name post-surgery and Muckles turned his head around in response, obviously hearing his parent for the very first time. In their post-performance interviews, the students made clear how they were carrying the ethical burden of representing their classmate’s story with truth and accuracy. All of this made much sense, but it also meant there was little room in rehearsals for experimenting, for playing, for finding truths; everyone was on a quest, it seemed, for the one true representation. ­Admirable though it was, it did produce some other challenges, not least of which was creating a piece of theatre that would communicate powerfully to audiences. As team member Kelsey Jacobson and I ­previously reflected, “the relational bond that had been created within the group by virtue of



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their shared efforts to ethically and accurately represent personal stories shared among peers could not be fully translated to the audience through the narrow representational aesthetic range they had decided upon. The realism, in this case, undermined the ‘care’ they had taken to receive their peer’s story and then to share it with others. The ­totality of the shared and caring experience, the p ­ rocess of making, had seemingly been betrayed by its closed and narrow aesthetic representation” (Gallagher & Jacobson, 2018, p.  45). Roberta Barker and Kim Solga (2012) posit realism’s ties to conservative and exclusive social politics: “Over the last thirty years realism has come primarily to be defined by political failure, especially in its representations of gender and of queer and minority subjectivities” (p. 3). At the assembly, the offerings by groups 1 and 3 were well r­ eceived by the student audience, but that same audience, when watching ­Muckles’s group, laughed at inappropriate moments, finding the “operation scene” with students dressed up as doctors and nurses and realistic operation room sounds particularly comical. It did not feel like the audience was making fun of Muckles or the story, but that the ­realism, almost like a kind of “dress up” theatre for these young people playing very adult roles, was not easily taken seriously by the students in the audience. Perhaps they were also uncomfortable with the subject of disability. It was hard to know what really was behind their laughter. The performers’ closed and tight system of representation could not be easily appreciated by the audience, and the deep care for their classmate’s story that they had taken as actors was not perceptible to the audience. Performance studies scholars Jay Baglia and Elissa Foster (2005) argue that documentary theatre or ethnodrama has often relied too heavily on fixed notions of truth and “challenge what [they] perceive to be an over-reliance on the ‘real’ as a basis for claiming theatrical and political significance” (p. 127). In studying The Laramie Project, a verbatim play about the homophobic beating death of Matthew S ­ hepard, they conclude that director Moisés Kaufman wanted to move his audience, perhaps even ignite action and a sense of responsibility, but ultimately fell short by elevating the status of the play as “really real” and not sufficiently “critiquing the status quo and its privileged representations” (p. 141). The Regal Heights students seemed to have fallen into a similar trap and consequently felt very hurt by the audience reaction and even more fiercely protective of Muckles. They, too, wanted their audience to feel the story. Paul explained, “I thought [the story] was remarkable, and I wanted the feeling that I got when [­Muckles] first told it to come across to the audience” (Focus group interview, 16 December 2015). As we found in the focus group discussion, they struggled to understand

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why the audience had not been moved as they had been, but instead had laughed: That was one major thing. During the school assembly for Muckles’s thing, they all laughed. nancy: During the afternoon. evangeline: And everyone got so pissed off about that. josh: When did they laugh? estelle: They laughed when Xaviar was like, “Your son is deaf.” evangeline: And I guess maybe the way he said it, maybe? marcel: The lights didn’t go down quick enough. leroy: All of them laughed. (Focus group interview, 15 December 2015) evangeline:

Erin Hurley (2014) argues that “theatre is an intensely relational space ... that makes the experiences it offers so potentially impressive and so very disappointing when they fail ... [T]heatre is a realm that tends to fuel desires of all kind” (p. 11). This concept was entirely true for these young theatre-makers. The performance could not translate what had, in fact, been the most important part of the experience for this group of students: a bond created around the caretaking of a peer’s deeply personal and important story. During their rehearsal process, a member of our research team, Sherry Bie, made several attempts to open up their explorations, to pose questions and make invitations to consider other modes of storytelling. They politely declined her assistance, so certain were they of the path they were on. Sherry was gently offering some other ways to think about disability, not as something to be “corrected” through surgery but as something that may offer other insights. In fact, Muckles had privately shared with Sherry that he sometimes turned his implant off when he desired silence, tuning out the hearing world when he felt so inclined. We wondered if the normativity of the hearing world could be decentred, but there was no interest in exploring such narratives or possibilities. This narrative was entirely a story of “normalcy” overcoming “disability,” and the “happy ending” was vital. I write these words not in judgment of Muckles’s desire to narrate his story in a particular way but only to further underscore how important dominant affects became in the telling of this story and then how disappointing it was when those dominant affects failed to reach the audience. Beth Ferri (2012) writes: “To talk of ability is not to speak of a biological ‘fact,’ but rather to call forth a socially produced system of norms that construct and regulate the boundaries between ability and



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disability” (p. 29). Even more than their desire to work independently, the students became keepers of normative cultural narratives in their deliberations over faithful representation and important artistic messages for a broader audience: Hearing is normal; deafness needs correcting. Normalcy, Leonard Davis (2006) argues, is not a static category but rather a social obligation that must be enforced. As Kelsey, Scott, and I further argued elsewhere, “hearing was the end goal, the victory, admission into ‘normalcy’ and the entire performance reproduced the joy of ability overcoming disability. Their story re-played how disability is socially, culturally, spatially, temporally, relationally, pedagogically and artistically normatively located” (Gallagher et al., 2018, p. 67). In their telling, Muckles needed to hear with his ears, as others do, rather than in the myriad ways he navigated the world prior to his cochlear implant, creating what disability scholar Sunaura Taylor in conversation with Judith Butler (2009) describes as creating disability from impairment. The students’ work was certainly a powerful experience of bonding and peer support, but it was also a story, we remarked, that reasserted the mainstream reading of disability and stifled the complexity, conflict, and paradoxes of the actual story. There was no room for Muckles’s desire to, sometimes, turn the hearing world off. But as Muckles himself said, “they had his back,” and he “needed to do this story.” In fact, Muckles, in his post-performance interview, seemed shockingly unaffected by the reaction of the audience. The volume of the laughter in that afternoon assembly had been powerfully muted by other feedback he received from important adult members of the audience who had seen the show and, most certainly, by the support and care and love he had felt, perhaps for the first time, from his classmates. The amount of people coming up to me this morning, the gym teacher, my law teacher, my English teacher. I had everybody: my Dad was in tears; my Mom was in tears. My English teacher this morning, she couldn’t stop tearing up. Thank you to everybody for such a wonderful time. That will be one of my favorite moments, probably of my life. (Individual interview, Muckles, 12 January 2016)

muckles:

And, then, he reflected on Mr. L’s leadership and its role in his newfound love of drama and his desire to be more open with his feelings. Oh, he’s awesome. He’s my best drama teacher by far. Ah, he starts every day with a warm-up. And this, when this year began I didn’t know what to expect from drama, even though I had been here for the last two years and had taken drama for both. Not the

muckles:

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best experiences, but I stuck with it. [Mr. L] he, he’s kind of taught me to relax a little bit more, just put all of your feelings out there, just, just feel comfortable. Mr. L has been probably the greatest thing about this, about this drama year – about this this school year. (Individual interview, Muckles, 12 January 2016) Mr. L, too, had been overwhelmed by Muckles’s work in the unit: “In my evaluation, when I think about Muckles in particular, I could not help but think about his bravery and his willingness to have his story told.” We also asked Muckles what, specifically, he was taking away from drama class. It has taught me to always be close because having connections with other people really kind of makes them more become a second family to you so you can trust them to tell them what you think about things. Drama’s really connecting me with other people because, ah, maybe, because other people have done this as well, so that can connect me with them. Drama just really kind of pulls everybody together … Oh my god, and it’s really important for your oral skills, storytelling. It helps with your imagination, I would say. It certainly helped mine, and now I really have images of what the future could actually look like. Like I can’t see it, but I can kind of picture it. It’s more predictable, which I would like it to be. But storytelling is something really important that really helps you in the future, I would say. (Individual interview, Muckles, 12 January 2016)

muckles:

And we asked about oral history performance in particular. Your [personal] story is a story that happened. It’s true. When someone says they have done that, I can say I have done this. Like not to try to one up each other but to feel like – I have done it in front of the school … I just feel more comfortable with oral history now than I was in the past. After this unit, how do I feel about the world? I feel like it is a stronger place. (Individual interview, Muckles, 12 January 2016)

muckles:

The laughter at his story was not Muckles’s lasting memory. The collaboration with his peers, the support of his caring teacher, and the revelation of his personal story – the courage to make public a private struggle – was what he took away from this work. As we saw in all of the sites, such individual lessons can be life changing. The constellation



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of a caring teacher and peers who “always had [his] back” made the experience for Muckles. As Judith Butler has said, “the limits of the body do not contain us but expose us to a world without which our living is not possible. Indeed, we are given over from the start, so to have a body is already to be in the care of the other or to be in need of such care” (Butler & Berbec, 2017, p. 5). Muckles did not hesitate to share his discoveries with his peers in the focus group we held. And they did not hesitate to show their warmth and appreciation in return: I really thought about myself telling my personal story on the stage, showing my story onstage, I thought this is the moment to do it, the time is now. There was just never a better time to do it. It really helped me in the future. All the school knows my story. Even if I don’t know them, they know me. Yeah, that is something. Yeah, I think drama was definitely the best thing to do this in. It – I don’t have to say it. I can act it out … And, that’s why I say it paid off in the end. Because I had everybody knowing my story. I don’t have anything to hide now. Everything’s off my chest, and it’s just normal. classmates: (pleased) Aww. muckles: Just feels normal. (Focus group interview, 16 December 2015) muckles:

Courage in the drama classroom is never a given. Courage often needs the conditions of support and camaraderie, and there is never any guarantee of that. But many teachers work towards that goal. And we have all fallen short, possibly as often as we have made the mark. However, it is not for us, the teachers, to judge. We are not the arbiters of what is taken away by students. That is their story, not ours. The most important audience for Muckles turned out to be his parents. His fellow storytellers were consumed by their upset about what they felt were the reactions of a disrespectful audience. But Muckles had his focus on two particular audience members in the evening performance. I knew this was the time to do it. There was no going back. Uh, it, everybody’s going to know my story. It could either be good, well, hopefully not bad, but, hopefully it – I knew with, throughout the rehearsal, this show was gonna be good. I knew it in my mind. I could picture it in my mind. I, I just said, let’s lay it all out there so everybody can see. For some reason, in my mind I could just picture it: my parents watching in the audience. I knew it would be special to me. Because, well, my dad said, uh, he was actually

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bawling his eyes out as well. My mom was tearing up … That was more significant than the assembly, because my parents were there. I really, that’s where I felt the most pressure. [The student matinee] was more like a wake-up call. It was more like a dress rehearsal. You had the dress rehearsal before, even though there was more people at that assembly than there was at the Arts’ Night, but I still felt that was just one step before the actual, like, play that I’m going to present to my parents. Because I felt they were more significant than anybody in the audience. I felt like they were the ones who needed to know – who knew … When I went onstage I said, “I can do this. I can do this. It’s my story. I have no pressure.” I didn’t really feel pressure. Of course, I was sweating. But I knew it in my head. I could see myself doing it. Then when I went out there everything went out of my mind except for the script. I stuck to it. So, I would say it was a success. It was the best play I have ever done. (Individual interview, Muckles, 12 January 2016) Youth Alienation from Mainstream Politics: Who Is the Knowledgeable Citizen? In the fall term of 2016, Year 3, we found ourselves with a group of twenty-two students (twenty-one grade 12, one grade 11) and spent nine weeks with them at Regal Heights. This group would be the one we would also return to in the spring to share a reading of an early draft of Andrew Kushnir’s documentary play that he was creating from the research project. They would be the first young people to give us feedback about the creative work coming from their and other young people’s drama-making spaces. It was a complex time to be working with students in a North American context because of the US election campaign. It seemed to permeate everything, including the thoughts of our research team. Our team includes a range of people, some Americans, or with strong ties to the United States, and others, Canadian and international students, who were very concerned about the impact of a Trump presidency on the entire world. Mr. L, always aiming for a relevant curriculum, had fashioned some lessons that he hoped would help his students process some of the feelings and ideas the world seemed immersed in at the time. It is a bit of a time travel to return to that period, knowing what we know now about how disastrous that presidency has been for the world and most certainly for growing political polarization in the United States and around the globe. It has given rise to, and fanned the flames of, extremist groups and especially widespread racist and misogynist sentiment and hate crimes. It has emboldened systems and



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individuals to voice and act on racist and misogynist worldviews. The globe’s asylum seekers have especially suffered at the hands of a “Make America Great Again” ideology. Civil discourse has been replaced by crass, factless, and endless political campaigning. The young students knew it was coming, and instead of wishing to engage with the world around them, where the oxygen was getting thinner, they reclaimed their drama space to create a laboratory for preparing for consequences of this new world. For them, the writing was on the wall. One of the first exercises the Toronto students engaged in when we arrived was a dramatic exercise called “The Hall of Voices,” in which one person representing a US political figure (Trump, Clinton, Obama) walked through two parallel lines of students who shouted commentary at them that they had heard from public discourse and news outlets. After the activity, the students engaged in a conversation regarding their concerns about the US presidential election. Comments included worries about the parallels between Trump and Hitler, particularly that both were dealing with a “massive economic problem” preceding their ascendency (Mindy Moore, class discussion, 10 November 2016). Other worries spoke to the future of the Canadian economy because of Trump’s critiques of trade deals like NAFTA, because “we are very much so dependent on America for everything” (Class discussion, 10  November 2016). Many students voiced their agreement when Scarlett brought this point up. She also expressed concern over Trump marring the overall image of North America, as well as fears that the United States would “start picking on us because we don’t have much to defend ourselves against them … I mean, there’s droughts in America. We’ve got a lot of water” (Class discussion, 10 November 2016). In terms of reflecting on the potential impacts of marginalized Canadians, Mother of Dragons asserted: It’s going to be much worse now. And the fact that people out there now are scared for their lives, even more than they were before. It’s just horrible. I think that’s going to reflect throughout the world, not just America. Because America, if Americans can do it, then Canadians can do it, then everyone else can do it. (Class discussion, 10 November 2016)

mother of dragons:

It wasn’t only Trump being criticized by students. Zoe Jenkins voiced concerns about Hilary Clinton “sending all this classified information and lying for so long.” Zoe elaborated, saying: “She went after all the people that Bill Clinton had an affair with, she attacked them personally, she attacked their families. She didn’t agree with gay marriage for

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a while”; and ended with the familiar opinion that “she’s been in politics for thirty years. She’s also very corrupt because politics is a very corrupt place” (Class discussion, 10 November 2016). As Zoe continued speaking, her tone changed to one of cautious optimism towards Trump and serious consideration of some of his problematic policy proposals. After praising him for being a successful businessman and pardoning him for cheating on his taxes – “so does every rich person,” she said – Zoe echoed his denigrating comments on immigrants entering the United States from the southern border: And the other thing is, I don’t know, if you look at Trump, obviously, I disagree with everything he says, but some of his ideas aren’t terrible … He also raised the issue of all of the illegal immigrants getting into the USA, which has been a huge problem. Obviously, I think the wall is a stupid idea, but it is a really big issue, the fact that they are having all these illegal immigrants come in. The economy isn’t really surviving with all these people coming as well; if they were legal immigrants everything would have been good. But it’s not fair for all the Syrian refugees that want to come in. But then people are just hopping over the border. You know what I mean? They’re in such dire situations. The fact that people are skipping the line and just walking into the US isn’t really okay. And he’s the only politician that has brought up that issue ... Like, you are not going to build a wall, but yes, that’s a good point. We need to do something about this issue. So, I think in the end he’s not going to be as terrible as everyone thinks. (Class discussion, 10 November 2016)

zoe:

Then came a sobering thought from Xzibit: “It doesn’t feel like politics. It feels like a reality show.” Mother of Dragons was worried about her family in the United States, and Marcel, another female student of colour, called out Trump’s bigotry as something that must always be considered dangerous and influential in global politics. Seizing upon the heat and engagement of this topic, Mr. L, with our contributions, began to think about how the devising unit might be structured to allow the students to further explore their thoughts and feelings about this moment in political history. But that plan met first with a lukewarm response that morphed into an outright and vehement rejection. During our years at Regal Heights, we would travel in a large van back and forth to the school. On our trips home, we would always record our “car debriefs,” and these data became really important for attending to our own frustrations and insights as researchers.



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On 9 November 2016, the day after the US election, in our transcribed notes from a car debrief, I see I shared with the team that I had – that day – shared with Mr. L that I thought they were sinking in the process: “They’re floundering. What Xzibit said about needing structure? They all need it. It’s not about being cool with openness. They haven’t been hooked into this at all. So, they’re now articulating really sophisticated ideas that bear no connection to what they’re actually doing.” Then, I reminded the team: “We’re ethnographers; we’re gauging, How much am I in? How much am I out? And also, how can I help Mr. L best? ... Every day is a new day, all along a thread – no day is the new right. This is what you should expect, and this is what makes it a real experience, not a removed thing but an embedded thing.” For his part, Mr.  L was always amenable to the students “taking charge,” and we were, of course, so very interested in what was behind this clear rejection of his plans. From our informal conversations with students and from interviews, we came to realize three important things: (1) students felt “ignorant” about US politics and about politics in general; (2) they also felt disturbed by the degree to which US political problems were dominating their sense of autonomy and sovereignty as Canadians; and (3) they had “bigger and more pressing problems” than the corruption of mainstream politics. Looking at young people’s everyday political talk, Mats Ekström (2016) studied the different ways that secondary school students view what it means to be a citizen, or what he refers to as the “knowledgeable citizen.” The Regal Heights students expressed clearly a lack of real understanding of Canadian and US politics, which made them fear sounding stupid and also made them feel disconnected from a civic identity as knowledgeable citizens. Maria Olson and colleagues (2015) also speak about the importance of civic knowledge to enable political participation, while Juan Carlos Castillo and his colleagues (2015) argue that knowledge and classroom climate are major factors. Given the free-form conversations we saw the students engage in, we wondered, too, if it felt too polarizing a topic to take on. Were they worried that creating as an ensemble would become too challenging if they went down the road of politics? Mr. L did not give up immediately, however. He wanted his students to feel more knowledgeable. He persisted with some improvisation activities, inviting the students to be in role and play out some of the opposing views surrounding the election. But it continued to not unfold as planned, to not take flight in the ways he was hoping it might. The adults in the room were most certainly consumed by the current news cycle. That election campaign was merely a taste of what would come

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with an egotistical news cycle junkie like Donald Trump. In my interview with Mr. L in December 2016, with some hindsight in our favour, I asked him to reflect on that rejection of his plans about devising around the US political election. So when we got into groups with the peaceful protestors and the more violent protestors and the media, those sorts of things, they started to build structures where it’s like, “Ok this is happening, but there’s things that we can do.” There are ways that we can galvanize around this, you know, either against it or try to work within it. And I think some of the work we were doing, after reading some of the articles and improving some of those scenes, we saw some students thinking, “Ok, this is a pretty crappy situation, but there are things that we need to do, because we’re gonna be affected by this one way or the other, but we’ve got to try to basically do the best we can do with what we have.” kathleen: Do you think Canadian students – I’m asking myself this – have some resistance or a harder time looking at things that explicitly create division between people? mr. l: I think so. kathleen: And why is that? mr. l: Because we’re Canadian. kathleen: And what does that mean? I’m trying to figure this one out. mr. l: I think we’re the nicer, friendlier, politer part of North America. I think we’re more peacemakers than we are divisive. You know, the whole Trump thing was happening in the United States, and I know that students do realize there are repercussions for us as Canadians, but it’s still – there’s still enough of that “us and them” kind of thing that – I think that’s another reason why some students were upset that we were focusing so much on Trump because it’s not our politics necessarily, but it does affect us, right? Yeah, I think there’s a lot of that “being Canadian” that softens some of those political stances and our role within it. It’s hard to define, but there’s definitely something softer, something kinder that we are. (Individual interview, Mr. L, 20 December 2016) mr. l:

Several years later, I do wonder whether Mr.  L would feel the same way about Canada now. As everywhere, political polarization is widespread; hate crimes are on the rise; and now there is a particular version of racism against Asians, stigmatized because of the origin of the coronavirus, a version of racism deeply stoked by former president Trump. And we are in a historic moment of Black Lives Matter protests



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all over the world, after ongoing structural racism in policing and in other institutions like schools and universities, where racial reckonings continue to unfold. What would Mr. L want his students to be thinking about and creating through now? What questions and theories would the students hold now? While persisting with Mr.  L’s lessons, many students described a sense of resignation because they stumbled in their improvisations and felt ineffective. Some of them spoke of a sense of doom, knowing that the Trump presidency will affect them in some way but not being able to articulate just how that would be. When two research team members, Nancy Cardwell and Rachel Rhoades, jumped into role as “Democracy Now” reporters, they asked the class in their roles to describe their opinions of how the election of Trump would affect youth in Canada. After a full five seconds of silence and confused glances, Scarlett said something about trade and the economy. They would clearly understand from the news that bad things for Canada were expected, but they could not articulate any examples of just what that impact might be: I think people pumped it up, pumped up the issue, inflated the urgency of it when really, it’s not happening yet. And we can take precautionary measures. But I think, especially if you’re a student in Canada, there’s not much you can do to support it. As much as you can draw awareness to it, in Canada you can’t change anything. Having rallies at the Eaton Centre [large shopping mall in downtown Toronto] won’t change anything in America. So, as much as you want to help, there comes a point where you have to sit back and accept that you have to watch what happens. Unless, you know, you go down to America, become a citizen, and then voice your opinion. (Focus group interview, 16 December 2016)

breanna:

In an individual interview, Xaviar clearly communicated his sense of inefficacy. I don’t really follow politics that much to be honest. I don’t know. I just feel like it’s so much bigger than I am. And so it’s not like, so I don’t really pay attention to it ’cause it’s, like, I can’t really have an effect on it which in a way is kind of like that. I don’t know. I think it’s pretty crazy. It’s just a lot to wrap your head around and it’s really hard to, like, it’s just so big and it’s hard to like, do things with it … Like, I just couldn’t, like, when we had to make comments when we were walking around, I just didn’t know what to say. (Individual interview, Xaviar, 20 December 2016)

xaviar:

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But when they took charge and turned the pedagogy towards their real, material concerns, the theatre-making, the dialogue, and the classroom climate significantly changed. Devising Theatre, Identity, and the Search for Structure and Meaning As I sit these years later, during a global lockdown, my laptop on my lap, my earbuds in my ears, I watch again the rehearsal day when one of the two groups the class had now divided themselves into made a pitch to Mr. L about what their devised scene would be about. Though their play would stand as one story, the class divided into two groups, with one focused on the effects of mental illness and the other on trans rights. This second issue is one they said directly affected several students in their school (though not in this classroom), and this group reached out to those students in the broader school to help them with their research for their scene. They knew that they wanted their scene to reflect trans rights. Marcel stood on the stage and walked Mr. L and the rest of us through what they had been developing as they worked independently over the previous several days on their scenes. Marcel would gesture to her collaborators when they had a key line they wanted Mr. L to hear. Mr. L and the other students and our research team sat out in the audience, perceiving what the concern and interest was for this group. They had “hijacked” the content of the class in ways that Mr. L fully appreciated; they were making what they needed. And they were “over” all the talk about politics. A group of the girls explained that each one of them was going to say unhelpful things to the girl (played by Chloe), who has revealed that she is depressed and suffers from anxiety. They explained that they were going to say things like, “Just get over it” and “Just think of something positive,” “Just relax.” After these unhelpful comments, the whole group would make a “soundscape” Marcel explained, and then Xaviar (the friend) would join Chloe in the middle while her anxiety attack was symbolized by all the students slowly enveloping her while they beat their chests rhythmically, like a heartbeat getting faster. Then, a blackout, after which the four girls would find themselves at the front of the stage where, Marcel resumed, they would each say “a piece about our relationship to people with mental illness.” After each told their unique story, they would say in a chorus, “I probably shouldn’t have said that,” referring to the unhelpful comments that had initially been made. Mr. L asked them whether they were sharing true stories or whether this piece was from the research he had tasked them to carry out when they said they wanted to create a piece about how to



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offer support to friends with mental illness. They said the creative work came from both research and their own lives. Interestingly, Xaviar was the one comforting Chloe, though the piece was inspired by Xaviar’s own story of being helped. Unlike Muckles, Xaviar did not choose to play himself. After they explained their scene, classmates sitting in the audience offered helpful suggestions. Had you thought of this? Maybe Vanessa could be a supernatural character who comes to help? Clearly, their story had caught the interest of their peers. The video recording reminds me that I, too, asked a question building from how they had explained that they also wanted to uplift the audience, not just depress them with their “sad” story about a character who is anxious. So I asked: “Are you saying that, as people, we get affected by things in our life but that they don’t necessarily have to determine us? Is that part of what you want to offer an audience, too?” Chloe responded that they want the audience to be heartened by the hug that she shares with Xaviar at the end. The hug, which came from the personal story Xaviar shared with his class and was the motivation for this work to be developed, became the symbol for overcoming anxiety – not alone but with support from friends, the very thing the class said they initially wanted to explore. My question, I now realize, positioned us as individuals overcoming our inheritance, while their response, in all its simplicity, was about valuing how mental illness is a shared experience that requires the support of community. Xaviar missed the focus group interview for his devising group, so he had an individual interview. In this shared moment with Nancy, he retells the story of the hug and reiterates how important the dramatic realization of that symbol became for him. So, um, the questions are in four sections, and the first section is about the devising unit. So, the first question is, “What considerations did you think about as you devised your performance piece?” And here are some examples. Did you think about audience, or politics, or ethics, originality, impact? You guys, you were in the mental wellness group. So, as you guys thought through that, what were you discussing? xaviar: We wanted to make it, like, like, realistic. As realistic as we could. Kind of have it connect with our age group in a way because it can be a pretty difficult time for some. It can kind of make you bring out traits, like, that, stuff like (pause) we were trying to keep it relatable I guess. nancy: As you devised your piece, what was the most enriching moment for you? nancy:

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Figure 18.  Final performance of Blackbird at the school assembly (Toronto, Canada)

Enriching moment (pondering). And take your time. These are pretty big questions. xaviar: I thought it was pretty cool that they added the hug that I proposed. Just because that was a really important moment for me. Like, it just really helped. nancy: How did that happen? (Nancy meant how did the hug become central in the devising process, but Xaviar recounts again his episode with a panic attack.) xaviar: We were just hanging out at my friend Keaton’s house and I wasn’t really having a great day. Kind of a bad day, and it just kind of all hit me. I was thinking. I was just in my head. And so that happened. nancy: And he just intuitively did that [gave you a hug]? xaviar: Yeah. He hugged me. Yeah. It was really good and that also really helped our friendship. It kind of brought it to another level. It’s, like, it showed that he really did care. We played hockey together for a long time. He’s a really cool guy. nancy: I thought that was an amazing moment when you shared that in the class. I was just thinking that it’s so great that you felt like you could do that and hopefully more people would take that lead when things come up. And then when you were devising the piece, how did the hug happen to come into the scene? Because you related the story? Or? xaviar: Um. nancy: Did you guys just decide at the end of the panic attack – xaviar: nancy:



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That the hug would be like the “cure,” the saviour of it. Just ’cause, after explaining how it helped me, we just kind of added that. (Individual interview, Xaviar, 20 December 2016)

xaviar:

The two scenes somehow came together, the story of a trans girl who meets an old friend who knew them in their former life and the story of a friend bringing solace to a bereaved friend suffering from anxiety and depression. The shared context was a funeral, a sombre meeting place for the two stories. And they closed with a tuneful rendition of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” “Blackbird singing in the dead of night/ Take these broken wings and learn to fly/ All your life/ You were only waiting for this moment to arise.” We were clearly very far away from Trump and Hillary, and the “unknowledgeable” citizen, and were instead deep inside the terrain of their lives, their own concerns. Mr. L reflected: “What I was shocked by was how much resistance I got from the students around it. I thought they were going to be able to work within that context [of politics] to see the idea of maybe what hope can come out of this, but in a lot of respects I think the opposite happened: ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Why are we spending so much time on this?’ ‘Where are we going with this?’” Even though he had pivoted away from his plans to dramatically explore the political moment and turned the leadership over to his students, they somehow, the researchers agreed, seemed not fully committed to either the research or the creative process of their reclaimed work. Mr. L shared this view. But the students claimed to be satisfied by their work, though they expressed some concern about offending people, given the topics they chose to explore. Mr. L had encouraged them to reach out to the trans community more, to think carefully about the messages they were transmitting to an audience about mental illness, but they claimed they were satisfied enough. They subverted the curriculum in favour of the curriculum they desired, but they were searching for structure. They used drama to work out the narratives they wished to develop and share with an audience of their peers, but floundered to find a structure that could contain their stories. In the end, the victory was not the actual work itself but their attempts to find the stories they wanted to tell and the subjects that mattered to them. While Mr. L, and we as researchers, felt the students had not pushed themselves to their greatest potential, they seemed to feel satisfied by rousing the emotions of audience members who saw their work. It was not necessarily the quality of the work, then, that satisfied the students but rather that they had evoked responses in the audience and subverted the unit to turn towards the issues most pressing to them. And sometimes, that is exactly

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what the drama classroom affords as it balances creative practice with the social work of supporting young people and their quest for meaning. This point was true every year at Regal Heights in Toronto, as it was in Athens, Lucknow, Coventry, and Tainan. To invoke Hurley (2014) once again, “theatre is an intensely relational space ... that makes the experiences it offers so potentially impressive and so very disappointing when they fail” (p. 11). Drama, as a school subject, is marvellous in this way, with its potential flexibility and openness, which must, of course, always be accompanied by a teacher willing to follow the lead of his students, to privilege relationality, to see beyond his own pedagogical or artistic visions. Such considerations do not guarantee excellent artistic work or even positive social outcomes. But drama is not only about successes; it is also about failures. And if you squint your eyes enough, you can even sometimes see the successes inside the failures. Drama in a justice and care–focused context is about survivable failure. The trust and care, the difficult conversations, and the wild affects can accommodate the deconstruction of, and learning from, failure. We can all exit stage left asking ourselves what happened and what might, next time, be changed for the better – pedagogically, artistically, and socially. The hope, sometimes, is about “next time.”

7 Hope and Care in the Quantitative Landscape

One of the ways that we pushed ourselves beyond the familiar comparative method for global studies, a favoured mode of international research in almost all domains and sectors, was to create a mixed methods Radical Hope Survey that would allow us to see sites in their own terms, to offer young people an instrument that invited them to make sense of questions and prompts in culturally significant ways and not around some perceived, unspoken norm at the centre of our probing. That meant we relied heavily on our international network of researchers to help us understand whether our questions would constrain cultural understandings in any way or delimit how young people felt invited to make sense of our questions. Language alone was a challenge. For instance, there are five different ways to translate the word “care” in Greek. Which “care” were we meaning? What cultural language around that word would help the Greek young people know what we were asking them? Many see the value of quantitative work as its capacity to help “generalize” or abstract specific findings so they have greater or wider relevance; in essence, our approach was to do the opposite. We wanted the instrument itself to be adaptable around the terms of reference and desires of the different cultural groups so that findings could be seen in their specificity and also in their relationality. The survey also allowed us to ask questions about young people’s relationships beyond the drama space, lives outside schools or clubs, including their online lives. We could see the tentacles of care and hope beyond what was immediately perceivable to us in the qualitative work. We would put the weighty concepts of “hope” and “care” together in ways that were more difficult in the qualitative work, bring them into relationship with one another as I had originally done in the conception of the study. The survey became a place for the youth to ponder some big questions. And the questions

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we asked worked against the normative survey ideas of generalizing individuals across type and instead probed into individual existence in order to see the infinite possibilities of relationality from one single life. The survey itself, through its quantitative and qualitative questions, was inviting young people to think with their specific communities in mind, to situate themselves relative to the others of importance in their lives. Geoffrey Walford (2020) recently published an article provocatively ­titled “Ethnography Is Not Qualitative,” in which he traced several “classic” ethnographies in British sociology of education to illustrate how quantitative research played a significant part in those ethnographies. Then he examined more recent ethnographies to illustrate how the presence of quantitative research in ethnographic studies has greatly diminished, rendering, he argues, ethnographic research all the poorer for its absence: “Ethnography has been weakened by the exclusion of simple counting. Ethnography seeks to answer questions – who, how, when, where, what, why, and so on – and the questions of ‘how many?’ and ‘how often?’ are an important part of understanding cultures” (p. 129). In fact, he further argues that the division between qualitative and quantitative research has been detrimental to both (p.  129). While focusing primarily on British schools of ethnography, the argument has relevance for our global work. His analysis of the phenomenon is as follows: At both ends of the qualitative–quantitative spectrum, over time more complicated research methods and ways of analysing data developed such that it became almost impossible for researchers to be able to cover the full range of educational research, and so they began to perceive of themselves as either “qualitative” or “quantitative” researchers. Research methods books designed for undergraduate and graduate markets in ­education and social sciences more broadly began to be divided into two distinct groups – and ethnography practically always became positioned within the qualitative portion. (p. 128)

One of the most important early discoveries in our quantitative work was how our relational ideas had helped us to think beyond traditional demographic information. Of course, we ran statistical findings through the lenses of gender, sex, class, race, age, socio-economic status, and so on, but more important to us was how young people saw themselves in relation to others – their families, friends, communities – and how, importantly for us, the microcosm of the drama-making space could be a point of contemplation and analysis for young people themselves to help us perceive how they understand their worlds. A couple of concerning findings we grasped early on in our analysis were guiding our



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impulses: We came to see how age was negatively co-related with hope; in other words, getting older meant having less hope. And further, aging was key in how we came to understand young people’s relationship with care, both giving and receiving care. As youth aged and naturally pulled further away from, or relied less heavily on, those early primary relationships with parents/teacher/school peers, they also came to feel less optimistic about their personal futures. Our work has provided evidence for some of the concerns Walford (2020) points to when he writes: “If we do not use any numerical methods in our observation, we will miss regularities and patterns. If we do not categorise and count those described by those categories, we will miss linkages to wider social structures and indicators of inequality” (p. 132). The following section will delve into these findings, with nuance and subtle questioning, that our relational survey afforded us alongside our qualitative fieldwork and qualitative survey questions. Our quantitative work also importantly laid the groundwork for better understanding how the drama space can shore up hope for young people, especially as deficits they perceive in their lives can leave them feeling discouraged. In this way, the mix of methods, including the inventive drama methods of our work, helped us realize the complexity and suitability of a multi-paradigm ethnography to remain agile in our responses as ideas unfolded and new questions arose across our longterm engagement with our research collaborators and participants.9 Key Quantitative Findings across Sites • To see and be seen as a fundamental right: Young people learn best in and from the worlds they inhabit. Curriculum and pedagogies that centre the everyday experiences of young people are most powerful. 9 I am committed to carrying out quantitative work differently in future studies, given the ground-laying work of Michelle Fine and her team at City University of New York, published after our quantitative study was completed, who have powerfully reimagined questions of gender and sexuality for large-scale survey work. In a formidable chapter, “Refusing to Check the Box: Participatory Inqueery at the Radical Rim,” published in 2018, the researchers open up the many binary and limiting categories of most quantitative surveys with one designed by and for LGBTQ+ & GNC (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, plus and gender nonconforming) youth (Fine et al., 2018). I am certain that all young people would benefit from being invited to think about gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability in less restrictive and narrow terms, and research results will come to better represent the world as it is importantly evolving.

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• Creative practices to dream more connected lives: the process of imagining community (which can be facilitated through drama) is critical to fostering hope. Trusting this process is critical to caring for the self and others. This understanding is powerfully corroborated by the multi-site survey – the drama space is appreciated for its ability to address certain deficits youth may experience in other relationships. • Given the impact of the current world order on the social inheritance of young people, hope is, on one hand, a shared political alternative but can also be a deep source of divide. The response to our quantitative survey has taught us that perceived minority/ majority identifications (for example, ethnic, religious, gender, class, caste in Lucknow; socio-economic class in Coventry and Athens; Indigeneity and race in Toronto; Indigeneity and family-based ­stigmatization in Tainan) fundamentally shape their experience and orientation of hope. • The trifecta of care: Students, regardless of site, shared in the ­survey that their early sense of hope is dominated by their relationship with their school peers, school teachers, and parents. These relationships foster hope by providing them opportunities to both listen and assert, to care and be cared for. This important foundation later becomes a point of anxiety as they grow older and/or as such relationships are replaced by other types of relationships, especially romantic ones. Aging makes them feel less optimistic about their personal future. • Age and the diminishment of hope: Across sites, we found a ­worrying co-relation between age and the diminishment of hope. The older young people were, the less hope they felt. • Care as responsibility to others: The “ensemble” or collective ­process of theatre-making underscores how struggle and disagreement, difference and solidarity are valuable experiences in an increasingly fractured world. Drama can afford young people a rehearsal space to develop care for self and others. Given the appreciation expressed by the youth in both our quantitative and qualitative data, we see how drama spaces are uniquely positioned to be responsive to the evolving demands for care and hope among diverse students. One important consideration as I proceed into some discoveries with more detail is to understand that the survey was completed at one point in time and therefore only completed by the actual students with whom we were working in Year 2 of the study. The temporal proximity between the survey and our site-based work permitted a rich analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data. The single point survey



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Percentage of students

%

City site

Figure 19.  Percentage of student participants at each research site

Percentage of students

40%

–

–

Age (years)

Figure 20.  Ages of student participants

distribution also resulted in greater variation in response rates between sites, with Tainan and Lucknow constituting the two largest groups while Coventry, Toronto, and Greece had fewer students that year. For this reason, our statistical analysis focuses less on comparisons between sites and more on the overarching variables of age, gender, and ethnic identity. Further analysis revealed these variables to be predictive of site-based differences, supporting our focus on these individual factors.

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60.00% 54.50% 45.50% 40.00%

57.10%

42.90%

60.60%

39.40%

21.20%

Toronto

Coventry

Athens Yes

Lucknow

Tainan

No

Figure 21.  Student self-identification of ethnic minority status by site

“Outside the Mainstream” and the Nature of Personal Hope and Experiences of Care Early on, we came upon a major finding that oriented our curiosities and sense-making from that point onward. I am not sure a more traditional approach to quantitative surveying would have necessarily surfaced this foremost vantage point for understanding diverse young people’s experiences across vastly different cultural spaces. It is something we came to call “Life Outside the Mainstream,”10 an experience of “minority” status as determined by the young people themselves, given their perspective on the communities in which they live – what constitutes the centre and what constitutes the margin

10 I must once again signal my gratitude to research team member Scott Mealey, who brought his philosophical spirit to the task of statistical analysis in a way that I think is a rare talent. He gave us new language, too, to help us make novel connections with real world implications. He also made numbers and clusters of findings dance on a stage for us with his theatre analogies.



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according to the complex and evolving realities of their lives. For the reader, this finding considerably opens up the complexity of perceiving oneself to be at the margins of one’s own community. Our analytic approach aimed to challenge how majoritarian/minoritarian identities could be thought differently rather than reproducing typically reified and dominant perspectives. For instance, Cuban performance studies scholar Jose Esteban Muñoz (1999), speaking from the context of the United States, examines how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate dominant cultures not simply by aligning themselves with or against majoritarian discourses but rather by “recycling and r­ ethinking encoded meaning ... [to] represent a disempowered politics or positionality [previously] rendered unthinkable by dominant ­culture” (p. 31), what he has termed “processes of disidentification.” Our ­approach also accounts for the ­intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) of identities and for young people’s own experiences of their multiple, and ­context-dependent, identities. Our findings, then, represent a significant shift away from static n ­ otions of identity and situate relationality and context as key components in demographic research. There is no story more significant from the quantitative data that so powerfully and consistently accounts for the “stickiest” connections between the questions the survey asks than the thick red line of ethnic status, that is, the division between students who selfreported as a person in the ethnic minority (REM) and those who did not (non-REM). Among the 195 students who filled out the survey, 48.17 per cent said “yes” and 51.83 per cent said “no” – the s­ ingle most even split among any of the questions. We chose the term “REM,” as in “report as ethnic minority,” and “non-REM,” as these come closest to the actual question we asked the young people (“I  consider myself an ethnic minority”) but also because we were wanting to avoid the ­over-determination of terms such as majoritarian/minoritarian, which tend again to reify identities around a consolidated construct that we know from our qualitative and quantitative ­research can round out the edges of young people in ways that are inadequate and render identity more static than it is or as we know it to be experienced by young people. We consulted, too, with our research collaborators to try to find the term that would be most clear and understandable across all of the research sites. It is important to underscore that our survey questions asked young people to decide, within their own contexts, whether they identified themselves as of the “ethnic m ­ inority” in their context, not whether others had identified them as such.

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Hope In comparing the responses of REM students and non-REM students, we discovered very distinct portraits of the nature of personal hope, as primarily derived from the relational interactions with the first five survey items known as the hope scale. Beginning with the first variable, how important they feel “hope” is to them personally, what is unique about the interaction REM students have is that parents, as caregivers and influencers, play a much stronger positive role than seen in nonREM students. Conversely, as these same REM students ­experience greater levels of care from their online relationships, they are much more likely to experience a decrease in valuing “hope”  – p ­ erhaps a greater cynicism among their peers and/or in the online world. We also found important associations between their level of personal hope and the degree to which students feel they have opportunities to be their “true selves,” the latter we discovered as a key variable for REM students. Non-REM students, on the other hand, demonstrate a connection between their level of personal hope and the influence of grandparents (REM students seem to actually have a negative trend between these two). This second group also tends to make a stronger, though not exclusive, association between personal hope and the expectation that their lives will improve in the future. While the confidence in one’s ability to solve problems seems relatively insignificant to REM ­students – despite some unique connection with their opportunities to be their “true self” – it emerges as a distinct hub of associations for the non-REM students. It mirrors the REM “hope” relationship above in the way in which their problem-solving is deeply impacted by the care and influence they receive from their parents and negatively associated with the care received from online friends. It also positively correlates with the students’ level of confidence in an improving future and in their sense of having people in their lives they can trust. Care and Trusting Relationships “Having people they can trust” is another variable that most strongly manifests for non-REM students in its important positive ­connection with having caring school friends and in the negative effect that ­increased levels of romantic influence seem to have on it. The only ­relational variable found positively impacting the sense of trust for REM students comes from the care they report they receive from their grandparents. The chief hope hub for REM students revolves around the degree of opportunities to be their “true selves,” and it is uniquely and



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positively associated with many of their relationships. These include the care and influence of their parents, the influence of their grandparents and other family members, the influence of teachers, and the likely importance of religious leaders. The only distinguishing connection for non-REM students around the “true self” question is with the level of care they believe they receive from their school friends. Finally, both REM and non-REM students feel the important positive influence of key adults on their optimism about the future, but REM students tend to connect it with the importance of religious leaders and the influence of teachers,11 while non-REM students associate it with the care and ­influence of their grandparents and the influence of their parents. Even though both groups seem to share instances where parents and grandparents play an important positive role in facets of their hope (and that, similarly, online friends and romantic friends have an occasionally negative i­mpact on their hope),12 we nevertheless begin to already see some broad, diverging trends. REM students tend to value the hopefulness derived from opportunities for authentic ­self-depiction, while non-REM students much more frequently emphasize problem solving and trusting relationships. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that REM students seem to feel the stronger consequences of influential school teachers who control the environment for expression,13 and non-REM students are moved by educational community-building primarily ­influenced by their schoolmates.14 Family, Community, and School REM students seem more likely to exist in two, less connected worlds: family-community (mostly driven by parents) and school (mostly driven by coaches and teachers). The influence and care from the parents of these students have a strong, positive correlation with the influence and care received from other adults, other family members, friends outside of school, romantic relationships, and the likely impact of a religious leader. In school settings, these REM students show signs of increased positive engagement with their teachers and classmates as

11 Non-REM students also have a significant positive association between teacher influence and future optimism but at a meaningfully lower level of effect than REM students. 12 These two types of relationships are moderately related in the data. 13 This idea was also expressed in some of the Toronto site interviews by students of colour. 14 Opportunities to “be me” versus opportunities to build together is a major theme from these data and is especially present in the specific questions we ask about drama.

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we see an increase in the likely influence of a coach. Non-REM ­students move in a more integrated but narrower world and are more likely to engage in their schools, especially with their teachers, to the degree they feel cared for and loved by their parents. These students are more likely to have influential, extended relationships with other adults, such as coaches and other family members, as they are cared for and influenced by their grandparents. In both groups, then, we find a key parental type figure, but the non-REM students seem to orient first, through their parents, towards the school world, and REM students seem to orient, through their parents, towards their extended communities (extended family, cultural neighbourhood). In fact, non-REM students’ parents actually seem to actively suppress certain extended relationships (for example, romantic relationships). The Influence of Family and Where You Live The impact of family (other than parents) shifts depending on city, age, and whether the student is a REM. Coventry, representing the youngest group of students, reports the highest levels of care and influence on hope from grandparents and other family members, while Tainan, the oldest group of students, reports the lowest level of the influence on hope from other family members. Lucknow is unusual in that, while it reports, overall, the lowest levels of care and influence from grandparents, it seems to be a phenomenon distinctly connected with students from that site who are not REM. The connection of care and influence between parents, grandparents, and other family members is also more broadly connected to REM status. For REM students, we saw a meaningful bond between the care received from parents and other family members. For non-REM students, this bond is between the care and influence of parents and grandparents. These are important connections, because for non-REM students, there is a positive association between the care and influence of grandparents and a positive association with their personal estimation of the future. These findings might point to the propensity of majoritarian families to streamline their children’s relationships, encouraging significant access only with those who have the capacity to directly improve their future.15 The influence of other family 15 Here, Scott speculated that, in wealthier countries and families, there is a tendency to have fewer children. The typical explanation is that, given the increased likelihood these children will survive and thrive, it’s wiser to pour a great deal of energy into a few, while the parents simultaneously maintain and grow their personal income/status (which again can be leveraged to benefit their children in the future).



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also matters for these students, but mostly because its absence (that is, low influence) seems negatively connected to hopefulness about the future. REM students, on the other hand, are more likely to manifest positive associations between the influence of grandparents/other family members with opportunities to be themselves and the degree of care from grandparents with their sense of having people to trust. This last finding may suggest that REM students see the family circle as a safe alternative for self-expression in contrast to the majoritarian world in which they feel far less engaged or significant. Learning and Relationality In a series of small ways, the relationships students have with people outside of their families and schools is positively associated with the importance of hope, their access to trusting relationships, their opportunities to be their true self, and their confidence in an improved future. The likely impact of these relationships is often associated with other social connections in their schools and within their families. The strong influence on hopefulness from school friends, for instance, increases the likely influence from friends outside of school. Non-REM students are more influenced by outside friends when they are also influenced by their school teachers. Students are more likely to be influenced by other adults when they believe they are receiving some care and influence from school teachers. These connections perhaps suggest that learning relationality in any arena of one’s life has a more global impact on all relationships and/or that experiences of relationality are less prone to discrimination between types of people/environments. If this is true, then the relational learning that drama fosters becomes even more valuable. Hope and “Others” Financial status also seems to have a role in the level of influence from outside friends, as it decreases among those who report less than average household incomes. “Outside” relationships impact hopefulness in small but tangible ways. Increased influence from outside friends is

The less wealthy/powerful must often contend with the likelihood they may in some way lose their children, so they may be more inclined to increase the odds of success by having more children and, perhaps, managing these larger families by spreading the responsibility over a larger network of family members.

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associated with elevated positive expectations for the future. At least some care from outside friends seems to increase the feeling of having trusting relationships and the opportunity to engage as one’s true self. Large amounts of care and influence by “other” adults are positively associated with the increased personal meaningfulness of hope. Care and Online Relationships There is a persistent, positive, moderate association between the care received from online relationships and the influence of online relationships. Broadly, Tainan reported, on average, at least some care from online relationships compared to very little, on average, from the other sites (though there are important sectors who do feel its meaningfulness in each city). Students in Lucknow and Tainan, while reporting small levels of influence on their degree of hopefulness from their online relationships, are still reporting higher levels on average than those in Toronto and Athens (who consider the question, on average, to not even be applicable). Again, with the exception of Athens, there are still pockets who are at least somewhat influenced by their online relationships (especially in Lucknow). Not surprisingly, there are ­important ­increases in the degree of care received and influence on hope from online relationships as students get older – fifteen and up being an important threshold. Among REM students, those identifying as boys tend to report higher levels of care from their online relationships than those identifying as girls, while among non-REM students, those i­dentifying as girls tend to report higher levels of influence from their online relationships. We also see that, among non-REM students, those who ­report higher than average household incomes are more likely to report at least a little influence from their online relationships. Overall, from a demographic point of view, distant relationships moderated online (or perhaps through the mail) tend to matter more for students who are non-Western, older, come from more affluent than average households (if non-REM), and are REM boys (care) or non-REM girls (influence). Parents’ Care and Hope It came as no surprise that parents, more than any other group, not only offer the most care (82.1 per cent report they receive a lot of care from their parents) and exert the most influence on students (61  per  cent ­report that parents have a big influence on how hopeful they feel) but also are the most intertwined in the nature of the other relationships the students have and their sense of hope. For REM students, parental



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care shifts along with future optimism (especially between those who receive “a lot” of care and those who receive “some”), while non-REM students experience their shift between parental influence and future optimism (again, mostly between “a lot” and “some” influence). This last contrast matches the overall hope pattern: REM students are more hopeful – in the way they value “hope,” believe they can be their selves, and foresee a better future – as they experience more care from their parents, and non-REM students are more hopeful – believing they are effective problem solvers and imagining a better future – as they feel greater levels of influence on their hopefulness from their parents. Teachers’ Care and Hopeful Futures Non-REM students are especially moved by the care they feel they ­receive from teachers, while REM students shift according to the teacher’s capacity to project a vision of hope. While the aspects of hope that most matter to each remains the same between parents and teacher,16 the mode seems to switch: REM students, overall, thrive on the care of their parents and the influence of their teachers, and non-REM students seek the influence of parents and desire care from their teachers. Put differently, we might say that non-REM students are searching for affirmation of their current worth from their teachers, while REM students are searching from their teachers for an affirmation of their future possibilities. Generating Hope through Self-Creation in the School, the Community, and the Drama-Making Space Some of the most dramatic differences between REM students and nonREM students take place within a school context, beginning with divergences (and sometimes correspondences) in the impact of school-based friendships. Among REM students, there is a small, significant increase among boys in reporting that they receive only a little care and influence on their level of hopefulness from their school friends and a decrease in reporting they receive “a lot” in both categories. This finding may suggest a higher level of isolation from REM boys in school ­settings, which

16 As a reminder, REM students associate teachers with the value of “hope,” future optimism, and opportunities to be their desired self, while non-REM students connect teachers with the value of “hope,” future optimism, and belief in the ability to problem solve.

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would likely impact their future prospects.17 There is also a big difference between the level of care from school friends reported by REM students in Toronto (“a lot”) and those in Tainan (“some”), which may gesture to the stronger ethnic enclaves in a multicultural city like Toronto compared to other more homogeneous urban centres. Among non-REM students, the only small, significant difference is between the level of care from school friends reported by respondents between twelve to fourteen years old (“some” care) and those over seventeen years old (on average “a lot” of care received). This finding seems to be yet another sign of increasing peer connection for non-REM students as they grow older.18 Care and Self-Building There are a few reported meaningful connections between the care received from school friends and other relational and hope scale variables, but only, with one exception, for non-REM students. On the ­relational front, there is a small mutual increase in the care from friends outside of school and the care received from online friends for nonREM students when they receive “a lot” of care from friends in school. This trend is perhaps accounted for by high-sociability types among non-REM ­students – those who are well liked by their school peers and also well “liked” in a social media sense. When it comes to the impact on hopefulness, there is, first, a very clear increase in the level of feeling that non-REM students have people they can trust as the care from school friends also increases, especially when there is a lot of care received from their schoolmates. Second, there is a small increase in the perception of having the opportunity to be one’s true self in conjunction with a corresponding rise in the care from school friends, with particularly important differences between those who receive “a lot” of care and those who receive “a little.” The only association for REM students is a negative one, in which decreases in the care from school

17 This finding would certainly correspond with other research in the area of gender and schools. 18 Again, we included the categories “male,” “female,” and “other.” I now see this categorization as a significant limitation. Michelle Fine and colleagues’ (2018) publication, noted earlier, came years after the survey was developed. In her work, students resisted a “check the box” approach to social identities like gender and preferred many more non-binary options. We were also mindful that, in some of our school contexts – in particular Greece – school leaders needed to sign off on our survey questions, and some were deemed too “provocative” or controversial. We did face some external constraints, therefore.



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peers parallel a similar downward shift in the care from teachers. So, for non-REM students, we see evidence for relational self-building as an important by-product of having caring school friends, but for REM students, we only find trends in which such students are feeling little care from their school friends at the same time as they feel the same deficit from their teachers. School Friends and Hopefulness Interestingly, a switch occurred when we began to explore the impact of school friends on the degree of hopefulness. In sharp contrast to the care outcomes, the majority of associations came exclusively for students who identify as REMs. For instance, there is a small, positive connection between the influence of school friends19 and the influence of adults outside of the home/school, perhaps most acutely seen when these “outsiders” have only a little effect. Within a school setting, both the care and influence of a school teacher very positively associates with the influence of school friends for REM students – though it is important to keep in mind that higher levels of influence are not necessarily an affectively positive experience. Strong drops in this type of influence occur between REM students who reported experiencing “big” influence” and those who reported only “a little.” Additionally, for REM students, the importance of an athletic coach is positively associated with greater influence from school friends. So, it might be suggested about REM students that the adults in school settings especially set the tone for the true import of school friends on their sense of hopefulness or hopelessness. One striking way to look at these findings and reflect on how schools are doing in many parts of the world is the following: REM students seem to receive especially positive benefits from strong relationships, while non-REM students seem to receive especially strong deficits as a consequence of particularly weak relationships. For non-REM students, it is a narrative of increasing advantage, while for REM students, it is a story of avoiding disadvantage. Influence of Teachers Where teachers fit within the major landscape of this survey largely depends, in keeping with the major refrain of the data, with whether

19 “Influence” here and subsequently is used as shorthand for “the influence on degree of hopefulness.”

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respondents report as REM or non-REM. REM students, as seen above, find small to moderate correlations between school friends and school teachers, while non-REM students demonstrate nothing of the kind. Instead, their link is between teachers and parents. Overall, boys tend to report a small decrease in care and influence on hopefulness from a school teacher (we saw a medium decrease in influence from REM boys). There are very large differences in care and influence from teachers between sites: Lucknow is high in both the care received from teachers and the degree to which they influence the students’ level of hopefulness; Tainan and Toronto (and possibly Coventry) are mid-range; and Athens is very low. There is a moderate decrease in the influence of teachers among all students between the ages of fifteen and seventeen and for those over seventeen. For REM students, school teachers can create important environments where the students feel they have ­opportunities to be their true self, which facilitates improved future optimism (and/or vice versa). Non-REM students can make gains in their future ­optimism when their confidence in their own problem-solving ability is enhanced by care from their teachers and bolstered by in-school friends they can trust. The Drama Classroom and Feeling Heard Within the context of the drama classroom, projects that the students felt helped them express themselves rather than improving their drama skills (REM students) or relieving stress (non-REM students) were associated with higher levels of valuing hope, as was helping others by challenging them rather than making them feel safe (REM students). ­Increased levels of confident problem solving (REM students) were associated with preferring that people perform along with them rather than leaving them alone. We saw increased levels of feeling that students have people to trust when they report they had worked on ­projects that helped them work collectively rather than express themselves and when they preferred to work with people who understood their feelings rather than leaving them alone (non-REM students). Finally, ­increased optimism about the future is witnessed in students who prefer others to either listen to them or challenge them rather than make them feel safe (REM students), when they work on projects that help them understand others rather than relieving stress (non-REM students), and when they chose to help their classmates by performing with them rather than making them feel safe or when they offered practical advice rather than challenging them (both non-REM students). While non-REM students tend to gain more from feeling-centric



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activity rather than being challenged (more REM students), there is a general benefit expressed from mutual sharing, manifest in peer listening and expressing/performing self with others: being me with others. Being Assertive and Learning Empathy Though we did not see a great deal of direct differences between REM students and non-REM students in reported drama preferences and experiences, there are still two unique characteristics worth outlining. There was a small difference in the primary way students chose to help their classmates. REM students are more likely to first adopt a strategy of challenging their fellow drama students, and non-REM students are more likely to focus on being a good listener.20 There was also a small difference in what they reported as the chief reward of engaging in their most recent drama project. Students in both groups were likely to say that it helped them better express themselves and better understand themselves. Non-REM students, however, were also just as likely to share that the project helped them better understand others or helped them to improve at working collectively. This finding is certainly not overwhelming proof, but it may gesture to a positive trend: REM students are feeling like they can be (or hope to be) more assertive in a drama classroom (likely not typical of their experience elsewhere), and non-REM students are learning to be more empathetic and less dominating. Feeling Safe and Being Challenged There is a wide range of preferences about the type of classmate students feel would be helpful to them if they were tasked with dramatizing some aspect of their personal experience. A majority of students included in their top two helpful characteristics “peers who are good listeners” and “peers who can successfully understand their feelings.” One trend that emerged within the theme of drama relates to the students’ engagement with parent-type authority. When students report a parent or a coach as a prominent motivator in their lives and/or a receiver of a student’s primary care, they are much more likely to prioritize the usefulness of being challenged in a drama project rather than citing the value of receiving practical advice or being made to feel safe.

20 REM students also chose being a good a listener as their top choice (about 45 per cent) but less than non-REMs students did (about 60 per cent).

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Self-Expression and Understanding Others What is most clear is that a significant amount of divergence exists in the way students engage and feel they profit from their work in a drama class. This divergence is at least partially explained by its ability to adapt to and illuminate the students’ perception of their relational standing they feel they have in their everyday lives. When students spend much of their time in deferential relationships with parents, coaches, and r­eligious leaders, they will more likely crave the feeling of being pushed towards deeper degrees of self-expression, but when students shift ­towards greater engagement with peers, they tend to place higher value on drama that enhances understanding of others and how one can carefully and helpfully build with them. It is also important to realize that students who feel themselves to be in the minority are more likely to feel the need for self-expression and require teachers who foster a safe environment for doing so. However, given that the majority of students suggest they would help their classmates by being a good listener (two out of three) and by expressing their understanding of their classmates’ feelings (one out of two), we have learned that students generally offer their classmates what they themselves would prefer to receive. Young People as Caregivers The single most powerful correlation of my previous global study (see Gallagher, 2014) was the finding that, the more youth actively took care of others, the more engaged they were at school. In this study, I wanted to flesh out that surprising and little-studied finding. A new and very compelling finding from this Radical Hope study is that the strong relationship between caretaking and school engagement holds, regardless of a student’s social identity. Given the many differences we did find between REM and non-REM students, giving care reaps rewards for young people’s learning across geography and identity. When the students were asked to list the three kinds of people they provided care for most often, more than half included their parents (93.6  per  cent) and a close friend (70  per  cent). The next most commonly listed relationships where they express care are siblings/ cousins (40.4  per  cent), romantic friends (31.4  per  cent), and teachers (26 per cent). Finally, four other types of relationships were listed by at least some of the students, including a family member not listed elsewhere (15.7  per  cent), grandparents (13.9  per  cent), someone in their community (4.2 per cent), and someone in their online community or a pen pal (3.0 per cent).



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93.60%

70.00%

40.00% 31.40%

26.00% 15.70%

13.90% 4.20%

3.00%

Figure 22.  People youth provide care for, by frequency

Students learn to show care first and primarily by extending it to their parents. About a quarter of students surveyed, however, give first priority to close or romantic friends, and an additional tenth focus on a family member other than their parents. If we extend this breakdown to include the top two choices, about half of the students include a close friend, and a quarter will include a romantic friend and/or an alternative family member. The likely recipient of care from the students is shaped by their age, gender, perceived financial status, and in some cases, according to their perceived minority status. These differences are initially visible by comparing the distribution of care among relationship types in each city. However, it is the participant composition within each city across the variables of age, gender, perceived financial status, and perceived ­minority status that mediate for whom youth provide the most care. Chief among these variables is age, which acts as a moderating variable for the types of relationships included as targets of students’ care. While parents are most frequently listed as the primary focus of care across age groups, close friends are included as recipients of students’ care after the age of fifteen. For non-REM students, this list expands to include romantic friendships after the age of seventeen.

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Another family member 6.70% Sibling/cousin 16.70%

Close friend 20.00% Sibling/cousin 33.30%

Close friend 20.00%

Another family member Sibling/cousin 0.024 Teacher 5.00% 2.50% Sibling/cousin Teacher 7.10% 1.20% Close Romantic friend Close friend friend 2.50% 16.10% 4.8%

Close friend 16.70%

Parent 88.80%

Parent 80.00%

Parent 67.30%

Parent 66.70%

Parent 40.00%

Toronto

Coventry

Athens

Lucknow

Tainan

Figure 23.  People youth provide care for, by site

Grandparent 50.00%

Sibling/cousin 7.10%

Another family member 1.50% Sibling/cousin 9.10%

Close friend 7.60%

Teacher 1.70% Close friend 31.00%

Romantic friend 13.80%

Parent 78.80%

Parent 50.00%

Under 12

Sibling/cousin 5.20%

Teacher 1.50%

Close friend 9.50%

Parent 83.30%

Another family member 5.20%

Parent 43.10%

12–14

15–17

Over 17

Figure 24.  People youth provide most care for, by age

One likely explanation for this increase in attending to romantic relationships among non-REM students may be the decrease in the engagement of parents, who, we found, tend to suppress romantic ­influence and care. Non-REM students are also more likely to include siblings  and teachers as their second focus for care between the ages of twelve and seventeen, and then to shift to selecting parents or close friends (and sometimes romantic friends) as their second choice after



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the age of s­ eventeen. This trend may support the theory that non-REM students tend to adopt a narrower cluster of relationships (immediate family, close friends, and teachers) than the more eclectic relationships seen among REM students. While both boys and girls tend to equally ­distribute their primary care towards parents and close friends, REM boys are also likely to select romantic relationships as their primary care and then to strongly limit their second choice to either a close friend or parents (the limited number of relationships selected by REM boys is quite dramatic compared to REM girls and non-REM students). How isolated might REM boys feel, and how might this isolation ­impact their future engagement with the world? Our qualitative work in ­Toronto certainly corroborated this evidence. Another finding made clear is how the caregiving activities of young people loom large for those non-REM students who report that their family has a lower annual income than their classmates. These students more often included other family members among their care targets. We might imagine, then, that financial challenges in their home may require extra responsibilities within their family as caregivers. What powerfully stands out among all the data we collected on both being cared for and giving care to others for young people is that they like to provide care through “being a good listener” and to receive care by being listened to by those who care for them. This focus on listening cannot help but return us to the drama classroom. Finding and Giving Care in Context Context is significant in the matter of whom students seek out first when they care, support, and hope. The kind of people students turn to first for care tends to be almost identical to the people they themselves provide care for: dominantly parents, then close friends, and occasionally teachers. For five of the nine situations for which students were asked to note the first person(s) they would seek to engage (feeling hopeless, needing motivation, feeling worried, needing career advice, needing to confess) parents (50 to 55 per cent) and a close friend (19 to 42 per cent) were each mentioned about half of the time. All other relationships were referenced less than 20 per cent of the time, with teachers leading this third group of caregivers (18 per cent). The strength of parents’ dominance as primary sources of care diminishes slightly in a few circumstances: when students are over the age of seventeen, when the reason for seeking care involves confession or confessing a wrong, when in need of relationship advice, and when needing classroom advice. Only when students were asked about feeling alone was someone other than a parent (in this case, a close friend

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[57 per cent]) selected most often, while the need for classroom advice is the only scenario in which youth indicated a three-way split between parents (37  per  cent), close friends (30  per  cent), and teachers (30 per cent). Confessing a wrong would seem to be a particular barometer in marking the connection between the student and their parents in both degree and composition: The stronger the mutual care between parent and student, the more likely they are to turn to a parent in confession. Here, ethnic status acts as a mediating variable with 59 per cent of REM students identifying a parent over a close friend (35  per  cent) as the person they would confess to. By contrast, 42 per cent of non-REM students chose a parent, and 39.8  per  cent a close friend. REM students who show a strong affinity for confessing to parents first are also likely to feel better about their opportunities for self-expression (and, to a lesser degree, be a girl and have more future optimism). These findings align with a significant positive association found between REM parents and romantic relationships, furthering our hypothesis that the degree of mutual care between REM students and their parents paves the way for emotional vulnerability. This proposition also holds in the opposite direction: non-REM parents are negatively associated with romantic relationships, and indeed, non-REM students who have strong romantic bonds are less likely to confess to their parents. Together, these findings point to an important clue to the romantic divide between the two groups. REM families may see romantic relationships as an extension of the existing home, while non-REM families may read them as alternative homes. To Conclude: Wrestling towards Hope through Relationships of Care The final variable map of hope and care21 provides an overview of how students wrestle their way towards hope through relationships of care over time. It is critical that they find places where they can more deferentially learn from caring mentors (below the line) and places where they can assert their own unique voice (above the line). We also found a hope-based trifecta, where it is important to balance one’s ties with “home” (particularly parents and parent-like coaches

21 My deep thanks again to Scott Mealey for his imagistic, mathematical, and ­allegorical imagination, which undoubtedly comes from his many years spent in the theatre. My additional thanks to Lindsay Valve who, latterly in the manuscript preparation period, asked all the right clarifying questions of the quantitative data.



Hope and Care in the Quantitative Landscape l

l

203 l

l

l l

Opportunities for Self Figure 25.  Map of hope and care

Q.V. dots are context questions; QVI.A represents where students give primary care; QII are care from ____; QIII are hope influenced by ____.

and social leaders), caring semi-permanent authorities (teachers and ­grandparents), and peers in the classroom and beyond. Adventuring too far outside the home circle (right of the line; online and romantic relationships) may be more loss than gain for many young people. • This graph represents the distances between twenty-three key variables (that fit reasonably within a single model) based on their shared characteristics. • The model suggests strong two-dimensional characteristics: (1) Home to Foreign Lands Continuum: The horizontal can be ­understood as proximity to “home,” with the relationship to

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parent(s) as closest to home and romantic relationships as the furthest away (perhaps representing the closest gesture to a new home); (2) Deference to Assertion: The vertical plane represents the degree to which the student self-asserts (desires, personality, will, and so on), with the most deference shown to grandparents and the most with “other” family, as well in some facets of their relationship with “other” adults and online relationships. • The diagonal semicircles represent degrees of extension beyond parental relationships. Using this approach, we find that four hope scale items sit in the second zone along with their school-based ­relationship with peers and teachers. The furthest zone includes online relationships and romantic relationships, city site, and age, which also are the most likely to have a negative correlation with the hope items. • The bottom right quadrant seems to be the most dangerous, as it combines distance from typically safer zones for care and hope with higher levels of submission.

Epilogue: Acting in Concert

What kind of a metaphor is theatre for the world? How do we use drama to build ethical relations? What is the relationship between form, content, and context? How do we act responsibly? How is the idea of hope linked to the existence of political alternatives? How can we think about care more relationally? In light of ongoing and overlapping global crises, what can we do with art? When we first came together as a global research group and spent that week together in ­Toronto, we gave ourselves the task of how to think about what it means to do drama in “dangerous times,” and these were the ­questions we asked ourselves. We set the agenda for our meeting well in advance of the horrific event that unfolded a week before we met; the Paris ­terror a­ ttacks of 13–14 November 2015 that killed over 130 people and wounded many others. The Paris events and loss of life, and the ensuing violence against ­racialized and particularly Muslim communities in cities across the globe, were only the latest rendition of a state of insecurity that now very clearly defines our times. Our “drama in dangerous times” took on new meaning in the wake of that event but, now, at the end of this project five years later, has again taken on new significance. Drama in the context of mass Black liberation protests and a global health pandemic that has put us all into quarantine made “working together” mean staying apart and halted the world’s economy. These defining crises of this time have changed what it means to be human for our generation, how to give and receive care, and what shape hope takes; eradicating a virus and eradicating racism have converged as a potentially revolutionary historical moment. Drama classrooms, as I have come to understand them, are a kind of “first responders”; their curriculum is the world. And the world has its way of interjecting itself and changing the course of all plans. Students in drama spaces want to make sense of the world(s) around

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them. Drama can be a critical tool of investigation, intervention, and social reimagining. Our network of global researchers sought to have a conversation over five years that was rooted in our particular locations around the globe; we used theatre forms to explore content and context. As researchers, we turned our thoughts to young people’s experiences to consider what we perceived to be a general malaise, a social unrest across racial, cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical divides. The drama work, the symbolic worlds, became containers for grief, for love, for suffering, for strength; these analogous worlds could contain all the “versions of truth” (Barker, 1989) and versions of self – through verbatim, oral history, and devising processes – that young people desired. On 11 September 2001, at 9:00 am, I was headed into my university drama classroom where I would meet, for the very first time as a new university teacher, my students who were training to become high school drama teachers. As people slowly entered the room, the horror of the day began to sink in, though so little was yet understood. The subways in Toronto were experiencing delays, so people were trickling into the room slowly. There were no cell phones, no steady stream of updates. We were all stunned and quiet. It occurred to me that people might have loved ones in New York, so I announced that, if people needed to leave, for whatever reason, they were free to do so. A couple of students left. Most stayed. The only thing I knew I needed to teach them in that moment was that there were two different ways to run a drama class. In their future lives as drama teachers, they could either close the door and get on with the lesson or keep that door open to the world, its events, its catastrophes, its struggles, and its joys. If they did, they could use the form of drama as a container for that world, to study it, to create metaphor about it, to situate themselves inside some analogous world in order to understand the very real world they were living in. And they would do this with their own students, with infinite care, with profound intimacy; they would create an ensemble in the face of everything. Our research in drama classrooms around the world aimed to yield empirical evidence related to cultural theorist Richard Sennett’s (2012) argument that the fates of people, strangers, within and across the Global North and South, are increasingly diverging as inequality grows in the context of more pronounced forms of neoliberalism and morally bankrupt regimes. COVID-19 has only exacerbated those inequalities, while giving the appearance that it levels the playing field because we are all affected; but as someone recently put it to me, we might be in the same storm but we are in very different boats. Locally, and globally, this pandemic has allowed us to see clearly where the fault lines are in our



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societies. Who owns a computer for online school? Whose parent can work at home, and whose parent cannot? It has also overturned who we may think are the world’s “essential workers.” It turns out that they are not the CEOs of companies but the cleaners who keep the buildings safe. They are not the multinationals, but the grocery clerks and truck drivers who keep the food chain going for all of us. When we are forced to live our most minimalist lives, not lives of convenience, access, and excess, especially in the privileged North, it turns out that the most essential workers are the lowest paid, least valued among us in so-called “normal times.” Each year of the study, we drew from a different model of drama, a different form of pedagogy, a different kind of practice to create and share cultural productions across sites. We used these genres to examine hope; where it lives and why. Hope may seem an unlikely subject in catastrophic times. Hope, as we have observed it though, is not a state or a possession but a practice of the most resilient youth we have met, a way of working that slowly comes to circulate, often in unanticipated ways, as the struggle to create something together takes hold. Young people are not hoping for something; they are practising what it might be like to live with hope, even when their material or social conditions make that exceedingly difficult to do. Through drama, a walk in another person’s words, their story, becomes in striking instances the source of radical hope. How do teachers and students practise hope together? How do we practise hope through our theatre-making? How does this hope live uncomfortably alongside disappointment and disengagement, or worse, exclusion and marginalization? How do we create new imaginaries of hope through theatre? Not sentimental, saccharine fantasies of an unlikely future, but hope grounded in present social relations, politically clear eyed, critically and affectively engaged. So, what kind of metaphor is theatre for the world? At its simplest, it is “the ensemble”; it is “stronger together/tous ensemble,” as the C ­ anadian slogan goes in COVID-19 times. It is acting in concert on the street or in isolation. It is the look of fearlessness in the face of difference; it is the concept of the incredible importance of local communities, where we give and receive care, where we hope together with others, in community. And it is in the everydayness of life where struggle and strength battle it out. In all of the very different research sites, young people were creatively collaborating but also building community resilience. The creative space in the room pulled on collective energy to build something together. Invariably, the thing built was a response to the everyday, immediate concerns of young people in direct dialogue with the pressing challenges of the broader world, as they perceived them.

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The theatre is also a metaphor of liveness and co-presence in the world. No one imagined a time of global self-isolation. Before coronavirus, this generation could not have imagined a world where being in the presence of others was a threat, a deadly threat. And so, the sudden and utter absence of places of gathering (sports arenas, cultural venues, protest marches, for instance) where strangers come to have an experience together, in joy or in anger, is the thing we thought we might ­simply miss, theoretically, until such gathering spaces and liveness ­became themselves a metaphor for what makes us human. The theatre has also now, in these times, become an especially important metaphor for time; that is, the present is what we have, what we can count on. And being present to the moment of “the now” is what theatre asks of us. It is a world unfolding with no rewind. It is a world that is constituted only by what is happening now. The loss of theatre is a powerful reminder of its capacity to focus our attention on the certainty and the importance of what is right there before us. The theatre, like a global health pandemic, asks us to keep our horizons close. One of the other impacts of the global pandemic is that the larger world has had to imagine behaving much like a drama ensemble, a collection of people who share a purpose. The COVID-19 purpose has been survival, as are the Black Lives Matter protests. And we have discovered that we cannot do this without others, even if we need to maintain distance from them. What a fascinating and simple lesson it has been, because it has meant that people have had to assume that strangers are good-faith actors. And there has been, with the notable exceptions of some world leaders and bad-faith actors trying to take advantage of people’s vulnerability, a critical mass of goodness in the world. People across communities are experiencing the good will and acts of kindness of strangers. This observation does not mean that largesse is experienced equally. We have seen that this is not the case. But what we do know is that trust has become the most precious commodity in these times. And that is precisely what an ensemble of drama students aims to build; the ­creative work is impossible without it. In those diverse classrooms, not all of those young people are arriving fortified by the privilege of family or societal support. The trust-building we witnessed across all of the sites was a detectable, but tenuous, thing. And it was a work in progress. Naively or not, that trust is what the young people came to expect of their peers. Where they may have lacked communal support to build resilience, they practised it in their theatre-making spaces. Helen Nicholson (2002) contributed an extremely important theoretical paper to the field of drama education in which she unpacked the history of liberal thought in the field, which had regarded all sentiments



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as equally morally trustworthy, arguing instead how trust is dependent on context and is negotiated and renegotiated in action, as a performative act. Acknowledging how trust is central to the positive functioning of any drama-making context, she explored what is meant by relationships of trust and where the scope and limits of trust might lie, arguing that “the lack of firm theoretical basis for the practice of trust in drama education, as elsewhere, has led to an acceptance of the benefits of trust in generalized terms; following the tradition of Western liberalism, in drama education trust is almost always regarded as a way of enabling individuals to become a harmonious group, in Lockean terms, as a way of establishing positive social bonds” (pp. 82–3). Of course, notions of “harmony” have come under scrutiny by many critical scholars as a reinsertion of hegemony or “social normalcy” (see Giddens, 1991). ­Harmony might be more easily attained in circumstances where there are shared values, but less honestly attained in contexts where differences in values, experiential knowledge, and social location must be coerced into harmony. Nicholson (2002) further points out that drama is “unlike many traditional educational practices not only in that it relies on collaboration, but also because it requires participants to recognize and value the importance of the emotions and the body as well as the intellect.” It ­follows then that “if trust is recognised in practice it is because it can be identified through the public actions of the body – what participants say, how they act towards others, and how they relate to each other physically within the specific context of the drama itself” (p. 83). Using Geertz’s work, Nicholson goes on to argue that trust is contingent on context and circumstance, negotiated and renegotiated as new or unexpected circumstances arise or, I would add, as trusts may be broken in the difficult and deeply subjective processes of building aesthetic work. As we noted at Regal Heights, in Toronto, and as Nicholson confirms, creativity is stifled if the aim is ideological consensus rather than artistic coherence. Within scholarly research, public policy, and government-funded programs, the idea of resilience is generally framed within psychological and individualist frameworks. In their review and critique of the literature, Sue Howard and colleagues (1999) offer an early definition of resilience as “a set of qualities, or protective mechanisms that give rise to successful adaptation despite the presence of high-risk factors during the course of development” (p. 310). Neringa Kubiliene and colleagues (2015) further articulate youth resilience as “how well adolescents accomplish developmental tasks, such as academic achievement, identity formation and involvement in social life” (p. 341). Such definitions

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miss overwhelmingly the nature of resilience as we saw it play out with young people around the world. Resilience was a narrative of “the collective” for the young people we met; they survived with others at their side. My understanding of youth resilience came from extended time with young people and drew from social theory and the empirical work of applied theatre, and it was made powerfully evident through the creative processes the young people undertook with others, through the aesthetic storytelling they sought to share. Our understanding of resilience, then, was inflected by the aesthetic and political orientation of the creativity we witnessed young people engaged in. They were fundamentally challenging structures of power and the conditions of their vulnerability. And they were doing it together, not as unique individuals with personal capacities to overcome failure. In other empirical research work I carried out in a shelter for homeless youth in Toronto who were engaged in a drama program with members of Andrew Kushnir’s arts organization Project: Humanity, we named the kind of resilience we witnessed in those theatre-making spaces as “creative resilience,” where young people improvise from real-life situations in order to explore and collectively debate alternative forms of resilience. This work is like the early work of Augusto Boal but differs in the sense that Boal’s work turned on the individual protagonist who could change the course of a narrative through their individual actions. That is not what I witnessed in drama classrooms in “dangerous times.” Instead, I witnessed young people testing out multiple versions of themselves, sometimes as the one supporting, sometimes as the one being supported. The “problems” to be explored, whether they were personal or worldly, were to be explored together, which meant that young people began to see more dimensions of themselves; they became less insecure precisely because they were meaningful players in others’ lives. I started this book with one important “finding”: The drama/creative space is critically important for the ways in which it allows young people to see themselves providing things for others. They become key audience members to the emerging selves around them. The drama space, that space of collective creating, can – through this simple yet powerful dynamic – enable the conditions of hope. Young theatre-makers often find this “creative resilience” through performing counter-narratives to the dominant ones that surround them (see Gallagher et al., 2017). In Greece, the young students were all too aware of how the world was seeing them: What I want to say is that I’d like to show how the country has many, many problems. In spite of its problems, it has really tried

petros: 



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to help out in the story of this refugee crisis. When other countries in the world consider us, they humiliate us. I would always like them to come here and see what is really happening. (Focus group interview, 23 March 2017) So, like the students in Lucknow, they played joyfully with those stereotypes, those images of heartless, lazy Greeks who had carelessly spent their way into an economic collapse and had no capacity or desire to care for those seeking asylum on their shores. The students improvised those monstrous stereotypes in order to own them and then subvert them with new narratives; they practised different stories, different relationships to those dominant narratives, and then enacted them with each other and in their performance of solidarity with the young refugees who were also witness to their storytelling on the first day of our arrival. The girls in Lucknow played their oppressors with an almost frightening ease, and then they built the characters that could and would overthrow those oppressors. They rehearsed another way to be, in the face of systemic oppression, and then took their learning to the street to ignite others, their communities, with their newfound dignity. It was infectious. It does not mean their rehearsals could change everything, but only that their imagined new narratives could interrupt the reflexive turn to weakness and fear. We saw it in their imagined work and in their real political work. Arzu challenged her frightening uncle at the well that day; she stood up for the woman being cast away. She knew her legal rights, and she enacted them. She learned about her rights through the creative pedagogy at Prerna and accessed her dignity and security when she was challenged. She learned that solidarity with her peers would carry her far. In critical dialogues, the problems that the kids have, whichever topic is taken, it is discussed, a play is developed, so that they can understand what their problems are. The children – they face things, but they can’t connect what they face. But when we open these issues in class and discuss them, then they realize that “Oh! These are the problems that also occur [for others]!” So then, the issues come out, the worries and troubles and challenges come out when we act them and how we can fight them. Critical dialogues enable us to know life challenges and how to fight them! (Focus group interview, 4 April 2016)

arzu [translated by urvashi]: 

The ensemble practice was at work in Coventry as well. Bruce, the “lad in care” whose political consciousness was awakened through the

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creative work of Canley Youth Theatre and the solidarity of the adult allies with whom he worked, experienced an affective and embodied solidarity through that work, which he then carried into his fearless and committed activism. Urvashi often said to the young women at Prerna: “You have the right to feel indignant!” In the same way, Bruce found himself without the insecurity he had known most of his life. After their Museum of Living Stories performance for their families and community, there was a talkback with the audience, where we heard how the trust and solidarity they had built through their oral history performance work had created a particular space for them: It strikes me that there is a lot of trust between you all and I just wondered, has that been hard work to get to? Have you had to really work on the trust bit? Does that take a while to achieve? connie:  I don’t know. A little bit. But every week, when we come together, we get closer each time. So, you tell stories like John said and like, get to know each other a bit more each week. So, a little bit. theo:  And also, we’ll do like trust exercises. Like to do that lift with Bruce [they raised his body over their heads as a group], that was quite a big thing. He had to trust us. But like, we’ve done it before, we’ve practised, we’ve told him a lot about ourselves, and he can trust us, so. john:  It shows how much he can trust us ’cause that’s actually only the fourth time we’ve ever done it. audience member: 

(Laughter all around.) I lost some sleep worrying about that last night. Well before we did this project, we had to sit down and sort out some rules because of the stories. They were quite personal. We said we’d have to trust each other not to go off or make fun and so we sort of trusted each other from the start, and it sort of just grew as the work progressed. (Talkback with audience post-show, 29 June 2016)

rachel: 

ophelia: 

Of all the groups, the older Taiwanese students worked on theatre in its most traditional and hierarchical ways. Each of the three plays had a playwright, a director, a stage manager, a set designer, actors, and so on – all the traditional roles in the theatre. And yet, despite the structural hierarchies, their practices were centred on the collective, the ensemble. In interviews, the students consistently pointed to the importance of



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listening to each other and prioritizing the collective over the individual. The greatest feelings of pleasure came from working successfully together. Failure came in the form of conflicts, but these were resolved in each case by sharing each other’s perspectives and speaking openly with each other. Despite the many different voices present in the groups, and the strictly hierarchical theatre-making structures, the students found ways to work collectively: one group had every member write a diary entry from the perspective of one character; another had everyone try their hand at performing as the mother. Every classmate had a role to play, and there was strong emphasis on the group. In Tainan, the ethic of working on a story might be open to criticism in some Western contexts because they talked about “story-taking” in their practice; notably, they “took the stories” of the Indigenous villagers and of the LGBT+ in particular to bring those stories to audiences to invite them to “do better.” These were hyperlocal stories, though often muted ones, which they felt warranted broad public consideration. They “took” these stories only after building relationships with those whose stories they were working with: the Indigenous village near their university and the stories of their LGBT+ peers in the room. These were negotiated practices with the story-keepers, and the underlying premise was the idea of “absorbing” the story into the collective: if it is your struggle, it is our collective struggle. In the interviews with the young people, we learned more about their powerful sense of duty to others, their sense of responsibility to family and to communities beyond their own. Wan-Jung explains: wan-jung:  After

I have brought them to the community and really sat down with the elders, they grew respect for them because they [the Indigenous elders] have their life experience which is so precious and they care about them. Those elders, and those community people, care about the youngsters. It’s a different kind of care; care about our mutual culture. There is a sense of urgency [from the elders]; they want to share their stories with us, and pass down to us, pass down to us so that they [the young people] grow to have that kind of sense of responsibility to pass down their stories to a wider community. (Interview with Wan-Jung Wang, 18 November 2016)

We learned from the Taiwanese students that care was most strongly associated with ideas about responsibility: to the story or source, to society and taking care of society at large. And care was often associated with feeling: making sure that the story owner’s feelings were cared for.

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Andrew has wondered if the quality of their reception of others’ stories had changed through their dramatic engagement with the stories. Had the listening changed because of the deep sense of responsibility they were cultivating? Has it changed your listening outside of drama? So, has it changed your listening in your day-to-day life? shuan-shuan [translated by wan-jung]:  It totally changed her way of listening in life. Now she listens very carefully, even just a subtle breath someone says, it’s almost like a pearl, this pearl given to you. So, she learned to appreciate and admire people more, and they have more respect and sometimes more empathy for other people’s lives. She becomes more subtle in observing and taking care of other people’s feelings. andrew:  Is it something automatic or do you have to keep reminding yourself to do that? shuan-shuan [translated by wan-jung]:  “I just found out that I have changed just now.” Automatic for her. So good. andrew:  Has listening changed in anybody else’s life? You can say no. rey [translated by wan-jung]:  I feel listening to others [is] now a responsibility. We have a responsibility to other people, but I still have to remind myself moment by moment [that] we should do it. (Focus group with devising group 2, Cross, 16 November 2016) andrew: 

In recent work, Amanda Stuart Fisher (2020) argues that placing care in dialogue with performance enacts a form of resistance to the “care-lessness” of contemporary life (p. 3). In Toronto, care was perhaps hardest earned. The obstacles to caring were considerable. In Year  1, racial and gender tensions, and a general lack of trust within the group itself in the context of an unsupportive larger school context for Mr. L and his drama students, meant that there were false starts and considerable scepticism that had to be overcome. Theirs was a tenuous and hard-earned interdependence. In Year 2, intimate sharing was both powerful and unsettling to the youth, and telling a “collective” story took many different forms. For Muckles’s group, the bond created in telling his story of deafness and hearing remained much more important than the poor reception of that story from a broader public. The group had learned that process matters more than product, and no measure of audience response could match the interpersonal learning that had transpired. The group in Year 3 overturned the curriculum as given in favour of the curriculum they desired, and drama became a workshop for rehearsing how to be the supportive friends they wanted



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to be. They rehearsed new selves and didn’t much care about how polished their performance was. They took the autonomy and artistic licence on offer by their teacher and made what they needed. Consequently, their classroom became a workshop in caretaking, a wander into the complexity of mental health, and a performative rehearsal for becoming better caretakers and better friends: I feel like before we do anything, we need to research a lot more about it because it is a topic that is very sensitive and a lot of people … well … one of the things it brought up is that it is such a taboo topic that no one really talks about it so no one gets educated on it. And even in our group, we were talking about things and I learned something I didn’t know before … And so, because it’s not talked about, when it gets brought up people don’t know how to help. They come from a good place but they’re not doing it the right way. Like people will say, to like people with depression, “It gets better. Get over it. Don’t be sad anymore.” And that’s not how it works … So in the play if there is a person who goes through a panic attack, or something, we can show both sides. There are so many people who aren’t educated enough so they don’t know how to help. We can change that. (In-class brainstorming session, 24 November 2016)

marcel: 

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Turning towards Part II

This, we believe, is why documentary theatre can bring about social change. Not because it pumps its fist and warns us all of the grave dangers our society is facing. But because if you tell a story in the theater, and tell it well and clearly, the audience will empathize; and if the audience empathizes, they are implicated and involved. Documentary theatre can, done right, involve us all, on an immediate human level, in stories that are happening all around us, in reality, every day; stories we might think are not our responsibility, but which in fact affect all of us. Documentary theater can show us, as long as it refrains from telling us that this is true, and in so doing can help raise all kinds of questions that we desperately need to be asking as a society. – Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen (2005), p. 15

It is a special kind of joy to have Andrew Kushnir’s Towards Youth: a play on radical hope as a part of this documentation of the Radical Hope research project. It is an artistic output that has taken my research, and my life as a researcher, to a thrilling new level. And it is, for all posterity, a testament to the fierce and formidable relationship we have. As a socially engaged artist and playwright embedded in social science research, Andrew is bringing his art “out into the public world where ethical judgment can get at it” (Geertz, 1968, p. 139). It is important to also underscore how the script you are about to read was never aiming to be a “representation” of the people engaged in the research in some positivist sense. The sway of a theatrical rendering is that it can use the full force of its powers of metaphor, analogy, visual culture, stage design, symbol, and silence to point to relationships and action – not stand-alone, decontextualized ideas – to illustrate the “networks of relations,” “entangled relationships,” that this research has been. Speaking of research as an “art” rather than a “science,”

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Madeleine Grumet (1990) once elegantly compared it to Henry James’s artist in the short story “The Real Thing,” writing: After struggling in vain to illustrate a text on the aristocracy by working with authentic models, the artist finally has his servants pose and it is their perception of class difference that strikes the gestures he draws. His canvas depicts his relationship to a phenomenon, rather than a display of the thing itself. (p. 101)

Andrew’s canvas exposes his relationship to the research and the people and places of the research, using as his guiding light the idea that new audiences of strangers, too, will need to find their own relationship to the “thing itself.” In other words, “the play is not the thing,” but our relationship to it is. As a playwright, Andrew is always taking care of imagined audiences in this way and thinking specifically not only about what his own relationships to subjects were, in retrospect, to the people of the project, but also what kind of host he will be to those who will experience them through his shaping. Of theatre’s relationship to audiences, philosopher Alain Badiou (2015) has said: “Whether comic or tragic, the theatre figures the play of passions. In this way, it plunges deeply into the relational structures which shape the unconscious. Grasping the most sophisticated forms of the debate of ideas by their tops, the theatre organizes the energy that comes from below, from the swamp of the drives, from any subjective real not yet symbolized” (p. 83). ­Towards Youth, then, is inserting itself into cultural anxiety about youth, into strangers’ desires and dreams, into the hopes and fears of those who receive it. And as a documentary piece of theatre, it has particular stakes. As theatre scholar Carol Martin (2010) has so poignantly expressed, “much post 9/11 documentary theatre is etched with the urgency of the struggle over the future of the past” (p. 17). There is a future conditional tense to Towards Youth that implores: Now that we know, now that we’ve seen, can we get it right? Can we do better? The future of the past. In the rehearsal hall, Andrew referred to me as the “research dramaturg,” while he and co-director Chris Abraham, an ensemble of nine actors, and a creative team of ten built the world of the play. They called on me regularly to make sure the compass of the play was on course, to make sure that the five years of research were being respected and drawn upon. But the play is its own thing, and the co-directors, actors, and designers also worked fiercely to let it come into its own unique communication. My experience in that room furnished me with enough ethnographic and artistic experience that I felt I might retire and write about those experiences for the rest of my life and still would



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not exhaust the “data” or the discoveries and learning they spawned. From the moment that Andrew invited the international collaborators to write a message to the actors portraying them about what they should be thinking about if they want to be aligned with the real people and places of the project, I was all in. I have come to understand just how verbatim theatre is ultimately the very best form of expression of the research, the verisimilitude and the vernacular of the youth, whose words and actions, whose silences and hesitations, whose force and clarity had pierced us all, over many years. There was nothing to paint over or academically shape. We are only asked to listen to these raw voices in the script. But listening, for actors, is an embodied action. One listens and expresses with one’s whole body. The youth stories were full joy and pain; the actors had to build a vast emotional repertoire in order to offer the audience vicarious experience. As Erin Hurley (2010) has argued, “vicarious experience is very intimate indeed. In its intimacy, the vicarious experience of others, on which much performance is based, can create the same neurological imprint as doing or feeling them oneself” (p. 76). The physical work that I witnessed the actors undertake in the rehearsal hall was the kind of work that I knew would offer audiences a direct entry into their own private conversations with the characters of the play, and that, ultimately, was Andrew’s hope. Can you turn towards youth? Are you ready? Are you able? Do you see how important that directional shift is? In the next section, Andrew will offer brilliant insight into the process of his relationship to, and curation of, those voices, their stories, their desires to be heard, and ultimately how he imagined inciting a “call to thought” in his imagined audiences, the new strangers who would meet these re-embodied voices. To a person, every member of that company brought extraordinary care to the work. I oftentimes thought about how fitting it was that Andrew and Chris Abraham, and the company as a whole, had somehow reproduced the kind of caretaking and receiving that the research itself had been interested in perceiving in youth cultures over the previous five years. Of course, that would be the case, I thought to myself. There were a great many ethical pitfalls to be wary of – adults playing children, cross-race, cross-gender, cross-generation, and cross-cultural casting. The capacity of the co-directors to invite all voices in, those in the room and the researchers beyond the room, outsider eyes and cultural translators, to invite all of us to voice misgivings and address as a collective the many challenges of the script, made for a powerfully productive space, one of deep trust and care. Liisa Repo-Martell was to play Dr. Kathleen Gallagher. She had to face me in the room every day. I often reflected on how hard that

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must have been. But Liisa is the consummate professional, and she knew her task was not to mimic the real Dr. Kathleen Gallagher but to find her action in the play. It is important to know that Andrew’s way of working with a verbatim script is to let that script, and not the myriad other kinds of evidence of those original people (for example video recordings or images of them), speak the truths of the characters. The verbal tics, hesitations, pauses, intonation, precise word choices, and internal rhythms of the characters are on that page as a result of careful and detailed transcriptions. The play condenses five years of data, 250 young peoples’ voices down to 35, and 21 adult voices in that ­final script. ­Andrew’s shaping of the character arcs would be crucial to the storytelling, but the feel and essence and truth of those characters would come ultimately through an actor’s engagement with the actual words spoken and the precise ways in which they were spoken. In other words, “­listening” became utterly fundamental to how the a­ ctors worked, which may always be the case; however, in this instance it could also result in undoing dangerous misrepresentations of the youth voices. On this point, Andrew Kushnir (2020) has previously written: In his Nobel Lecture, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro ... invokes E.M. Forster’s ... famous distinction between three-dimensional and two-dimensional characters: “A character in a story became three-dimensional ... by virtue of the fact that they ‘surprised us convincingly.’ It was in so doing that they became rounded” ... This idea offers insight into not only improving representations of young people on stage, but also entering into improved relationships with youth outside the theatre, wherein their voices can surface more easily and matter more. There is a cultural anxiety about young people, one that impedes our capacities to hear them for who they are. Youth are “flat” to us, by and large. And our inability or unwillingness to hear a young person, to deal with the particulars of their hopes and dreams and fears, to receive the ways in which they may “surprise us,” has contributed to our practices of categorizing them. Categorizing youth, in turn, makes us less able to hear them. (p. 255)

At one point, Liisa Repo-Martell asked me whether she could borrow a book I had written on a previous ethnographic research project. She wanted to get deeper into the ideas of my research and me as r­ esearcher. She returned that book some time later with pages dog-eared. What I  realized from Liisa’s evolving interpretation was that her action in the play, as Dr. Kathleen Gallagher, was, in fact, listening. Social science research of this kind was, she came to see, mostly about listening, and if she could capture the quality of my listening, she would find the essence of Kathleen, the character. The slow unfolding of Liisa’s work



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was a marvel to witness. Each actor had a similar journey, and it was thrilling to be in the room with them as the pieces started to come together, step by step, and word by word. Towards Youth Audience Research I have to say that, beyond watching school and student theatre, I’ve never seen a cast like that before. And I think it definitely is a good turning point in theatre because I think that it gave a clear viewing of the different – it wasn’t an allwhite cast, and a bunch of plays that you go to see, it’s an all-white cast. And the other voices are not shown, and I feel like with Towards Youth and bringing in other voices in the world, it helped with bringing it all together. And I loved the fact that there were actors playing characters of a race that they wouldn’t go and get cast in for an audition. It was phenomenal. – Youth audience member I found it at the same time disrupting and challenging, while also being very centring and anchoring. I found it to be those two things together a lot. – Adult audience member I’m having trouble remembering because I’m having too many emotions. I don’t even know if I can describe it. I just feel – it sounds weird – I feel like I’ve been heard. So, I just feel like these are all these thoughts that I’ve had and I felt alone in them, and now I’m seeing them as this huge performance and this huge research study and this whole huge group of people who basically think the same way I do, and that’s what makes me feel really hopeful. – Youth audience member

Surrounding the play, we carried out research with youth and adult audience members at evening and matinee performances. This exploration included seventy-six adult interviews (individual and focus group) and eighty-nine youth interviews (individual and focus group); twenty comments received in an anonymous comment box we put out in the lobby; three “speakers’ corner” video recordings, where we had set up a video camera in the corner of the lobby and invited people to speak uninterrupted into the camera with any thoughts they wished to share; two actor interviews with cast members; two teacher interviews; and three youth matinee performance talkbacks after the show. We also undertook research on the pedagogical work on verbatim theatre that Project: Humanity carried out with groups of youth in their classrooms before they came to the show and after they’d seen it, both in-class ­observation and interviews with youth. Between the pedagogical research and the spectator research, the data we have are full of affect, complex and

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complicated affect. Nobody who saw the play came out with neutral feelings. I believe that is due to Andrew’s invitation, to the company’s daring to go to ethically fraught places, taking an abundance of care with very challenging questions of representation. C ­ onsequently, the audience was taken to difficult places, and the ensemble earned their respect. The audience members were not patronized. Their intelligence was taken seriously. They were, as Jacques Rancière (2011) urges for the “emancipated spectator,” “removed from the position of observer calmly examining the spectacle offered to her. She must be dispossessed of this illusory mastery, drawn into the magic circle of theatrical action where she will exchange the privilege of rational observer for that of being in possession of all of her vital energies” (p. 4). We are still contemplating all that we learned in carrying out that research, but what remains clear is that there was a generational divide in those audience responses: young people felt seen/heard; adults felt disturbed. For Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005), knowledge is produced through “thinking–feeling, the embodied sensation of making sense” (p. 1), and in his discussion of dramaturgy, George Pierce Baker (1919) defined a play as “the shortest distance from emotions to emotions” (p. 21). ­Theatre, as a site of “live encounter,” is a vital site for public pedagogy. Older audience members were disturbed by the ethnographic play, and in particular by the realization that the contemporary problems facing young people are different from those they faced when they were young. For older audience members, “turning ­towards” youth resulted in an uncomfortable learning about young peoples’ unique challenges. This “call to thought” is exactly what ­Andrew was hoping to awaken. Could we, the adult world, orient ourselves differently to young people? Could we “adjust”? Could we think otherwise? Could a play make us do that? In a conversation with critic John Lahr (2008), American playwright Sarah Ruhl diagnosed the problem of much contemporary theatre in this way: “Now, some people consume imagination, and some people do the imagining. I find it very worrisome.” Ruhl tells her actors that the audience always knows the difference between being talked to and being talked at. In Andrew’s very title, he was inviting an orientation from the audience; if you turn towards these youth, up here on this stage, what might it call you to think about? What might you feel compelled to think or do? It was an invitation of the most direct kind: I am not asking you to observe, to let me do the imagining. I am asking you to listen and to wonder, to be on the pilgrimage with us. As they say, “without further ado,” we turn now to Part II of the book: Andrew Kushnir’s introduction and the play Towards Youth: a play on radical hope.

PART II

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A Step towards Youth andrew kushnir

As playwright David Edgar (2008) puts it, “verbatim drama wears its sources on its sleeve.” I hear this statement in two ways. Verbatim plays  – whose performance texts are typically created from the transcripts of research interviews and then performed by actors – uniquely demonstrate how their content comes from real-life informants, word for word. But I also hear, whether or not this is Edgar’s intention, how these plays can reveal the ways in which they were made, by whom, and through what sorts of relationships. In my fourteen years of w ­ orking in this journalistic form of theatre, I have grown increasingly aware of how this tension between objectivity (what was said) and subjectivity (who heard it, how it was heard) must be part of the picture. I believe it is at the heart of practising care and accountability in this delicate work. Relationships are key to the ethical root system of verbatim theatre; they can also go on to inform the aesthetics and “above ground” that the public engages with. What I created as the “embedded” artist in the Radical Hope project, a piece entitled Towards Youth: a play on radical hope, could have been solely composed of responses uttered by our extraordinary informants in the field – much like those documentary films where you never hear the interviewer’s questions. I felt the research, which ­includes and involves my relationships, asked for something different from me. What the reader will discover in the upcoming pages is a play that p ­ urposefully dramatizes youth, educators, a researcher-artist (­Kathleen), and an artist-researcher (me) in an unfolding state of encounter; our relationships to each other (and how we took and take care of them) are laid bare. Naturally, Kathleen’s and my connections with the sites of research, and even to one another, are much more complex than what is represented or representable in the play. The same goes for the young people we collaborated with, whose dimensionality

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certainly surpasses what I have been able to depict. The play does not attempt to be a comprehensive capture of all the events, dynamics, and discoveries of the Radical Hope project. Towards Youth chooses to focus on the transformative potential of encounter – what I believe to be one of the great prospects of ethnographic research and, also, of the theatre. And the play – composed of what affectively punctured1 me and others in the field – is an invitation for audiences to have their own contact with some of the words and worlds of the research project. The play and its playwright ask the question, How do these punctures relate to hope, both in the moments they occurred and in the moment of new audiences encountering them? Verbatim theatre, as a form, is problematic. That said, I think its problems are worth our time and effort. I believe that we learn something about being together, in more broadly social terms, when we interact with works of art that trouble the fiction/non-fiction binary, as verbatim plays do. I have observed time and again how the considerable work that practitioners and audiences must do to reconcile this kind of documentary theatre – with and for the world it overtly draws from – has the potential to augment our sensitivity and care in and of that world. I have previously attributed this effect to verbatim theatre’s capacity to simultaneously activate the audience’s imagination and conscience. Everyone involved knows the words hail from primary sources b ­ eyond the actors delivering them, and yet an editing and interpretive process is also at play. Eduardo Navas (2012), whose analysis of remixing – wherein a sampling “which favors fragmentation over the whole” is used to make something new (p.  12) – writes: “Remix as binder, as cultural glue, as aesthetic, as virus, as discourse, enables people to u ­ nderstand how the recycling of material can be p ­ rogressive and constructive” (p. 169). V ­ erbatim plays seem to me a form of remix. And ones that remix the voices and insights of young people, as has been done in the play contained in this book, may be particularly fitting. In The Arts of the Remix: Ethnography and Rap, Brett Lashua (2006),

1 A concept I frequently use in my practice, a puncture is something that happens in the field that upturns my assumptions or my held narratives. These punctures inform my editing process, wherein I gravitate towards the moments of research where my preconceptions have been dismantled by an event or statement. The a­ spiration is that these moments, when arranged in a dramatic structure, ­comparably surprise and move new audiences. I inherit the term from Roland Barthes’s punctum (in relationship to photography) and some of the dramaturgical practices of Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit Theatre, with whom I briefly trained over twenty years ago.



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lecturer in sociology of the media and education at University College London, offers: The arts of the remix share some affinities with notions of hybridity and bricolage. Concordant with notions of sampling, popular cultural theorists ... have argued that young people make and re-make culture through appropriating the cultural “raw materials” of life in order to construct meaning in their own specific cultural localities. In a sense, they are “sampling” from broader popular culture and reworking what they can take into their own specific local cultures. That is, the ways that young people sample drum rhythms and vocal segments from songs may be thought of as analogous to the ways that they sample from broader cultures (such as styles from USA hip-hop cultures), modify or restructure it in some meaningful ways, and rework the “compositions” of their own daily lives, including notions of identities. (Lashua, 2006, p. 6)

In and with my work I have asked myself the question, Does taking a step away from reality – which is in part what occurs when an artist creates through the actual words of another – constitute a step towards truth or, at least, new possible truths? In his book How Theatre Means, Ric Knowles (2014) writes: But all representations are misrepresentations; if they weren’t they would be the thing itself, and would be unnecessary. Representations are useful only insofar as they do substitute for the “real thing”; that is, they are useful only insofar as they are misrepresentations. (p. 3; emphasis in original)

In this same book, Knowles invokes Russian Formalist Viktor S ­ hklovsky’s analysis: For Shklovsky, one of the key functions of art was to make ordinary, taken-for-granted elements of life visible again by making them “strange,” “seeing things out of their usual context” ... or removing them from the sphere of “automized perception” ... and thereby seeing them “as if for the first time.” (Knowles, 2014, pp. 43–4)

I see how this phenomenon plays out with verbatim theatre as a form: relocating the words originally spoken by “real people” to a theatrical proxy does constitute a discombobulation and a de-familiarizing. I see this concept heightened in Towards Youth, where adult actors embody the words, insights, and past experiences born of cultures (ethnic, ­racial, and generational) not their own. If we suppose that one of the roles of

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theatre is to make things strange, to take what we perceive as known or understood and re-present it, then verbatim theatre’s strangeness is noteworthy. It has the capacity to change the quality of our listening. The inevitable shortcomings of representing the exact words uttered by others activate a sense of ethical relationships in a distinct way – both for the speaker and the hearer of those words. I believe the theatre is an art of riddles, puzzles, and games. I believe theatre has more linkage to the dreaming mind than film or television – which, in my experience, supplants the mind with a kind of generated “seeing” of a story (versus theatre’s make-believe in so-called real time and space). In the theatre, we are presented with myriad signs and stimuli, and we take pleasure and derive meaning from decoding and fleshing out (and at times “correcting”) what we see. This process, which plays out in verbatim theatre as much as any other theatrical genre, generates its own forms of recognition, realization, and affect. What’s more, this mental game plays out on an individual basis in communion with others. In the theatre, everyone in attendance is consequential to the event. Collective attention – and a certain kind of tension in this attention – is required for a play to have lift-off, for theatrical metaphor to take flight. Meaning, as much as the story or conflict, is co-created by the practitioners and the audience, and for that reason, theatre is a social and spatial art. American playwright Sarah Ruhl (2020) penned in The New York Times: The theater, I have always maintained, is composed of language, ether and actor. One commodity the theater has that film and television do not have is air. Air is that wonderful substance that denotes presence.

The board members of the Conseil québécois du théâtre (2020) eloquently essentialize theatre in the open letter that they issued in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. They could just as easily be referring to the relational premise of both the play-making and the research of the Radical Hope project. Their words reaffirm for me why this ­research had to become a play and what kind of play it wanted to be. Theatre is the art of gathering. Without direct encounter with the audience, theatre does not exist. Without this delicious and dangerous awareness of the fallibility of the humans there, in front of you, theatre does not exist. Without the mystical awareness of sharing a unique, fleeting moment, theatre does not exist. Its existential quality is based on its ephemerality. Theatre is what happens between humans gathering together. Theatre is built on the ideas and feelings shared between souls gathering together.



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We build multifaceted universes, integrate new technologies, we sometimes collaborate with other artistic disciplines, but none of this affects the essential nature of the performing arts, which fulfill the prehistoric need of humans to be among their own, to observe oneself in the cathartic presence of fellow humans. (English translation by Dayane Ntibarikur and Gabriela Saltiel)

Theatre in Your Hands Not only do I look to leave the theatre or the television set knowing more, but most especially I hope to know more about now. The ignorant and foolish critic is the one who sneers that nothing dates faster than the up-to-date. – David Hare (2005), p. 82

The documentary or verbatim play is a powerful contradiction: it at once glaringly holds a “then/there” of the past and speaks to the “now/ here” we are in. I could call Towards Youth a “contemporary period drama, 2008–19,” but it is difficult for me to see the play as an assembly of ideas, articulations, and voices from a bygone era. To ­improvise on the notion of “period” as not only denoting a historic time but also a kind of punctuation, I would say the play better resembles an ellipsis: a space to move through2 in one’s pursuit of further understanding. I  take heart in the possibility that a metaphor – and for all of its real data, Towards Youth is a work of metaphor – can be more of a verb than a noun. American journalist James Geary (2011) offers: Metaphorical thinking – our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another, for equating I with an other – shapes our view of the world, and is essential to how we communicate, learn,

2 In reading my introduction to the play, Kathleen was caught by the notion of “move through” and expressed to me how an ellipsis is something that typically has her “hanging” with a thought – a moment of holding. It had me examining my relationship to that punctuation mark. In a rehearsal exercise called a “Punctuation Walk” (which I have inherited from director Alan Dilworth), wherein actors physicalize the punctuation of a dramatic text in order to further embody the distinct rhythms of character, the ellipsis is not a moment of pause (like a period) but rather a moment where the actor presses their body through to their next thought/word. In my playwriting, an ellipsis is a moment of active tension leading to some point of release. It is also worth noting here that, in my particular form of verbatim theatre, as a way to privilege interpretation/encounter over imitation and to provide anonymity to sources, actors do not listen to recordings of the original speakers. The liberal and creative use of punctuation becomes the actors’ best key to the rhythms of someone’s transcribed voice.

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discover and invent. Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words. (p. 3; italics in original)

So what does the Towards Youth script offer a reader engaging with a record of what happened (the play in performance) with a record of what happened (the research in the field)? The audiences that came to the produced play were in many ways “cast” as a group of fellow ethnographers, urged to pay careful attention and make meaning of what they beheld (and underwent). The play, in written form, remains a comparable invitation. What’s more, I think it provides its reader a unique proximity and access to the source material. In fact, the reader is capable of doing something the live audience could not do – what American verbatim theatre-maker Anna Deavere Smith (2003) refers to as “the ability to walk in another person’s ‘words’ and therefore in their hearts” (p. 7). To be clear, I’m not speaking metaphorically here. As theatre critic Ben Brantley (2020) pointed out to those who may pick up a play at home while theatres were shuttered by the COVID-19 pandemic: Remember that plays – even those lofty classics that show up on college reading lists – are meant to be spoken and heard. And saying their lines aloud, no matter how clumsily, helps you hear the music and cadences in them.

In service of enriching this reading, aloud or otherwise, I see three ­potentially useful areas to elucidate for the reader: key moments of my development process on the Towards Youth script, how theatre practitioners brought this text into performance (or a public practice, as I like to refer to it), and some thoughts on the playing space. To those who have read Kathleen’s formidable pages in this book, some of the play’s components will be familiar to you. The following notes seek to convey parts of my own meaning-making and how the exact words issued by youth and educators around the world passed through the hands and hearts of artists. I typically write a sizeable playwright’s note for the show program provided at the theatre. I make every effort in those notes to avoid directing the audience member’s experience or spelling out the meaning of what they are about to watch. That said, I never expect that everyone reads program notes in advance of watching the play they are attending. This surmise may be because I, admittedly, seldom do ­myself, ­often preferring to engage with them on the streetcar ride home from the theatre or the next day with my morning coffee. I welcome the reader, should they wish, to take my considerable introduction to



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Towards Youth as an “outroduction” – something to connect with after reading the play itself. Or, not unlike an audio guide in a museum exhibit, the reader may wish to swing between my offerings here and the drama itself. Notes on Composition In its first iteration, Towards Youth: a play on radical hope was structured as a cycle of five one-act plays, roughly one hour long each, representing each physical site of the Radical Hope research, along with some sites from Kathleen’s past studies. In December 2017, a two-week script development workshop – co-produced by Crow’s Theatre and my company Project: Humanity – distilled over five hours of text into a two-hour work. The newly condensed play at that point, as it does now, moved through six research sites. What fell away (or was absorbed, as I often like to think) can provide further dimension to a reading of what endures. It may seem unusual to share out-takes in advance of the completed script itself, but I perceive in the pared away material ways of conveying my editing process, along with how key themes and conflicts came to ­undergird the dramatic storytelling. Often these scenes were cut in order to satisfy the exigencies of drama – the needs of structure that require a playwright to foreground certain things in order to craft a legible journey for the uninitiated viewer/listener. Other edits came from my sharpening the central thrust and argument of the total theatrical endeavour. TORONTO 1: “The Teacher”3 The first school we encounter in Towards Youth aims to dramatize the power and problem of (mis)hearing youth voices. It must be said, at the outset, that the thick data appearing in this part of the play do not hail from the Radical Hope project. I shaped this opening section (in a school Kathleen called “Middleview”) from the first year of Kathleen’s previous research project Urban School Performances (USP): The Interplay, through Live and Digital Drama, of Local-Global Knowledge about Student Engagement (2008–2013), an international ethnographic study

3 Along with identifying the location of research, I include here my working title for each section of the play. In this case, the first Toronto site bore the title “The Teacher.” These titles provided me a “north” on my navigation system as embedded playwright, a key concept to anchor my exploration.

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examining (among many things) marginalized young people’s engagement with the normative trajectories of schooling. Kathleen approached me in 2009 to do a “tour” of her data after she had attended a performance of my first verbatim play, The Middle Place, which staged the words of youth shelter residents and their caseworkers. In a very thoughtful way, aware that not all ethnographic r­ esearch is suitable for a dramatic framework, she asked if I saw the makings of a play from her work on youth engagement. She described her research to me in this way: “What do young people care about? Why do young people care when they care?” Consequently, it did not take me long to detect the dramatic potential in this research, and I eventually penned The Teacher – which I would sooner call an étude than a full play. It marked one of the earliest instances in my verbatim theatre practice where I was able to work not only with interviews but also with transcripts of filmed classroom dynamics (a recurring feature of Towards Youth). The Teacher, so titled to invoke the possibility of youth and drama itself being teachers alongside the salaried educator in the room, provided some building blocks that I needed to integrate into Towards Youth if I were to give proper breath, breadth, and clarity to Kathleen’s mission as an ethnographic researcher. If we were to u ­ nderstand the source of the Radical Hope project – even the concept of “radical hope” as Kathleen understood it – I felt the uninitiated public would be well served by receiving some backstory. The articulation of radical hope – an active form of hope-in-the-now that relates to care – emerged, in part, at Middleview. What Middleview also provided in vivid terms is the significant challenge of hearing young people in our ongoing times of global unrest and how the drama classroom creates a “hearing space” like no other in our educational institutions. The drama room is spatially different; learning and communication usually happen in an embodied way, and often, young people’s lives are the curriculum. Youth group life force, when uncorked, is robust. Ms. S, the drama teacher at Middleview, is a skilled educator and one of the highly respected drama teachers in her school board. One of her toughest semesters as a teacher is represented in Towards Youth because it holds both the impediments to listening and the glimmers of what is possible when we hear young people for who they tell us they are. Charting her struggles, alongside those of her ­students – who struggle to be seen and heard – incited the fundamental question of Towards Youth, as voiced by Bella, a student in that class: “How are you going to hear me?” Ms. S was an empathetic listener and skilfully “surfed” the polyphony of her classroom. To the chagrin of some students (and even audience



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members of Towards Youth), she would often open up the drama space to extended discussions about how her students were navigating the complexities of their lives. One student, Derek, jabs at her pedagogy at one point: “Can I just say we spent a whole period on Monday talking about our weekend? Which – that’s not drama, that’s like – sharing.” Derek’s comment garnered a laugh every time it was performed in the play by actor Tim Dowler-Coltman, usually from educators or students in the audience who recognized the complaint. In the book about her previous multi-year study, Why Theatre Matters, Kathleen astutely observes: Talk is a double edge sword in drama classrooms. It often opens up the room to a “social curriculum” that students seem to yearn for, but it also exposes our lack of knowledge, our cultural gaps, our difficult personal feelings. In drama, the talk fuels the performance work and the performance work fuels the talk. It is an unending reciprocity that can invite deep engagement and also induce strategic disengagement. It is a way to discover and reveal that is both desirable and intimidating. (Gallagher, 2014, p. 179)

In this vein, Ms. S’s pedagogy was actively responding to a deficit she perceived in her school ecology with regards to understanding and ­addressing the lived realities of the students. For all of its possible faults, the “Doors Project” that is featured in the opening scenes of Towards Youth is her attempt to rectify a most egregious and systemic muting of youth voices. From my first encounter with the Middleview data, I was punctured by Ms. S’s capacity to level with her students, to approach them as full persons, to activate and honour their capacities to be teachers in the room. Her careful risk-taking was apparent to me, and I beheld how it could both deepen relationships and learning, and at times, fuel disconnection and misunderstandings. I could not include all of her classroom successes in the dramatic structure of Towards Youth – it would have made for too early a resolution and may have strained the audience’s capacity to grasp the play’s central dilemma. I did include what may have been one of the hardest moments in her career as a teacher (the scene entitled “Derek Dis(engages)”). In rehearsal and performance, the actor playing Ms. S (Jessica Greenberg) and the ensemble portraying youth in the class avidly pursued a balance of power and voice that was true to that classroom and also supported the play’s dramaturgy. This balance involved performing the verbatim text alongside thoughtfully improvised classroom dynamics (which I speak to in my

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forthcoming notes on practice). Striking the balance was a constant challenge – and in any given performance, I would feel both uncomfortable with how close to the sun we were flying (the group’s creating and adjusting levels of order/chaos in real time) and committed to the value of effectively dramatizing the distinct power relations of that class. ­Middleview provided a way to animate and activate ­Kathleen’s portrait of drama spaces and the relationships therein: Drama classrooms, in our experience, are messy, chaotic, unpredictable spaces that seem to offer some possibility for different kinds of engagements in the performance moments in the “real” relations of the classroom. These possibilities are sometimes explored, sometimes left unrealized, and can also seriously backfire and reinforce the fear and vulnerability that persists for many young people in schools. They are what Foucault ... has called heterotopias in the sense that they are real, unlike utopias, but that they simultaneously represent, contest, and invert other real spaces. This hoped-for space of the drama classroom is similar to Foucault’s description of a space that is both a representation of the real but also a contestation of it. (Gallagher, 2014, p. 120)

In a short scene that was eventually cut from the play,4 Ms. S articulates her drive. As the reader engages with recurring forms of tumult in her classroom, as depicted through my edit of Towards Youth, I find this communication to be a helpful touchstone for the often messy and unpredictable Middleview scenes: kathleen:  And

why did you decide that high school, rather than say, other kinds of teaching, was where you should be?

(2)5 ms. s: 

I always felt drawn to youth and teenagers and

4 Although these passages did not make it into the final playscript, they did undergo a dramaturgical process: they were curated, subjected to my particular punctuation techniques/notations (in a best effort to capture precise rhythms of speech for an actor to re-present) and, at some point during the play’s development, explored as part of the “remix.” 5 The first instance of what will be a recurring dramatic notation for the reader, a bracketed number – in this case (2) – denotes how many seconds of pause before the character resumes speaking. Had Ms. S paused for four seconds, a notation of (4) would have been used.



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adolescents, and that stage of life where you’re kind of questioning everything. Because I don’t think I’ve ever stopped really questioning everything. kathleen:  What is hardest about your job? I know that’s a big question. ms. s:  I would say that apathy is the hardest thing. The fighting against the current of apathy that may either be there amongst the youth themselves or the institution, other teachers, the administration, the board, the city…so trying to inspire and create art is hard in the face of a lot of that kind of thing. COVENTRY: “Truth and Story”6 The youth of Canley Youth Theatre underlined for me the power of the circle – as a configuration for bodies in space, as a concept for mutuality, and as a compassion-building tool. In the Coventry part of Towards Youth, I leaned into how communities are lifted by the arts and, distinctly, lifted by theatre made with young people. Coventry is a success story nestled in a disaster. Kathleen and I, along with research team members Dirk Rodricks and Nancy Cardwell, arrived in Coventry two days before the Brexit referendum. I woke up late, jetlagged, the morning of the referendum result and could scarcely compute the BBC news coverage I was taking in. Within a half-hour, I went out onto the Warwick Campus and began conducting street interviews. My opening line went something like this: “Hello, I’m a playwright from Canada, and I’m speaking with people today about the referendum result. Can I ask you a few questions?” Barely anyone declined my ask. My next question, invariably, was “How are you feeling today?” The scene I eventually crafted from this material – the portrait of a community-in-immediate-shock – never made it into Towards Youth, but richly informed the stakes of what has been represented. It was “Open Day” at the university, which meant prospective Warwick University applicants were touring the campus with their parents, most of whom were distraught by the “Leave” referendum result. Many told me they felt “gutted,” that the referendum was “rigged,” and/or a “proxy for immigration.” A young man, Leon, told me: “Deep down I don’t think this species has a future anyways, like.” A mother, reflecting on where

6 As Kathleen has shared in her analysis, the Canley Youth Theatre’s A Museum of Living Stories included a re-enacted parable about Truth and Story. Its culminating idea is that sometimes Truth needs to be cloaked in Story in order to be accepted.

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she felt her democracy had landed on that day, said: “I thought we were stretching out our arms. Not drawing up the bridge.” I did, however, encounter some parents – particularly a pair of mothers – who ­provided a stark contrast: 1:  Yeah I was surprised. I thought we would lose/7 mother 2:  Not by much/ mother 1:  No I actually thought less. andrew:  And you got the results you wanted? mother 1:  Yeah, because I voted Out. andrew:  Oh. And I just wanted to poll your cohorts here. Did you both vote as well? mother 2:  I voted Out. mother 1:  She’s not old enough! (wicked laugh) mother 2:  But ask my son here. andrew:  Did you vote? son: (embarrassed) Yeah I voted. andrew:  And how did you vote? son: (embarrassed) I voted In. andrew:  You did. So how are you feeling today? 8 son:  Just bummed out (?) andrew: Yeah? mother 1:  I think, I think you’ll find that the older generation voted out and the younger generation wanted to stay because they don’t know any different…and we do. andrew: (unconvinced, but concealing it) Of course. mother 1:  So we wanted to…go back to what we had. And they’re scared of change. Which is…/ You know it’s going to be a big change for us and some of it’s not going to be good. Initially, but hopefully. mother 2:  It’s natural…because that’s all they’ve known. The pound is plummeting/…didn’t expect that. I mean what a shock! mother 1:  Well hopefully things will balance, even out. In time. And we will start regaining our country back and what we, the mother

7 A slash “/” denotes the immediate onset of the next speaker. It results in overlapping text/voices. If it appears at the end of a line, this denotes the next speaker interrupting. 8 A further form of dramatic notation in my verbatim theatre scripts: the (?) denotes an appreciable “upspeak” – the giving of a higher inflection to the last syllable of a word. It often evokes (rightfully or not) an uncertainty in the speaker, a reaching out to the listener.



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British people…’cause that’s who we are. Want for our country. All immigrants…it’s going too far. It’s gone too far. I want to go into my supermarket and there’s British people speaking English around you, not the tower of Babylon. There are health services where there are translators because there are people who can’t speak English. If you’re coming to this country then speak English…we’re in England, do as the English do. I don’t go to other countries and say, “You have to speak what I want.” People need to assimilate. There’s no cohesion. It’s not cohesive. There are ghettos. Rather than… (inaudible) in my opinion. And I’m not being racist. We just want to take back…I don’t want to be told by Europe that I can’t (inaudible). What right? My banana isn’t a certain (inaudible). Human rights. If someone commits a crime in this country, I want them to be sent back to their country. Why can’t we? Because they have a pass here? No. I mean it’s disgraceful. (1) We’re very civilized people. And we don’t know. All we know is that it’s time for change. We need change. Whether it’s hope or not. You can’t define it. You can’t define it because there’s nothing to define it to. You don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s into the unknown. And that’s exciting. Rather than hope. Because things now are going to have to change. Along with this passage providing some window onto the social upheaval and discord that our site was undergoing, it interrupted my own assumptions about who was voting to “Leave” the European Union. Included here are a pair of mothers on a prestigious university campus (one with a significant international student population, I might add) who were seeking post-secondary opportunities for their children. The polarization in the United Kingdom, partially represented here, is the social space where the Canley Youth Theatre group presented their work. The power of young people telling their stories provided some form of release and relief in a community comprised of many who had lost their story, or at least the story they thought they were contributing to (a Britain in Europe). The Canley Youth Theatre fundamentally, through drama and the privileging of youth voices (many of which had been suppressed in the referendum campaign), practised hope and put into motion the possibility that, perhaps more than something you have, hope is something you give. As one youth participant, Luke, aptly put it (in a monologue that appeared in an early draft of Towards Youth): Storytelling can be a way to try to – maybe it can be a step towards true justice and equality if you’re giving a statement about how the world should be or addressing a problem in the world.

luke: 

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Or it could just be, you know, for a bit of banter. (smirks) And I just think that banter is what makes the world go ’round because sometimes life can’t always be a nice place, sometimes bad things do happen and I think that banter can make everyone feel a bit better. I know sometimes if I’m having a bad day, I’ll go somewhere like I may go to do drama, I may go chillaxing with the lads, and we’ll have some banter, and that’ll just make everything seem ok. From what I could tell, the Canley Youth Theatre – in their circle and in their theatre-making – provided banter-with-consequence. ATHENS: “The Sea”9 I will only touch on this site briefly, as it is one of the weightier storylines in Towards Youth and I hesitate to overload it. Drama – defined by Dorothy Heathcote as “a real man in a mess” (Heathcote, 1971) – was self-­evident in Athens. There was a fundamental pedagogical incompatibility between the research team (which included our Greek ­Radical Hope research collaborators) and Tania, the high school drama teacher at our site of research. Something that I tried to hold onto as I wrote this section is how Greece, at the time of this research, occupied a space of intersecting and compounding crises. The interpersonal conflict we experienced would often upstage this key contextual piece, and yet the conflict and the context were fully interrelated. This cut scene may add further dimensionality to Tania’s motives, as grappled with by our two Greek research collaborators, Myrto Pigou-Repoussi and Nikos Govas. Schools with more arts: less violence. More socializing: less violence. More time you have free, let the students and timetable to breathe: you have less violence. myrto:  So I think, I think that crisis would be an opportunity for us to change. But I am afraid that gradually we are losing this opportunity. And we remain to our familiar ways of yes, making the small picture better rather than the big one. nikos:  There is change. Tania teaches in her spare time without anyone saying well done. She is not getting paid, why do this? Why do teachers come to seminars on weekends to pay out of their pockets – why do we have fifty people coming to these seminars? Why are we here in this drama room? It’s so nice outside – why are nikos: 

9 The Aegean Sea became an active metaphor for me in my development of this part of the play, as were the barely distinguishable islands on its horizon – both knowable but mostly unknowable.



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we not outside?! This is hope. It’s not about money or recognition, they want to be better at their jobs, for me it’s definitely hope. myrto:  Crisis for me, I’ve seen it so much and I have thought of it so much, it puts you in a position to want some things to feel a human being. I’m seeing sometimes in my environment people who are having serious problems in terms of their economic situations, and we are going, for example, to meet them, and they will have prepared so many things that you can see it might cost them the food of their week. But they want to feel that they have an open house, a warm house that will make a nice dinner for friends. They don’t want to feel…Kostas, my husband, always says – we are going out with a couple – so we will go out and Kostas will say, “Let’s pay, pay quickly, pay quickly,” and sometimes they want to pay and I told him, “They want to pay.” Because this is part of being a human being. (2) Could there be a connection between this and the way we are in our classrooms? The notion of philotimo lives large in this site. As explained to Kathleen and me by Myrto, philotimo is not simply being hospitable but ensuring that this hospitality has been felt by its intended receiver. There were deep implications here for our broader mission as researchers and artists, as this culturally situated idea pertained to listening and ensuring that someone feels heard. Theatre director Alan Dilworth, primary collaborator on my earliest verbatim plays The Middle Place and Small Axe, would speak to me in rehearsals about the “space between ­stories.” How do we create a space between the narratives we hold of/ for ourselves and those held by others? And can theatre – perhaps as a model for more “ordinary” instances of listening – generate possibilities for not only encountering but entering that space? For Alan, the act of a­ uthentic listening had something to do with letting go of our own “held” story while resisting the fast-tracking (and false comfort) of adopting another’s. It had something to do with time and forms of silence (the music in between the notes, so to speak) being a key ingredient to eventual and more complex understanding. TAINAN: “The Village”10 Tainan, in the play, has been largely distilled to two events – a visit to a night market with some of the site’s youth and a focus group

10 At the Tainan site, I was struck by the phrase “going back to the village” as invoked by Kathleen, referencing something Dorothy Heathcote once said. This phrase rang

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interview with these young people, towards the end of our visit. Over the course of our time in Taiwan, these students had shared their works in progress on three original plays, tackling a range of issues: the stigma of homosexuality in their society, poverty, family ties, and the dearth of opportunities for young people. Filial piety was a prevailing theme  – especially as it may chafe against concepts of individualism. Any a­ ttempts to transfer the student performances we observed into the body of T ­ owards Youth fell flat. I am reminded of assistant directing for Chris Abraham on ­Annabel Soutar’s excellent documentary play The Watershed in 2014 and how much we struggled with staging one particular scene. ­Annabel wanted to re-enact a notable ­public protest in 2012 wherein “white-coated scientists marched through downtown Ottawa to Parliament Hill for a mock funeral marking ‘the death of e­ vidence’” (Pedwell, 2012). Images and video footage of that event prove ­striking, chilling even, and yet we kept discovering how s­ omething that is ­inherently theatrical cannot be easily or as effectively re-presented in the theatre. The scene of the “death of evidence” rally resisted ­transposition – as though the metaphor of a metaphor c­ ancels the p ­ otency of both. For this reason, in Towards Youth, we do not r­e-present excerpts of the youth play in Coventry, and we do not see the three youth plays in Tainan. In the play’s depiction of the Athens site, we meet a few examples of young people’s drama, but sparingly. To have beheld the supreme focus and rigour of the Taiwanese ­students in their play-making was to take in the cultural specialness of being artists in a post-secondary context. By most accounts, they should have shed the impulse to make-believe along with their childhoods  – few, if any, had parents encouraging academic pursuits in the performing arts. In the focus group recreated in Towards Youth, I witnessed young people mourning their dreams, the impossibility of pursuing something as “selfish” as a life in the arts, and the inevitable dissolution of their cohort. These were young artists who had no appetite for celebrity, but rather wanted the possibility of having their voices and stories heard in their society. Wan-Jung’s rousing adamance to “keep banging on the walls” came through as a

out for me as it related to the drama classroom being a village for learning, a site of perhaps more direct and intergenerational exchange. Wan-Jung’s project See You Again, Kobayashi Village – which had her students engaging with Indigenous ritual in a remote mountain village – reinforced the strength of this image for me.



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counter-narrative, imploring them to question and challenge the barriers to their s­ elf-actualization and the perceived finiteness of their dreams. More than with any other site, in Tainan I questioned my own sense of comprehending what I was encountering: the limits of both translation and understanding. I questioned why translation needed to favour my North American English-speaking whiteness; and I asked myself, How could I bring myself to the unfamiliar as opposed to relying on the unfamiliar to come to me? I am struck by what was once the very first scene of the Taiwan portion of the play. In a passage far more dream-like than any other in the piece (at that point in its development), a recently elected Donald Trump was put into a theatrical collage with Wan-Jung (whom I had interviewed about translation) and a shirtless dancer sporting a pig mask. This last – most absurd – element hailed from a Taiwanese/Japanese production that Kathleen, her students Dirk and Kelsey, and I had attended in Tainan entitled Notes Exchange Dostoevsky, where precisely such a character appeared on stage. I sought to create a moment in Towards Youth that would unsettle audience members in some way akin to my own experience at this research site, at this given historic moment (November 2016), which had as much to do with being in an unfamiliar country as it did with being in the wake of the American election result. Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business. Complicated. Thank you very much. I’ve just received a call from Secretary Clinton. She congratulated us. It’s about us. On our victory, and I congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign. I mean, she fought very hard. Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely. Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division, have to get together.

donald trump: 

WAN-JUNG starts to translate Trump’s speech into Mandarin. donald trump:  As

I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign but rather an incredible and great movement, made up of millions of hard-working men and women who love their country and want a better, brighter future for themselves and for their family.

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A PIG MAN in gold shorts appears. He wears nothing else beyond these and a latex pig mask. He dances. Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream. I’ve spent my entire life in business, looking at the untapped potential in projects and in people all over the world. That is now what I want to do for our country. Tremendous potential. Tremendous potential. It is going to be a beautiful thing.

donald trump: 

Wan-Jung’s Mandarin translation extends well beyond Trump’s final words. The PIG MAN keeps dancing. andrew: 

Can I ask you a question about translation?

wan-jung: Yes.

(1) How would you describe what happens in your imagination when you’re changing…English…into Mandarin, or Mandarin…into English? wan-jung:  Hm. I just try to grab the words, the words that I can find in English to best express my Chinese feelings, (1) hm./ It’s the feelings. andrew:  And are the feelings different? Or are they the same. andrew: 

(2) wan-jung:  Are

Chinese feelings the same as English feelings? That’s maybe a stupid question. wan-jung:  No. I think they are the same. It’s a feeling, the thoughts that I’m trying to grab and try to find the right words that I can use in English to express it. Hm. I feel…you know, when I think in English and Chinese, it’s a little bit different. andrew: How? wan-jung:  The tempo. andrew:  The tempo is different/ wan-jung:  The tempo is different. In Chinese, I’m slower. In English, I’m more, more aggressive. And upbeat. andrew:  ’Cause I was noticing when you translated, when we say something in English, the translation always takes a lot longer in Chinese…in Mandarin. andrew: 



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wan-jung: Yes/

Why/ does it? it takes more syllables. Because we need more words in Chinese. Chinese is a more poetic language for me.

andrew: 

wan-jung:  Also

This scene, though still fascinating to me, was stepping out of the central “story arrow” of Towards Youth. I am, however, struck by the way movement (in the form of dance) explored here would inform how we “translated” the next part of the play for audiences. TORONTO 2: “Regal Heights” This site’s “portrait” proved the shortest one in the play and in many ways, for me, was one of the most theatrically satisfying. For a long time, I struggled to find a place for Regal Heights in the dramatic thrust of the play. What I knew to be true of this site in Year 1 – most anchored in data that I reviewed as opposed to moments I witnessed – were tensions in the class along racial lines. It felt appropriate and necessary, in the unfolding dramaturgy of Towards Youth, to remind the play’s Canadian audience that our educational and social systems need to be examined as much as any others. I was punctured by Kathleen and her student Dirk Rodrick’s analysis (see Gallagher & Rodricks, 2017) of how racialized young men in the class had “de-voiced” themselves on account of the group’s micro-­adjustment from a circle discussion to a more linear classroom orientation facing a chalkboard. What this highlighted for me was the power of the circle in drama classrooms, and many other kinds of spaces, as a way to “move the centre” – and specifically, to “de-centre” whiteness. In Towards Youth, Kathleen describes how the breakdown of the circle into a more socially accepted and reinforced linearity cannot help but re-­establish hierarchies and often re-suppress marginalized voices. Silence is a powerful thing in language-based theatre. To dramatize “silencing” is to touch the heart of why verbatim theatre is a necessary form. In my estimation, it makes manifest the form’s mission to give audience to underheard and misunderstood voices, along with the barriers to achieving that goal. It was Towards Youth actor Stephen ­Jackman-Torkoff’s profound offer to take Maliky’s silence (and silencing) into stylized movement. Stephen’s journey through gestures of raising their hand to speak, to reaching for something unreachable, to smearing their face with an open palm and holding their breath amounted to a disquieting dance. It was never clear to me whether it was the character of Maliky dancing or Stephen themself, an artist of

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colour, breaking from the script (so to speak) and dancing in honour of Maliky. I felt that it could be both at once – indeed, that it was the confluence of imagination and conscience and encounter. The story I got from it was a young Black person both undergoing and resisting negation and erasure – without words. What I can further provide here, in the form of a cut scene, is a secondary score: a sense of what Maliky and his friend Jamal were offering prior to the shift in the classroom orientation. It is, in part, the phenomenon inspiring Stephen’s movement. The strangeness of verbatim testimony in dance, as a way of helping us to see and listen anew, reinvokes Ric Knowles (2014). In my view, the dance in Regal Heights proved more theatrically effective in dislocating a sense of familiarity around racialized oppression and micro-aggressions than playing out the whole scene as offered here. I’m just gonna say there’s racial issues in our school. You can tell by the way the hall monitors question people. Uhhh, you know they won’t look at someone of a Caucasian colour like, “Hey what are you doing in the hallway?” But if it was me and my friends they’d be like, “Hey you guys got class?” Like in the library, you’re not allowed to go to the library without a spare. But like a lot of times you won’t be asked/ certain question if you look certain ways sometimes. jamal:  Yeah, a lot of people sometimes are blind to issues/ to some things that they are doing. maliky:  And like you don’t even, I had a couple incidents, an incident a couple weeks ago where there was (2) a teacher’s car got stolen. You know I got called down to the office for a different reason. I was in the gym after hours, me and my friends. I took onus of that – yeah I did that. But then she started asking me questions – “Hey do you know about this?” I’m like “naw.” And she really did think I knew about it. She really pressed, she was like, “I’m disappointed in you. I know you know who did it.” Why would you think I know this stuff?! It’s not like it’s not blatant, but it’s so stuck in your mind that you look like this and you dress like this, so you’re going to know certain stuff, and you’re going to/ do so – jamal:  I mean the article, uhhh, it shows what’s going on with Black males and police, and it shows how, um, people don’t really, don’t really care, don’t really care about the inner city youth, as they try to call it. maliky:  There was a video that just surfaced of, like, some police officer arresting a pregnant woman that was eight months pregnant! That was like/ January but it just surfaced. maliky: 



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jamal:  And

so it’s showing people what’s happening in the world and what could possibly happen and what could continue happening if nobody gets up and does something. (1) It could possibly happen to me, so I think about it more emotionally because it happens and it’s been happening for so long, and for some reason it’s still happening, and nothing’s been done about it. maliky: Yeah. mr. l: Ok. maliky:  But let’s just make sure whatever we make it’s not like that Waiting for Godot. I didn’t like that. I don’t like plays that don’t make sense. scarlet:  It makes sense. maliky:  Like, obviously it makes sense to a different person but, like, obviously there’s like a, an underlying message but I don’t like it when it’s so deep in there we have to dig and dig just to search it. mr. l: Ok. maliky:  And also no mockery when someone is tryin to play someone that looks like us. It’s always like, “Yo dog, whassup.” (Jamal laughs) They’re the funny person, they’re the one that’s going to get the audience amped. scarlet:  No we have to make it serious./ Obviously. jamal: Whassuuuuuuppp! maliky:  I’m just saying none of us talk like that – well some of us talk like that but – JAMAL and MALIKY laugh. SCARLET breaks from the circle and goes up to the board. She writes the word “Funny” with a line through it. Ok. So we can’t make it funny. My god, no. The video, it was traumatic. mr. l:  Yeah. Why? dj:  Well, like…you’re watching this dude who really doesn’t need to be – it was just, like – it was, like, why did he shoot him? Like, he was in his hands and then he shot him. And then he was on the ground. And then he was already shot bleeding out on the ground and they put, like, they, put a thing on his head. zaida:  They didn’t tell him he was under arrest or anything. mr. l:  So what goes through your mind when you watch something like that? dj:  It’s kinda infuriating. mr. l: Why? dj:  Just because, like, it’s obviously not like right. And it’s just, it’s just – I don’t know it’s one of those things that’s not, it’s not a good scarlet:  dj: 

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thing to do, and to see some things, like, that being done to people who don’t deserve those things. Like, it’s not, it’s not fair. JAMAL and MALIKY have been notably silent, and remain so for the rest of the scene. SCARLET continues to put ideas on the board. Plus the fact that we know that no action is going to be taken. ’Cause, how many, how many police have been arrested on (inaudible). Like no one. dj:  Police have so much power. So instead of being saved by them it’s/ like (inaudible). scarlet:  You would hope there would be a little bit of justice, like, the person who did the bad thing would be punished, that’s what we’ve been taught. And now these innocent people are being killed. So I’m gonna write Raise Awareness. I feel like that, that could be a good thing. You are raising awareness for this issue that some people may not, like, know about. Or have, incorrect opinions on. dj:  People should walk to their spots, and we could say the names. Like Trayvon Martin, right. And the other names. mr. l:  That could be good. dj:  Like, I’m just thinking, we could do tableau. Or we should all, like, get up in a line and be in, like, tableau, say a name and then go back into our line. scarlet:  But we have to make it dramatic to catch people’s attention. It can’t be funny. scarlet: 

LUCKNOW: “Universe of Care”11 If the central dilemma of Towards Youth came from Middleview – the difficulty in hearing young people (Bella’s “How are you going to hear me?”) – the central metaphor of the play came from the site in India. For me, a central metaphor is a key image that serves as an anchor or 11 This title emerged from an interview with Arvind, one of the teachers at Prerna. He offered: “You know I had a conversation with Anshu, she … she’ll be translating for you later, her English is very good, and we were talking about what universe of care is. And care in itself, the whole spectrum of care, love, affection, all of this is very – to some extent – turns mechanical over time. They make you know how to be nice to people. So how do you really say that the place is caring? Like, I can walk into an office and everybody will come up to me and ask me, “How are you doing?” But is that care? Like, how do you define what care is? And she said something that I found very beautiful. That care is when someone feels safe to demand care, is when you have a universe of care.”



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root for the disparate elements of the drama. I imagine it as much a playwright’s touchstone in their pursuit of unity as it is something that threads through the public’s experience of the whole play. I am able to trace the origin story for the central metaphor in Towards Youth back to the fieldwork in India: a confluence of articulations and events amounting to my fixation on the word and concept and imperative of adjust. In the play, Dr. Urvashi Sahni frames the concept of adjust in a way that had, in reality, come from a dialogue with her daughter ­Shibani that Kathleen, Dirk, and I witnessed. Even though Shibani would eventually fall away as a character, the reader will see how I still found a way to incorporate her evocative elaboration in the play. This is how it originally surfaced: Big term in India. Adjust. Like, when you are on public transport, any public transport: train, bus…where you have multiple people…if it’s a seat for two people and a third one wants to sit, he’ll be, like, “Adjust/ please.” urvashi:  Ah, Scrooge! shibani:  It’s not “Excuse me.” It’s not “Pardon me, can I.” Like, “Can I please sit?” No. So many people in India, like, that if there’s a little tiny place for someone to sit, they’re – yeah, they’ll Scrooge and they say (firmly) “Adjust. Please.” You know? urvashi:  shibani: 

There was linkage between this articulation and what I had observed on the roads of Lucknow. I wrote in my field notes: You feel it on the road first … Our driver, Pawan, weaves in and out of traffic – other cars, motorcycles, buses, rickshaws, pedestrians, vegetable carts, street dogs, cows – indeterminably, to my eye … Pawan never takes his hand off the surface of the horn, and he pumps it a dozen times per minute, at anything and anyone that gets in his way. He isn’t angry or flustered. He is making his way. And there’s an unexpected solace in registering how absolutely everyone else on the road is doing the same thing. (9 April 2016)

However, these notions of culture and context were but ellipses (something to move through), leading me to the most potent iteration of adjust: the girls at Prerna, who, as the reader has perhaps already discovered in Kathleen’s vivid writing and will further encounter in the unfolding action of the play, are actively reshaping their senses of self, their relationships, and the worlds around them. Urvashi attests to how anger can be a revolutionary emotion. Though I have seen footage and

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read transcripts that demonstrate how Prerna’s critical feminist pedagogy was equipping lower caste and class girls with ways to name their subordination and instigate reforms in their families and communities, I did not witness the power of indignation first-hand on my trip to ­Lucknow. What I was undone by – punctured by, over and over – was how the girls at Prerna resided in themselves in other powerful hues. Again, in my research trip field notes, I wrote: They are fiercely present, beaming, meeting us more than half-way. They laugh. They focus, carefully. As a facilitator, you grapple with feelings of awe and your own failure. These girls cannot be matched, you will always come up short of their massive dreams and hopes. They make you want to be better, to be more dynamic, to facilitate a greater discovery, to elicit more joy. Call on any one of them, even the shyest of the group, and she will participate to the best of her ability, full-voiced, stepping into their power, performing confidence if it isn’t yet there. And you keep finding yourself wanting to give them more space, all the space you can possibly give them. In their faces, in their voices and bodies, it’s hard to not feel how they are claiming what is rightfully theirs and saying to the rest of us, in no uncertain terms: Adjust, Adjust, Adjust. (9 April 2016)

When Kathleen and I were searching for a title for the verbatim play born of the Radical Hope project, “towards youth” felt most appropriate as an invitation to reorient, to reorder ourselves, to adjust our listening and being. The girls at Prerna were asking more of us and the world: to not only behold but to reinforce the complexity of their personhood. Urvashi has created a culture and pedagogy of “ands” not “ors” – by this I mean that I saw in practice her imperative to perceive young people “maximally” as a way of helping them discover their myriad capacities and possibilities. It felt to me then, as it did when I crafted the Lucknow part of the play, that Urvashi had invited the world into the classroom for this very teaching. Kathleen has shared and spoken to the poignant interview with Prerna graduate Arzu – one that informed the final portion of the play without being re-presented. A passage from that scene stays with me as a puncture of our time at this site and a kind of heartbeat for Towards Youth as a whole: kathleen:  Arzu,

what do you hope for in your life?

(2) arzu: 

I want to be a teacher.



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Notes on Practice The completed playscript of Towards Youth – though carefully tracking numerous themes, problems, conflicts, and revelations/resolutions  – was potentially unperformable. The script has sixty characters of socalled fixed identities, many hailing from parts of the world that bear limited resemblance to a Torontonian context (that of the artists who originally interpreted this text). In order to do justice to the sites and communities Kathleen and I had engaged with, I felt the piece had to be multilingual, thus requiring an ensemble of actors to speak, convincingly, Canadian-accented English, British Midlands–accented English, Greek, Mandarin, and Hindi (along with further English dialects as heard in England, Greece, Taiwan, and India). The racial and ethnic diversity of each site required a diverse cast, but how were we to evoke, for instance, the classrooms in Taiwan or India without a fully Taiwanese or Indian ensemble? Beyond these important concerns, how were we to approach the “border-crossing” we were considering with regards to age and, at times, gender? In performance, as with the published version, Towards Youth outlines the “rules of its consequential game” from the outset in its prologue: “A Letter from Kathleen to the Actors.”12 The beginning of the performers’ encounter with an audience involved addressing that audience directly (through the mask of Kathleen’s words, interestingly enough) as a way to prepare the listener for our modes and codes of communication and (mis)representation. Intended as a gesture of care and acknowledgment, we sought to trace a horizon of expectation for what was about to unfold in the space. It did not mean we were beyond questioning our own undertaking or having it questioned, but we wanted to provide some transparency around our creative challenges, intentions, and approaches. In our process, we avidly pursued some way to activate what Kathleen came to call a contract of care and a language of imagination with and between practitioners and then, ultimately, with the public. Key for me to highlight is the collaborative approach we took to this opening, specifically with the ensemble of actors, who were to become the front-line communicators of the play and needed to feel a measure of safety in their play-making. For this reason, they physically and representationally entered the play not as characters but as

12 This was a scene name we gave to the opening section of Towards Youth, the text that precedes any actors practising voices-not-their-own.

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themselves. They read Kathleen’s letter to the audience as a covenant that they had entered into with the words, worlds, and modes of the play, and as an invitation for the audience to consider that covenant along with them. In our rehearsal of this section of the play, co-director Chris Abraham and I asked the ensemble to elaborate on, revise, customize, and challenge what they were reading to the public. It was critical for their opening communication with their audience to be something that they had co-authored, could stand alongside, and confidently posit as a way of being together with others for a few hours. “These are the rules of our consequential game.” And their commitment to inhabiting the voices of others as a form of advocacy, stewardship, and compassion-building community work – along with their opportunity to name the imperfect container for that commitment, to the audience – informed the limits they were game to explore. ­Perfectionism breeds a fear from which few can communicate clearly; the opening passage of the play attempted to address that liability. A national newspaper theatre critic wrote of the play: “I’ve never seen the group dynamics of teenagers represented so well on stage by actors who are not, themselves, teens” (Nestruck, 2019). In developing a performance practice for Towards Youth, we provided both technical support and expanded/extended the relationships that Kathleen and I had been cultivating for many years. We engaged the most experienced dialect coach in Toronto, numerous language consultants, and corresponded with the project’s international collaborators. We also, critically, evaluated, on an ongoing basis, the affect of our process: What does it feel like to do this work? How might those feelings be precisely the pieces of information required to achieve incredible feats of empathy and dignity when embodying the words and worlds of another? I believe that the labour of care should be rendered visible in verbatim theatre. There is an arduousness to honouring in performance a young person’s syntax, language, rhythm – in that precise effort lies powerful and new understandings of self and other. The purpose of Towards Youth was not to translate youth culture – along with any other culture being represented – but rather to be transported by it. Helen Nicholson (2005) offers: In the process of transportation, the outcomes are clearly focused but not fixed, and change may take place gradually, a collaborative and sustained process between participants … [I]t is about travelling into another world, often fictional, which offers both new ways of seeing and different ways of looking at the familiar. (pp. 12–13)



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As practitioners we were not using the words of young people to take audiences to a pre-determined terminus as much as we were practising the words of youth as a way to be carried, with audience, through new hearings of young people. Alongside this labour, we developed a performance practice that provided further dimensions to the multilayered aural world of the play. In her own writing about her Urban School Performances research project, Kathleen writes: “Storytelling through theatre takes on a polyvocality, rather than a ‘telling it like it is’” (Gallagher, 2014, p. 16). This concept bears a strong relationship to Jacques Attali’s (1985) insight in Noise: The Political Economy of Music: For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for the hearing. It is not legible, but audible. (p. 3)

There is extensive meaning to be made from the sound of a place and the sound of relationships playing out within it. Deanna H. Choi, our skilled sound designer and composer, aestheticized voices using ­microphones, soundscapes and other supporting musical composition. Alongside this sound design was a choral dimension created by the performers in a live and semi-improvisational way. I am referring here to the lively sound of young people conferring, bantering, crosstalking in the drama classroom. In our rehearsal process, we came to term this sound a group life force – something that has proven exceptionally difficult to score and represent in the performance text, but proved an essential aspect of the play. In previous reflections of our process, I refer to this life force like so: In our production, the most prominent layer of voice featured the precise verbatim text drawn from the Radical Hope research project’s data, carefully transcribed by me or one of Kathleen’s research team members. Beyond this discernable top layer of voices, these observed classroom activities would often have moments of indiscernible youth commentary (typically because many voices were stacking on top of one another, or because this dialogue was happening out of earshot of the recording device) … Based on field notes from Kathleen’s research team and her own recollections about the young people in the room, the acting ensemble of the play developed layers of sound – further moments of youth voice that would often create a dynamic and, at times overwhelming, cacophony. This aspect of the performance practice advanced our “language of imagination,” drawing inspiration from the documentary aesthetics of the play

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while making space for a highly informed improvisational element. There was “faithful betrayal” in this dimension to the play, where the “arguably false” was helping to make the “arguably real.” (Kushnir, 2020, p. 259)

In other words, the lines of dialogue in Towards Youth’s group scenes can be considered the foreground of the performance, but they were regularly complemented by a multilayered and polyphonous dynamic background produced by the ensemble. Stage directions mark these moments. To further quote Attali (1985): “More than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies.” (p. 6) Notes on Space The theatre is a physical space and a state of mind, or mental space. At a symposium held in Toronto on 17 June 2012, playwright Edward Bond, discussing his work, argued that human beings created the theatre as an extension of the psyche – that we externalized a framework wherein we could experience the world and the human condition in an emotionally consequential but less materially consequential way. The way I have previously reframed this concept is that “we come to the theatre for [a] sense of community in the joint task of imagining things that are not really there in order to have very real feelings about them” (Kushnir, 2016, pp. 88–9). Did the human mind invent the theatre as a workshop for its dilemmas? And to what extent does the workshop itself inform and alter the mind and imagination? How might we see the world based on the spaces we occupy? In film, the director curates perspective in a much more unilateral way. In the theatre, no two audience members see the exact same thing. This has to do with space: physical, psychic, and social. Kathleen’s own research conveys some persuasive insights regarding spatial configuration. The Black students at Regal Heights fall silent once the classroom activity shifts from sitting in a circle to the linearity of the chalkboard. Spaces have an impact on voices: how they enter the air, if they enter the air (as Ruhl [2020] conjures), and how they are heard by others. The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, whose stage I  walked across on our research trip to Greece, is the birthplace of tragedy. What struck me from that spot – what we would call centre stage – is that I felt surrounded by the audience, the imagined ancient Greek polis. My story, my being, felt subordinate to the expanse of (imagined) spectators to my left and right – and perhaps most impressively, above, as row upon row ascended on a steep



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rake. I was at “ground level,” and the audience rose around me (from me?). I found it to be at once a humbling and commanding spot, one from which I could draw the attention of over thirty thousand eyes. I then scaled the amphitheatre to its furthermost “seat.” From there, the audience’s “embrace” of the stage was equally apparent. I was struck by how I was looking down at the stage, not unlike an operating theatre, and how there was no way to affix my gaze on the imagined play without seeing some of the i­magined audience watching with me. The space itself was forcing me to undergo story in community with others. It will then come as no surprise that careful consideration had to be applied to Towards Youth and its spatial configuration. I am not speaking about its set – which certainly helped transport the viewer to multiple drama classrooms around the world – but rather the total performance space that held the event of the play: the venue. A more detailed description here can inform one’s reading of the play and the stage that takes shape in the reader’s theatre. Toronto’s Guloien Theatre at Streetcar Crowsnest, where the play was spatially developed and premiered, is a black box theatre – which is to say, the stage and audience can be configured in any number of ways ranging from a thrust (audience on three sides of the stage), in proscenium (audience on one side, stage on another, not unlike a movie theatre), in the round (audience on all sides of the stage, like surrounding a campfire), corner stage (audience perpendicular, on two sides of the stage), alley stage (two blocks of audience facing each other with the stage in between them), and so on. The potency of the circle in the drama class had me thinking that we would end up configuring the play in the round. Why wouldn’t we replicate that powerful pedagogical tool in our theatrical storytelling? I was mistaken in my imagining. Early experiments in the winter of 2017 revealed again how making a metaphor of a metaphor seems to cancel both out. Chris and I quickly discovered that staging in the round fast-tracked familiarity; it plunged the audience into an illusion of mutuality, an unearned “equal playing field” with its subject. We felt it undid a dramaturgical gesture of the play – to turn audiences towards something – which meant that we were turning them away from something else. That “something else” I would argue is their preconceptions, their existing narratives about young people, the drama classroom, and the nature of youth personhood and citizenship. Having the audience surround the action of the play did not serve this mission of reorienting. For instance, half the audience would be taking in the

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back of a young person at any given time, which felt inconsistent with our commitment to help publics hear young people clearly and anew. One of the director’s primary tasks in theatre-making is directing the audience’s attention. This task felt insurmountably challenging in the round where moments of group life force made for edgeless confusion. There was something exhausting about trying to figure out where to look, where to listen, and to look across the stage and witness other audience members doing the same. When asked about what it felt like to perform in the round, actors conveyed a sense of the audience “having a lot of power.” Actors felt they had to orient and reorient themselves out of consideration for everyone in the circle. And though, as practitioners, that felt like a generous focus, as the youth they were exploring and embodying, it felt subservient. We knew that we would have to explore a different arrangement of spectator and story/subject, of bodies in space. What we landed on is the notion that a circle could be created, in half, by the performers and completed, in half, by the spectators. In other words, the principle of the circle was still in play for us, albeit not literally. Were you an audience member entering the Guloien Theatre, you would have seen an audience on one side of the room and the stage on another. The ­a udience rows ascended at twofoot increments (with stairs to take you there), with the first few rows of seats at “ground level.” The stage itself did not start at ground level, but rather was elevated three feet above it. What this configuration meant is that, if you sat in the first few rows, you would be peering up at the actors on stage. If you sat three quarters of the way back in the theatre, you would be at eyelevel with an actor standing on stage. If you were in the last row, you would only slightly be gazing down at the action of the play. In working with the wonderful set designer Ken M ­ acKenzie, our ambition was to physically elevate the voices coming from the stage and, in doing so, elevate where those voices were coming from – quite literally, young people who are seldom the “tallest” people in the room. This arrangement may not sound all that groundbreaking; however, one further element substantially customized the room to the play. Ken designed a catwalk that shot from the back of the audience through to the stage, thus bisecting the audience mass into two groups and providing a secondary performance axis. Actors entered the play down this catwalk. The characters of Kathleen and Andrew would often be positioned on the catwalk as they observed



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the unfolding events of the research sites. In this regard, this strip of stage allowed performers to become spectators – not unlike the duality of the ethnographer-artist in the field. The catwalk was “the camera” – a perspective from which the mysterious ecology of the classroom could be observed and understood alongside audience members turned ethnographers. It looked like a bridge; it acted as one too. Ken’s concept for this long narrow stage came from the traditions of Kabuki Theatre. The “flower way” or hanamichi is a traditional runway and playing space that runs alongside most of the audience in a Kabuki Theatre space. “An  integral part of the Kabuki drama since the 18th century, it is used for climactic scenes – spectacular entries, exits, processions, and battles – and for scenes when intimacy and emotional  rapport with the audience are desired” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007). Takashi Ogata and Taisuke Akimoto, in their book Post-Narratology through Computational and Cognitive Approaches, probingly offer: The hanamichi … is a mechanism on the kabuki stage that has multiple usages … A narratological feature originating from the hanamichi, or a narratological concept that is symbolic of it, is “fluidity” ... in the relationship of the stage and seating in the theatre … By utilizing the hanamichi, kabuki can symbolically represent a situation of multiplicity in which the stage and seats are complicatedly blended in an integral space … [T]he fictional space and real space are multiply blended within the same theatre. (Ogata & Akimoto, 2019, p. 215)

In the climactic passage of the play, as the educators from the sites speak to their pedagogies, their turning towards youth, the actor ­Amaka Umeh – first representing one of the girls at Prerna and then Bella (who utters “How are you going to hear me?”) – occupies a position midway on the catwalk. Spatially, it is the exact centre of the circle – the equivalent of being centre stage “in the round” and the centre of our world. It always satisfied me that anyone sitting in the first few rows of the theatre had to crane their necks and look behind themselves to see her speaking: a reorienting of bodies and minds through the voices of young people. In Conclusion: Tension and Attention An inescapable and appropriate tension for the verbatim theatre-maker is honouring the exigencies of dramatic storytelling and the ethical

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relationships with the play’s sources. Towards Youth is a kind of photograph of something that has, for me, remained in motion: my ever-unfolding encounter with youth and youth culture, as well as my advocacy. The play re-presents many relationships I have had with a wide range of stakeholders and contributors and audiences, but it is also a dot in a continuum of connection and accountability. What excites me about this script – this creative record of what happened and how I sensed it – is that it can be reactivated, through reading and through play. This notion is reassuring. Towards Youth seeks to do justice to those people Kathleen and I met, befriended, and learned alongside. For me, justice has something to do with authenticity as well as consequence. Has the play, like the research, not only done no harm to its contributors but also produced some benefit to them and the world at large? Does it have us paying attention to something that needs paying attention to? How does one balance the science in the art and the art in the science in an effort to induce empathy and understanding? I regularly come back to Kathleen’s letter to the actors, in the opening passage of the play: “There are lots of different kinds of forgery in this world. And so let this be a deeply respectful forgery. Let this be a faithful betrayal.” I remind myself that justice, more than done, is a sustained action; justice is an ellipsis. The drama classroom produces a kind of tension: for youth engaged in a pedagogy wherein their lives are the curriculum, that tension resides between the way the world is and the way they wish it to be. I  relay in Towards Youth how Kathleen told me: “Drama is about dreaming…a way of walking through life, however unrealistic, that is worth doing for some reason.” This is the practice of the drama classroom and the theatre. What fell away, textually, in the dramaturgical development of the play is what Kathleen said next: “What we’re saying is that this should be part of a young person’s education.” I believe that line fell away, in part, because the value of drama extends to all of us and our collective, ongoing education. Drama is not only for young people. The play is an object, an artefact, a dance-in-writing. I reiterate my hope that, as the reader meets it, the play presents a point of practice in the now, as it was for its interpretive artists and for its audiences during its first public run in Toronto in 2019. I hope the reader can consider this text-in-motion. Not unlike the carefully rendered transcripts from which the play is composed becoming revivified in the theatre, I hope the document of this play finds new and ongoing life in the reader’s hands and the theatre in their mind.



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Acknowledgments Kathleen graciously included in her acknowledgments many of the individuals and entities who helped make Towards Youth a possibility and then a new play. I wish to resurface a few names that have become familiar to the reader by this point, and also add a few others. As a researching playwright, my “passage” through education systems and contexts would have been impossible and irresponsible without guides, and I must underline how our international collaborators – Urvashi, Rachel, Nikos, Myrto, and Wan-Jung – were dazzling translators well beyond language. As vital to the play’s development were Kathleen’s exceptional graduate students, who travelled with us, transcribed, coded, analysed, and advanced their own research questions. The play benefits immensely from their bottomless curiosity and care. And then, there are the young people whom I met on this journey, grappling with a world they are simultaneously moving through and inheriting. Their singular voices make up the heart of this play you are about to read. There is a big circle of exceptional artists and arts administrators ­involved in this work. I must single out Chris Abraham. The d ­ ramaturgy of this verbatim play – a complex movement between remembered feelings, exact records, relationships, and the needs of drama – would not have been possible were it not for his formidable theatrical mind and instincts. As co-director and long-time champion of Towards Youth, Chris had my back through some of the most daunting artistic challenges of this undertaking. I want to resurface directors/dramaturgs Brian Quirt and Alan ­Dilworth for bringing love to this play at key moments of development. I want to express utmost gratitude to Daniel Chapman-Smith, with whom I co-lead Project: Humanity. The vitality of our socially engaged theatre company, and the special opportunities it has provided me as an artist, have so much to do with his ingenuity and selflessness. And little would be possible for me as a theatre-maker without my personal circle of dear supporters: Ian Arnold, Arlene Vandersloot, ­ Damien ­Atkins, Tiffani Van Buckley, and my partner Nolan Bryant. My ultimate thanks goes to Kathleen herself. The intricacy of her imagination and trust, her generosity, and her wholehearted commitment to centring drama in research have been inextricable influences on my practice. Walking alongside Kathleen in this work (as co-investigator, collaborator, and friend) is an ongoing joy and among the greatest of privileges. Andrew Kushnir

Figure 26.  Photo of an early design maquette for Towards Youth: a play on radical hope. Set design by Ken MacKenzie. Photo taken by Andrew Kushnir on 29 October 2018

TOWARDS YOUTH: A PLAY ON RADICAL HOPE by Andrew Kushnir

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Production History Towards Youth: a play on radical hope was first produced on the stage by Project: Humanity and Crow’s Theatre at Streetcar Crowsnest in Toronto on 28 February 2019. It was written by Andrew Kushnir. The research dramaturg was Kathleen Gallagher. It was co-directed by Chris Abraham and Andrew Kushnir; the production design was by Ken MacKenzie; sound design by Deanna Choi; video design by Amelia Scott; dialect design by Eric Armstrong*; the assistant director was Natasha Greenblatt; auditing youth assistant directors were Eudes Laroche-Francoeur and Hershel Blatt; stage manager was Sarah Miller. The cast was as follows: Emilio Vieira Stephen Jackman-Torkoff Tim Dowler-Coltman Aldrin Bundoc Jessica Greenberg Amaka Umeh Loretta Yu Zorana Sadiq Liisa Repo-Martell

Actor 1 Actor 2 Actor 3 Actor 4 Actor 5 Actor 6 Actor 7 Actor 8 Actor 9

Towards Youth was originally commissioned through Dr. Kathleen Gallagher’s research project Youth, Theatre,  Radical Hope  and the Ethical Imaginary, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Towards Youth received development support from the Banff Centre Playwrights Lab (2017), Crow’s Theatre (2016–19), and substantial support from the Canada Council for the Arts (New Chapter funding), the Ontario Arts Council, and Laura Dinner and Richard Rooney. This production received a high-quality filming and is featured, in part, in the documentary Finding Radical Hope (ISTOICA productions, co-­ directed by Chris Aldorf and Andrew Kushnir). *Further translation and transliteration of Hindi, Mandarin, and Greek provided by: Dr. Myrto Pigou-Repoussi Dr. Urvashi Sahni Dr. Dirk Rodricks Dr. Wan-Jung Wang

Sanskruti Marathe Kristy Tsai Thrasso Petras

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Casting1

ACT 1

ACT 2

Actor 1

Fabian Andrew

Andrew

Actor 2

Maxx Luke Ophelia’s Dad

Manolis Webber*2 Maliky Principal Gupta Announcer 2 Deval Alpesh

Actor 3

Derek John Jouvan Cabbie

Nikos Easan* Muni Announcer 1 Unmesh

Actor 4

Bonnie Max Olly

Angelo Adrian Rolsha Mr. L Vinod

Actor 5

Ms. S Neena Rachel

Marianna Maria Adrian’s Mother Another Staff Member (Prerna) Rachel

Actor 6

Bella Angela

Myrto Iris* Guest 2 Jyoti Arzu Vaishali Bella

1 An alternative casting can be explored; however, it should be noted that we discovered meaningful dramatic resonances with this breakdown. On occasion, you will see one actor embodying multiple characters in one scene. This was a deliberate performance challenge that reinforced the multi-character work of the play and gave the effect of a larger classroom dynamic through a smaller group of performers. 2 In Taiwan, some students provided so-called Western names to the research team (noted here and on the next page by an asterisk). Their project pseudonyms align as follows: Webber (Wei), Easan (Ah-Cheng), Iris (Shuan-Shuan), and Leah (a composite voice of Jia-Jia and Ting-Ting).



Towards Youth: a play on radical hope ACT 1

ACT 2

Actor 7

Erica Ophelia Connie’s Mom

Anatola Wan-Jung Staff Member (Prerna) Guest 1 Uma Kushboo

Actor 8

Chrysanthemum Bruce Brian’s Mom

Tania Leah* Zaida Urvashi

Actor 9

Kathleen

Kathleen

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Notes on the Punctuation In this form of verbatim theatre, punctuation is used in a non-­ grammatical way, at times, to denote particular rhythms of speech. Some specific verbatim notation includes: (2) – bracketed numbers denote pauses of a distinct duration. They can be counted in “Mississippi’s” – they can be 1, 2, 10 seconds long. / – a slash denotes an overlap in text. The slash appears at the point where the next speaker comes in. It can come in the middle of a line or at the end. (?) – a parenthetical question mark – denotes “upspeak,” going up at the end of a sentence.

PROLOGUE

A Letter from Kathleen to the Actors The stage evokes a North American high school drama classroom. The classroom is in poor condition. Dark curtains line the back wall, which can be pulled back to reveal a tall wall undergoing renovation. Small handscrawled graffiti (including youth autographs) cover certain panels of drywall, yet to be painted over. There are hard plastic chairs, a freestanding blackboard, a cupboard unit with a weight-bearing countertop (a frequent perch for the students). There is wall-to-wall carpeting. Two cameras occupy the space, on tripods. Perhaps most striking is a runway running from the back of the audience to this classroom. In the spirit of a Kabuki Theatre “hanamichi,” this bridge is used for entrances and exits, as well as for the positioning of listener-observers to the scenes unfolding on the main playing area.3 The ensemble of actors enters across the runway and forms a line in the main playing area. They speak to the audience, as themselves. 6:  Good evening [or afternoon or morning]. Thank you all so much for attending this performance; we’re so glad that you are here with us. So we, the actors, received a letter from Dr. Kathleen Gallagher. She is the lead researcher on the project from which this play was born. And we would like to share it with you.

actor

3 This set design is particular to the original production of Towards Youth in 2019. The play could very well be in imagined in a different spatial configuration and context.

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ACTOR 9 produces the letter and shows it to the audience. The actors recite the text of this artefact, trading off lines. The group eventually starts overlapping and delivering sections of this letter more chorally. actor actor

hope.

9:  Dear actors, 2:  You are about to perform Towards Youth: a play on radical

1:  Andrew Kushnir has written this play based on the experiences and recordings of his and my shared travels to drama classrooms in five cities across the globe. actor 8:  I hope our experiences are in some way reproducible, and appreciable to others. actor 4:  You are being asked to navigate many complex differences in the script. Differences of class, of race, of gender, of history, of context. And then there is language. actor 5:  When people imagine international work or think about these cross-cultural conversations, they often ask, “How do you get over the language barriers?” actor 7:  And I want to say: “It can be the opposite of a barrier. It can actually be a gateway. It can be a door.” actor

ACTOR 2, originally performed by Stephen Jackman-Torkoff (they/them), interjects in their own words. 2:  And I’m just gonna add – me, Stephen – um, that maybe we, and all of us actors and all of you audience can be gateways and doors, ’cause you know, we all wake up one day, all of a sudden we’re on planet Earth, and we exist, and we have all these histories within our belly (Stephen rubs their belly, then starts reaching behind themself and bringing their hands back to their belly), all these people that go back to the beginning of time, to the first bacteria and single-cell grandma, all these places that go back to the beginning of time, and we gotta like contend, and like reconcile with what we are (they grip their belly). Then we’ve got all these characters in the play (they reach forward, as if into the future), with all their beauty and their muck and their pain, and maybe we can meet it and be a gateway or a door and be like (sings a high-pitched sound, arms outstretch, free) ahhhhhhh. You know? Yeah. Hopefully.

actor

The actors resume the more formal letter from Kathleen, trading off sections, again.



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8:  And Kathleen goes on to say: And I remind myself that no less challenging than translating from, say, Mandarin to English is translating a fourteen-year-old boy with a slight, awkward gate… actor 9:  …looking you in the eye, and saying something, at once innocent and profound, that makes you go, “Everything I thought about kids before now is null and void.” actor 6:  You know, those moments when a young person upsets for you everything that you’ve thought up to that point? actor 5:  I’m not sure how to help you with that, as actors. actor 3:  Though I am deeply admiring of your willingness to try. actor 1:  I think striving for these voices is the thing. actors 2/5/7:  “Nailing” them is impossible. actors 6 and 3:  So let it be a forgery. actor 4:  There are a lot of different kinds of forgery in the world. actor 6:  And so let this be a deeply respectful forgery. all: (in unison) Let this be a faithful betrayal. I wish you well, in the drama classroom. Sincerely, Kathleen. actor

ACTOR 3, originally performed by Tim Dowler-Coltman (he/him), interjects in words that the ensemble agreed upon. 3:  And in the spirit of this letter, as Canadian artists, we acknowledge the land we are meeting on is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Anishnaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. Part of settler responsibility also includes a recognition of the ongoing systemic marginalization of Indigenous peoples in our educational and social institutions.4

actor

4 The premiere of Towards Youth occurred in Toronto/Tkoronto. If the play were to be remounted elsewhere, the territory acknowledgment would pertain to the land on which the performance is taking place. The exact words of the 2019 acknowledgment have been left intact, as an artefact. Were it performed today, I would be sure to include an acknowledgment of how Indigenous lives and living are not only a thing of the past 10,000 years on these particular lands but a present-day reality and relationship.

ACT ONE

Scene 1: Middleview On the other side of an electronic school buzzer, there is a sudden burst of voices and conversation, all stacking on top of each other. This is the play’s first instance of “group life force” – youth conferring with one another in a way that defies transcription on account of how many voices are speaking at once. Though challenging to make out the details of their exchanges (which are being improvised by the actors based on their characters and relationships to one another), the students are obviously disgruntled. MS. S stands by KATHLEEN, who is taking in the class for the first time. MAXX cuts through the group sound, which continues to ebb and flow under the following discernable lines. Honestly, Miss, I can’t stay here much longer. It smells so bad. I can’t even describe, fuck, it’s the dead mouse and then this. ms. s: (to Kathleen) I’m sorry, this has us a bit derailed. kathleen:  That’s alright. ms. s:  OK, take a vote. Do you want to stay or go to the library? erica:  I think the library might smell as well. chrysanthemum:  This whole fucking school. ms. s:  Can we pull back on the swearing please. Who’s willing to go to the office and ask the Vice Principal and ask for a new space? erica:  This smell is fine. fabian: Fuck. ms. s:  What did I just say about swearing? Ok, guys, we have a lot of stuff that we would like to accomplish. Spit out the gum. It gets on the carpet, and it’s bad for your jaw. fabian:  I already spit out, Miss. ms. s:  Who’s missing today? maxx: 



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some students: Cat./ other students:  And

KT. No – Cat is in Mexico. chrysanthemum:  He should have took me with him. fabian:  Derek said he’d be right back…Bella is probably yelling somewhere. chrysanthemum:  She’s la– guess what Miss? ms. s:  Ahh, Derek’s getting his drink. fabian:  Bella’s skipping probably. ms. s:  No, Bella is not at school today. ms. s: 

DEREK enters. He crosses past Kathleen and registers her presence. fabian: 

She told me she was having problems so she gets to drop –

ms. s: What?

Oh yeah, that teacher tried to kick me out too. Which class was it? fabian:  So in my last period, history, I come in late – erica:  I don’t know but she was giving the teacher attitude and she was suspended for the day,/ that’s what she told me after – fabian:  No, I was in the class, Miss, and she said the “F” word, the teacher kicked her out – ms. s:  Was it a supply teacher? fabian:  Yeah, she’s not even a real teacher, that’s the thing – like you got to out them in their place, Miss – ms. s:  No. You don’t. That’s how you get suspended. maxx:  ms. s: 

Beat. The students make muttered comments as MS. S steps forward and speaks to Kathleen. We have entered a slightly different reality, a kind of “interview mode,” though youth are still present in the background. Projected on the back wall is the name of the research site, MIDDLEVIEW, TORONTO, 2008. MS. S:  Well, my school is a downtown school. You could say inner city, it in fact is located in one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Toronto, so it’s kinda weird that way. Because we actually do get some kids from the neighbourhood who come to the school. But by and large the kids are coming from all over the city, and they have long commutes a lot of them to get to Middleview. Some kids come to Middleview to get away from their neighbourhoods, to get away from their schools. I’ve asked kids before: “Why do you travel so far?” and they said: “I don’t want to go to my school in my area, it’s so bad!” Lots of kids here ­because sometimes they’ve been

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transferred out of their own schools, like suspended or expelled from their schools, so that’s also a reason. Our school has notoriously taken anyone. You can see the school is so old and so run down. I think the quality of the place itself, the actual physical plant affects the students. If I could, I’d just tear down the building, and rebuild. Focus comes back to the reality of the classroom. A quieter group life force – small indiscernible exchanges between students, moments of laughter and supressed laughter – threads through this section. No, yesterday she said she’s not coming – Well she’s here, her stuff’s here – ms. s:  Her stuff’s here, in the classroom, ok so she’s here. Ok, so, a couple of things. Ok Fabian, come sit beside me right here. fabian:  Will you come sit beside me? ms. s:  No, you come sit beside me. chrysanthemum:  erica: 

FABIAN huffs, sits next to Ms. S. BELLA enters. Some of her peers give applause upon sighting her. bella: 

Hello I’m here.

A surge in group life force. MAXX invents a little song in Jamaican patois about what a “bad girl” Bella has been. BELLA dances to it, delighting some of her classmates. to get her voice over the students’ conferring) So, so, ah, I ask that we have a better day today than we had yesterday, and not offend anyone by talking out of turn (glances towards Fabian) and not listening to each other – bella:  Yesterday wasn’t a bad day!? ms. s:  Well, yesterday was a difficult day for me as a teacher, I felt. Okay, because I didn’t feel that the respect and listening was there (looking at Fabian who is lying down on the carpeted floor). And so Fabian, so you’re going to sit up so you look like you’re listening. fabian:  Ummmm, am I? ms. s: (trying

Some of his classmates laugh. You’re going to sit up, so you look like you’re listening. Miss, how can I hear you differently when I’m lying down right beside you?

ms. s: 

fabian: 



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It appears, when you’re lying down, that you’re not, ahh, (trips a little as she steps over Fabian) that you’re not listening. fabian:  I know you’re mad, Miss, but – ms. s: 

A bigger burst of laughter from the group. Ok, so we’re doing a couple of things today…ahhhh, one is we’re going to talk about the research project, and consent forms, and and Professor Gallagher, who is right here. (1) Alright, Kathleen?

ms. s: 

(3) It is the first silence of the scene. KATHLEEN steps into the circle. kathleen: Hi.

Class responds with a “hi.” Her shrug sweater has been noticed by ­FABIAN. fabian: 

I like your sweater thing.

Some of the students laugh. There is an awkward beat, then: My name is Kathleen Gallagher, and I am a professor and researcher at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. So, you’ll see there’s just a brief description of what the study is about.

kathleen: 

She starts to distribute a two-page info and consent form. This is about working in drama classrooms, in different places. There’s a lot written about youth, but there isn’t a lot of research that really, um, that really addresses your concerns your, your perspectives on how school works for you or doesn’t work for you. So I want to look at that. You become a special kind of, in research terms it’s called an “informant.” Sounds a little criminal, but it’s not. You’re not lab rats, so you have choices. In this letter, I’m asking you for your consent to video and audio record this class for the next few months and to do interviews with you. A slight shift in the classroom reality as students stand and read out the consent form to themselves, voices stacking into a choral moment.

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If you are interested/ in participating parental consent form also needs to be signed by one of your parents or legal guardians and returned to me. bella:  If you are interested/ in participating – please sign, date – Should you have any questions about the study, please feel free to contact me. chrysanthemum:  Please sign,/ date and return the attached consent form to me in class some time in the next two weeks…To consider participating in this study. fabian:  If you are/ under eighteen, the attached parental consent form also needs to be signed. Thank you for taking the time to consider participating in this study. chrysanthemum: Sincerely, kathleen:  Dr. Kathleen Gallagher. derek: 

Focus comes back from the letter to the original classroom reality. I’ll be eighteen in a week. Ok, because if you’re under eighteen then you also need your parent to say that it’s okay that you are part of this. A parent or guardian. fabian:  I feel safe (very quietly, mockingly) Dr. Kathleen Gallagher. kathleen:  Did you just say my name? fabian: Yeah. kathleen:  Well (1) that was very nice, thank you. fabian: 

kathleen: 

The classroom gets strangely quiet. Then discrete group life force resumes under the following exchanges. Miss, do you have a pen? I do. bella: (to Kathleen and the room) I have a question. kathleen:  Of course. bella:  From the sound of it, you’ve done a lot of research with drama students, with young people before? kathleen:  I have. bella:  Ok. So my question is how are you going to hear me since you have done so much of this with so many youth? chrysanthemum:  ms. s: 

Room quiets suddenly. (1) MAXX chuckles, covers his mouth with both hands.



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How is this not going to blend into what you already think you know?

bella: 

(1) kathleen: 

Good question.

Scene 2: Kathleen ANDREW, played by Actor 1, emerges and begins to interview Kathleen. As she speaks, projected behind her are archival images from all the drama classrooms she has researched since the 1990s. You started as a high school drama teacher. girl high school. andrew:  And you’ve researched how many drama classrooms so far in your career? kathleen:  Oh, I’d say considerable time with…fifty drama classes over the past twenty-three years. andrew:  And you still haven’t found what you’re looking for? kathleen: (laughs) That’s right. Something like that. How about you? Introduce yourself. andrew:  Not yet. More you. We’re just starting to meet you. Tell me: who’s your favourite drama teacher? kathleen:  Well, she wasn’t my drama teacher, personally, but she’s certainly one of my favourites. Dorothy Heathcote was a very famous drama teacher. In this BBC documentary I’ve watched a million times, from the 1970s, she’s asked: “What is teaching?” And her reply is: “I don’t know. But it has something to do with receiving.” andrew:  The teacher receiving. kathleen: (nods) What I do is called ethnographic research, and it’s not “this is the sickness and so this is the cure” kind of research. It’s not (1) “kids are trapped in a cave, there’s this much oxygen left, this much food left, the water is rising this fast, so how do we get them out of the cave in this many days or else?” Which is why, you know, researchers like me sometimes go, “Yeah, curing cancer. Getting kids out of caves. That’s worthwhile. What am I doing again? (light laugh) Yeah, cure for cancer. That’s a good goal.” Um. So…the, the questions are a little bit different for me. But no less urgent, I think. Because schools can feel like caves. I think increasingly so. (1) How do we (1) how do we work andrew: 

kathleen:  All

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to make young people’s experiences…and their experiences with each other…worthwhile or, better, or not damaging? (light laugh) It’s kind of a low bar. Right? How can we not destroy kids in classrooms? andrew:  “How can we not destroy kids in classrooms?” The actor playing ANDREW goes and resumes his role as a student. The energy of the Middleview drama classroom starts creeping in again. That’s right. My belief and intuition – it’s more than just an educated hunch – is that there’s something here, in the drama room. Something we can learn here. Even when it’s not working.

kathleen : 

Scene 3: The Doors Project A big surge in group life force. MS. S is attempting to rally the room around the day’s activity. It should be noted that, in the classroom dynamic, multiple factions become appreciable: those who are interested in activities, those undermining activities, those policing their peers, those taking care of their teacher. KATHLEEN observes from a distance. ms . s :  Ah,

we’re going to play a couple more games, and then we’re going to get started on the project, develop some scenes with you guys, um, that will be based on improvisation and then we’re having the performance on December 10th at the performing arts assembly. bella:  People are going to be throwing up. erica:  It’s just an assembly. ms. s:  The Performing Arts Assembly is basically an opportunity for performing arts classes to show the work that we’re doing, basically to the school. bella:  Miss, you might want to fix your shirt. ms. s: What? bella:  You might want to fix your shirt. Some students laugh. Others are trying to get Bella to quit. What, how? It’s kinda disturbing. chrysanthemum:  It’s because of the zippers, they kinda look… ms. s: 

bella: 



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bella: Young.

’Cause they don’t close nicely… It kinda looks like you’ve got four titties… chrysanthemum:  Like double boobs? ms. s: WHAT? chrysanthemum:  bella: 

Explosive laughter from the group. Some students come to Ms. S’s defense. Others keep making fun. ms. s:  Alright,

alright, that’s cool, whatever, so – ok, so let’s, um, let’s give some focus to the door.

The students hardly move. MS. S has placed a smallish door in the middle of the room. It is larger than a cupboard door, peculiar in shape. Its appearance pulls most of the students from their conferring/banter. Where did this even come from, Miss? There were a bunch of these in the janitor’s storage. From some renovation, from a long time ago. derek:  Hobbit door. Dwarf Door. bella:  ms. s: 

Some students laugh. MS. S is aware of being observed by Kathleen. She tries to focus the room. Throughout the following, the group life force persists, albeit more quietly. The students check in with one another frequently, but – overall – they do seem intrigued by Ms. S’s project. So this is going to be called “The Doors Project” and, ah, I just wanted to share with you a little bit about the, the story of Janus, who’s the God of Doors, from Roman mythology – bella:  A God of Doors in Roman mythology, they have a God of Doors?!? ms . s :  They have a God of Doors…ah, so it says here…tomorrow, tomorrow is, tomorrow we’re going to, um, we’re going to do two writing pieces, one today and one tomorrow. And, ah, I’m just going to read you a little bit about Janus, ’cause it could be a very kinda cool kind of image to work with. (1) So in Roman mythology, Janus was the God of gates, doors, doorways, beginnings and endings, his most prominent remnant in modern culture are his namesake, namesakes: the month of January, which begins the New Year, and the janitor, who is a caretaker of doors and halls, so the words “janitor” and “January” are derivatives of ms. s: 

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the God Janus, which is interesting. Ah, so he was representative of the middle ground between barbarity and civilization; rural, country, and urban cities; and youth and adulthood. So that’s, ’cause you guys are all, you know, between youth and adulthood, that’s very interesting. (1) So grab your journals – free write about the metaphor of a door. Ok? This is about your ideas around a door. In your voice.

Scene 4: Questionnaire KATHLEEN sets up a camera to film a focus group interview. As they introduce themselves, the youth and MS. S step to the front of the stage and address the audience. The reality of the drama classroom has fallen away. Pick a pseudonym for yourself and fill in any social c­ ategories you like. Then describe yourself in a sentence. If I were to describe you in a book, what should I say? chrysanthemum:  Chrysanthemum. Female, white, straight. I am fun, smart, and I enjoy having fun. erica:  Erica. Born: Canada. First language: English. I’m pretty straightforward, open-minded, easy to get along with, and quite mature at times. ms . s :  I inspire passion in students by promoting emotional honesty in a safe(ish), nurturing environment. Ms. S loves vintage collectibles, brunching hot stops, and traditional Shabbos dinners. maxx:  Hmm? (2) Maxx. Gender: blank. Race: blank. Class: blank. Born: blank. (1) The third guy in the class. bonnie:  Bonnie. I’m me; I’m different. bella:  Chilling low back. bonnie:  Black. Eritrean. Canadian. I like reading books/ fabian:  Fabian. I am a funny, understanding person. bonnie:  Enjoy music, have a love for money, hate eggs, waffles, and pancakes/ bella:  Outgoing at times. bonnie:  Have a thing for piercing. bella:  I’m me and no one else. Bella. derek:  Derek. (1) Outgoing, striving for success, which will be fulfilled. kathleen: 



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Scene 5: Focus Group KATHLEEN is having trouble with her recorder as the youth take their spots in a cluster. Some are seated on the ground, some in chairs, all facing the camera. MS. S is in the far background, marking. I’m gonna try and squeeze in a bit. (1) So when we’re asking you questions, just a technical thing, try and lean in. fabian:  I just don’t understand why we need a pseudonym. kathleen:  Ok. Ok. Thank you. So this is Middleview. November 5, 2008. Focus group interview number one. Okay. First question: Let me ask you about today’s drama class. Was today’s discussion interesting to you? fabian:  It was./ It was. erica: Yeah. kathleen:  With the talking stick? bella:  Talking pumpkin. fabian:  We didn’t even need it. We know how to take turns. We’re not kids. kathleen:  It was a really good discussion. erica:  It’s just this day like – we just had a friggin’ Black president voted in. It was good to talk about it. kathleen: 

Murmurs of agreement through the group. kathleen: 

that?

Was there anything anybody wanted to still share about

(3) Do you think there might be any Black prime ministers? kathleen: Yes. fabian:  Why does it take, why does it take America for the world to start changing? erica:  ’Cause they are/…huge. bella:  Everyone knows America. kathleen:  I mean that’s a good question, Fabian. Maybe because we think it is so much “better” here, we don’t have to wonder about that. bonnie:  I think for the prime minister of Canada, I think we need a person that’s not like rich and ugly. Because everyone who gets chrysanthemum: 

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voted is rich, so they always go for like the upper class people. So we don’t get anywhere, ’cause we need a person that lives a normal life and went to public school, shop at like a normal store, to be, like, a president or prime minister. chrysanthemum:  I agree with like Bonnie that we need someone from the working class. Who knows what it’s like, from, like, personal experience. But then again, how do we get that, like, foot in the door? fabian:  How do you choose a class? kathleen:  How, what is the question? Like…how – fabian:  I’m lost. kathleen:  No, no, but it’s a very interesting/ fabian:  How do you choose a class? She said you can choose a class that should lead the country, right? How do you choose a class? bonnie:  I never said, choose a class, like, we need someone that knows ’cause my mom was telling me, how like welfare, they cut like some kind of cheque. So how are you cutting that little small cheque if you don’t get it? MAXX’s hand has gone up, then back down. Like, you can’t get some working class persona all of a sudden and be the prime minister. They have to have money to do that. Like, you know what I mean. They can’t get just like all of a sudden pull it out of your ass, like that’s not gonna happen. Somebody who, like, maybe grew up in King’s Park like me. kathleen:  But Maxx was going to say something. maxx:  Do you know what time it is? bella:  It’s twenty, twenty-five to twelve. maxx: Twelve? erica: 

MAXX gathers his things. Leaves during the next response. It is ­conspicuous. And then you are destroyed when people know that you lived in that area. Then it’s gone. You grew up in a, a neighbourhood where shit, but shit’s not right. Shit’s hard. You know you have to do certain shit to survive and but you think you’re gonna go up and tell the world, “yeah I grew up in one of the worst neighbourhoods in Toronto,” and they’re gonna want you?! kathleen: Right. fabian : 



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Scene 6: Remembrance Day MS. S, again, trying to harness the cacophonous group life force in the room. Ok. We’re going to be working in a really focused way. I want to have a nice piece to present to that assembly. bella:  People are going to be throwing up. bonnie:  Miss, will some of the/ assembly be parents? ms. s:  So um (she clap clap claps over the youth’s sound, they quiet significantly) I’m very excited about it but we got to work, like, efficiently. So yeah, we’ll get back to the Doors Project after the announcement, but first…so something that I reflect on, on Remembrance Day, like what is, what’s what’s my role in the world when there’s conflict and violence. maxx:  Remembrance Day is today? ms. s: 

A burst of group life force. Oh my god! Are you serious? bella:  That’s so sad. maxx:  What. I didn’t know that – I’m not sad! I’m, I’m not even from here, dog. other students: 

Students laugh. This is followed by a lot of indecipherable conferring about Maxx not remembering. It has become a flashpoint. chrysanthemum: 

Well it doesn’t matter if you’re from here or not!

MS. S holds out a gourd. This is the “talking gourd” that she has tried to establish in order to manage the voices in the room. MS. S is unable to reconstitute the group’s focus. Shh. ’K. GUYS! No one else is talking right now, you don’t have, you don’t have the talking piece so I don’t hear what you say and don’t comment on other people, on what they say. chrysanthemum:  No, that was very rude, we live in Canada, it’s your problem, you’re in here – ms. s:  Oh! The fact that he didn’t remember that it’s Remembrance Day? That’s okay/ maxx: Yeah. ms. s: 

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No, the comment after/

Group life force surges again, a wave of commentary, indecipherable but clearly enflamed. CHRYSANTHEMUM manages to cut through. “I don’t care, I’m not even from here anyways, I’m past caring.” maxx:  No, you guys are like, oh you, everyone’s like, ah, you didn’t remember, ahhhhh, he didn’t remember/ chrysanthemum:  Nobody cares that you didn’t remember…it’s just – maxx:  That’s what, that’s what everyone said/ ms. s:  I heard it, what Maxx said, ’k shhhhhh (the class quiets significantly), he was irritated that somebody said, “That’s sad,” and I can understand why he got defensive there, because you interrupted him. bella:  I said it, because it is sad/…(mumbling) erica:  Well I was still talking. ms. s:  Just don’t interrupt when someone has the talking piece. derek:  Can I just say we spent a whole period on Monday talking about our weekend? Which – that’s not drama, that’s like – sharing. chrysanthemum: 

(3) DEREK has been seated at the far edge of the drama room. The whole group registers him. Ok. (1) Um, so, we’re going to do that tableau exercise that we started yesterday quickly and then we’ll move on to the Doors project after the announcement – bella:  We didn’t do an exercise yesterday/ ms. s:  So the power one/ derek:  What one? ms. s:  Where one person has more power over someone else in the space, but this time, when you do it, I want you, you can’t use guns or knives to establish power, so you can’t, you can’t do that – (to Fabian) why don’t you wait, wait till you see what’s going on, so one person – bella:  Just stand there, Miss? ms. s:  Yeah, just stand there and you will be the only one in the space, so – derek:  Any kind of power? ms. s: 

Students confer with one another. bella: 

Miss, how do you just do power? you can’t speak…

ms. s:  And



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ERICA moves to the centre of the room, arms crossed. CHRYSANTHEMUM stands on a chair looking down on Erica. The near silence and focus on the exercise is appreciable. Good. Next person. You have to add to that? ms. s:  Yeah. You have to add to that, or you have to be the one that has more power in the scene. fabian:  Can I go? ms. s: Yeah. ms. s: 

bella: 

FABIAN pulls up another chair and puts his arm on Chrysanthemum’s shoulder. ms. s: 

Good, very nice. Next? Someone else, have more power than them.

BELLA takes a pose as though she is taking a photo of the whole scene. Interesting. Ok. Someone else. Maxx. Have some guts. maxx:  Can I bring chairs in it? No, Yes? ms. s:  No no no – maxx: No? chrysanthemum: (to Fabian) You’re all excited. ms. s:  You just have two chairs. maxx:  I don’t know, I don’t know then. ms. s: 

bella: 

MAXX walks away from the exercise. I’m getting tired. I don’t know. bella:  Ok, like, I’m taking a picture then… derek:  Yeah, Maxx just goes up in front of the camera and goes like this (arms spread open) and blocks the picture. erica:  Yeah, block the whole picture. ms. s:  That’s a great idea right there, taking a power. bella:  maxx: 

MAXX obliges his classmates. He stands in front of the group, arms outstretched, lunging “up in front of the camera.” Nice! Okay very good. Now with this theme of power in mind, Erica, would you be willing to read what you wrote from our writing activity, around the door.

ms. s: 

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So I didn’t focus – what I wrote, I didn’t focus too much about the whole door thing but, like, whatever so. ms. s:  That’s ok. erica:  Um. (She produces her creative writing from a back pocket, unfolds the single sheet of paper.) It’s about going to heaven and how the door to heaven never closes. (reads) “I’ve often wondered about heaven and if there is such a place. For my whole life I was told that my mother was going to hell. And in the past few years, I was told that I was going to hell too. Why you ask? Because we are gay. And because of this I stopped believing in heaven and hell altogether. Why believe in a place that is supposed to reject me and a place that doesn’t accept me, um – accept me, all because of who I fall in love with. I haven’t done anything wrong. I know this. Um, I haven’t killed anyone or stolen anything or caused harm to anybody. Those are real sins. I simply just love my girlfriend. So if there is a door called Heaven, I will be opening it someday.” erica: 

(3) chrysanthemum:  erica: What?!

It gave me shivers.

It did. Good shivers. Yeah. That was good. We like shivers. Derek? derek:  Not yet. ms. s: What? derek:  Not yet. ms. s:  Not yet? Ok. Maxx, will you read yours. chrysanthemum:  ms. s: 

MAXX shakes his head no. Miss, the announcement is in like thirty seconds anyway. The class stinks like hot…bottom.

bonnie:  bella: 

The exercise dissolves, students disperse, converse with one another. Upon clapping eyes on Kathleen, MAXX gives her his writing, a folded piece of paper that he’s had in his pocket. KATHLEEN unfolds the page and reads the writing. BELLA gets up and walks around the room, spraying air freshener. derek: 

Miss, can I close the window just a little bit?

ms. s: Yeah. bella: 

You can close the whole thing. Bella who is still spraying) Just like, yeah, that’s it, that’s…

ms. s: (to



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The Remembrance Day announcement, muffled, starts up on the PA. Synth music. The youth still. KATHLEEN keeps reading. She looks at Maxx. A silence is observed. In the silence, KATHLEEN begins to speak. ANDREW eventually appears, and takes in what she is saying. When I was teaching and training drama teachers, a course that I taught forever ago, I would try and bring home the idea that the young people sitting in front of you in that room (1) have (exhale) big full lives that…to a large extent remain unknowable to you. So what I had my teaching students do is to first of all ask themselves, How did I get to school? Pick a grade. Elementary. Junior high. High school. (inhale) And ask yourself, Did I walk to school, was I driven, did I take a school bus, was it rural, was it urban? All of those things and try to do the map in your mind (and it’s not a drawing test). (1) And, as much as you can remember, what kinds of things did you pass? If you were on the school bus, were you the first on or the last on? That sort of things. Try to do the map in your mind. (1) Look back at your map. (1) In that, in that whole journey, were there any moments where you didn’t feel safe? When you felt anxious – it can be whatever – but the key is, What was your emotional journey? What did it feel like leaving home? And then – when you got to the school, did you feel safer? Did you feel less safe? (1) (MAXX grabs his backpack and heads out of the classroom.) And I would say to my students, these teachers-to-be: If that world has happened before 9 am…before you meet that young person, before the bell – how do you proceed? How do you proceed in the knowledge of that full, vulnerable, exciting, range of emotions that brings that kid to your classroom door? How do you proceed? andrew: (to the audience) Two weeks later: kathleen: 

Scene 7: Derek (Dis)engages MS. S is setting up chairs to create the “set” for the Doors Project presentation. Group life force is moderate. There is a palpable agitation in the room. The students must present their work that week at the assembly. inaudibly) An open door is a metaphor…An open door is a metaphor, an open door is an opportunity, it can be the

maxx: (mumbles

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door to your/ house. Finding out your wife is pregnant, an open door is…a challenge. An open door is a new beginning. ms. s:  So um, let’s get everyone in a line at the back, and Derek can you get the door? The students form a line at the back, some have scripts in hand. DEREK is located in the middle, in a chair, holding up the small door. His sweater hood is up. He rests his head on the small “hobbit” door’s edge. bella: 

Can we really learn all these lines, Miss, I mean come on.

ms. s: What? bella: 

You think we’ll have them all learned by Wednesday?

ms. s: Mm-hm. erica: 

I pretty well have all of mine memorized.

DEREK starts to bang a rhythm on the door with his hand. MS. S reviews the script she has in hand. So Bella will start and then you’ll enter – We weren’t here yesterday so we don’t know what was going on. ms. s:  So you’ll, so you’ll come on, and just stand on either side of the stage. And in this group, uh, I want you to be ready for your Heaven piece. So…so create that tableau…something, something like that. ms. s: 

bella: 

The students are standing around, fairly inert. Ok. So next thing, the door is going to open and you’re going to come out. So Derek, now we have to find a way for you to be a part of this group. So – derek:  I’m not, I’m not the angels. ms. s: 

BELLA laughs, seemingly with the aim to be obnoxious. derek: No. bella: 

Last time you did it.

derek: No.

Miss, can he be Jesus? He’s, like, we had him being part of that group, but Derek doesn’t want to do it anymore (?) derek:  Unless I’m decked out like Jesus. bella:  ms. s: 



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Fine. Costume’s up to you. Ok. So Derek, put the door down and come over here. derek: (mock yelling) Put the door down! (He drops the door quite noisily.) ms. s:  Let’s work on this piece. Ok. Go. erica:  There are those that say that Heaven is a door that never closes. ms. s: 

(2) ERICA looks to the others expectantly. Then finally: Welcome to Heaven! We accept everybody! then you guys… derek:  Yeah, yo. chrysanthemum:  ms. s:  And

The students laugh. bella: 

Derek is like “what the fuck?”

The students laugh again. I’ve often wondered about Heaven and if there is such a place. Because for the past two years I was told that I was going to Hell. Why you ask? chrysanthemum:  Because you’re gay. erica: 

Everybody gives the “Stop” hand; DEREK gives a limp wrist. Should we all say that together. effeminate) Because yer gaaaaay. bella:  Yah, for Derek! chrysanthemum:  derek: (very

Some students laugh and clap. ms. s: 

I don’t know about Derek saying it. I feel it gets it too over the top.

DEREK separates from the group. He walks around the room. He starts drumming a beat on the cupboards and walls. He does not stop moving. You gotta make the audience laugh, you want to be up there all serious the whole time? ms. s:  No, I think Chrysanthemum “Because you’re gay” and then Derek, you can be extra on the “Sorry.” Ok? So. “Why you ask?” bella: 

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Why you ask? Because you’re gay. chrysanthemum, maxx, bella: Sorry! erica: 

chrysanthemum: 

DEREK has been wandering, adds his “Sorry” separately, from afar. He has somehow ended up standing on the door. Derek, can you get off of the door? What about – can you show – it feels to me like you don’t want to do this/ and derek:  I don’t. ms. s: 

(1) You need to be uh, a good actor right now, you’re being a bad actor right now. So/ derek: (mocking) You’re being a bad actor right now. ms. s: 

MS. S, who has been able to “surf” the chaos of the room quite unflappably up until this point, betrays an irritation. You’re being a bad actor, you’re showing attitude. And that sucks – alright, so take – Derek – bring the door over to the group, and just, and just, like, put it there,/ bella :  Ok, is this something we’re going to show to the whole school? ms. s: Yes. bella: Shit./ bonnie:  I know. derek: (mumbling) Yeah, gonna be beat up by the whole/ school…the whole school. ms. s:  Ok, you’re just in your tableau, and you’re quiet right now. ms. s: 

DEREK is banging his head against the door. Why are we taking so much time on this part? ’Cause for every moment on stage, it’s like an hour of rehearsal. Guys, minute on stage is an hour of rehearsal – so Derek, are you planning to try and create this character or are you just not feeling it right now, today? derek:  I’m not feeling this at all, Miss. I don’t like the script. ms. s:  Sorry, the whole script? derek: Yeah. derek:  ms. s: 



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(5) ms. s: 

Well I’m sorry to hear that.

(4) If you don’t want to be in this, you don’t have to. We can find someone else to replace you. derek:  Alright. I just respectively ask if I could do backstage stuff and not act. erica:  We need someone to do stage stuff anyways. ms. s:  Well, we, we, we (3) ok – get off stage. (1) You can take a zero on the assignment. To be honest. DEREK goes. The rest of the students look to one another, in shock. I can take over the part. Yeah, you can take over the part.

chrysanthemum:  ms. s: 

Scene 8: Presentation Suddenly, we get the sound of a marching band finishing up a song. It cuts out. MS. S is speaking on microphone, trying to get the auditorium’s ­attention. ms. s:  Hi, so the next piece you’re gonna see is from the Grade 11 drama

class and they have written everything that’s in this performance, and they’ve been working on it, um, a lot, and it is based on the metaphor of a “door.” So what does a door represent? In what ways does it represent like a transition in your life? Or a new possibility? Or a change? The, the subject matter in this performance is very mature, and I just hope that you, um, give them all the respect that they deserve because they worked so hard on it. Thank you very much (puts mic down), ok.

The opening sound cue comes in. KATHLEEN narrates to the audience. Erica does her Heaven monologue in front of the whole school. Derek decides to do more than backstage work. His “sorry” gets a big laugh. Maxx gives a very committed performance. In fact, he’s so into it, he throws a chair in his scene for dramatic effect. maxx:  It gets a big response from the student audience. kathleen: 

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men:  A door

is a metaphor. is a burden. men:  A door is a risk. women:  A door is change. chrysanthemum:  A door is a secret. erica:  It’s the future. women:  A door

The final music cue comes in. The student audience applauds, meekly. The Middleview drama students line up and take their bows.

Scene 9: Reflections Various members of the Middleview site enter a one-on-one “interview mode” with Kathleen. First, MS. S, in isolation. I’m reflecting on my experience in that class. And I feel a moment when I might have gone wrong is this: I was overly protective of those kids who didn’t want to learn. In the end, I think that kind of backfired because rather than using that opportunity to then question, in a polite way, those kids and say, “Why are you disrupting, on a constant basis?” In the end it really gave a lot of power to those kids who were disruptive and sabotaging. The sabotaging kids are really the most vulnerable in a lot of ways. They’re masking their insecurities; they don’t want to be real. I really feel like there, I had a chance to turn things around and I kind of screwed it up a bit. (2) It could have been so much better.

ms. s: 

MAXX, in isolation. I don’t care what no one says. I don’t care that everyone was stressing out over the little Doors project. They only had a week to do it, I didn’t care. I mean, just sit down and practise, it doesn’t matter. kathleen: Ok. maxx:  I like Ms. S. maxx: 

ERICA, in isolation. I think we could have been a bit louder, ’cause apparently we weren’t very loud. But I was actually, like, really

erica: 



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like grateful I guess I could say. A lot of kids my age don’t handle the whole homosexual thing very well and so to have my whole class behind me and supporting me and stuff like that was actually – like…that’s never happened before really. kathleen:  Did you have any questions for me, or any thoughts? maxx:  Did I have any questions for you? kathleen:  Or anything that you’d like to say that I didn’t ask you about? (3) I don’t think I have a question. If you think about anything, there’s my card. maxx:  Kathleen Gallagher. Did I say it right? kathleen: Kathleen. maxx:  Kathleen Gallagher. Did I say it right? kathleen: Kathleen. maxx:  Yeah, so, mine’s Maxx. kathleen:  I know, Maxx. maxx: 

kathleen: 

DEREK, in isolation. It, it felt like we’re doing a lot of talking and not enough, like, proactive stuff on the project. Like, yeah, we just – half of the class we’re just drifting off and disrupting, it’s spent on trying to resolve conflicts between our peers and it’s just, it’s silly. kathleen :  And you don’t even think they’re conflicts a lot of the time. derek:  Yeah, they’re not. (2) I’m trying to live my life and experience every emotion, everything included so I’m trying everything out. Not drugs and stuff but, like, every kind of experience on a sober level. There’s always been stereotypes on youth that they are disturbances and menaces to society but – and it’s always going to go on so…there are going to be youth that are asses and there are just going to be youth that are just doing their homework. (3) I was a dick in that class. derek : 

MS. S, in isolation. ms. s: 

It could have been so much better.

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Scene 10: Drama Is about Dreaming Middleview fades away as a site. KATHLEEN takes centre stage, a lone body in the middle of the space. She speaks to the audience. There’s something here, in the near-beautiful mess of the drama classroom. When Ms. S says: “It could have been so much better” – I mean, that’s such a familiar refrain among teachers and students. I’ve heard it dozens and dozens of times. There is a really familiar melancholy in drama classrooms. Maybe it’s a failure, maybe it’s that the experience never meets the ideal. But what was reaffirmed for me at this school, Middleview, is that, in the drama classroom, an ambition, a hope, is awakened in this space, an appetite, to hear your voice in the world. (She spots Andrew, who has been listening to her) Your turn. Introduce yourself.

kathleen : 

ANDREW reluctantly emerges from the periphery of the space. He now takes Kathleen’s spot as narrator, speaking to the audience. Hi, I’m Andrew Kushnir. The playwright writing this documentary play, commissioned by Kathleen. One of the times I interviewed her, Kathleen told me that drama is about dreaming. (looks to Kathleen) You said: “Drama is about dreaming. So there we are, some of us, saying, ‘Here is the reading of drama as not necessarily salvation but at least a way of walking through life that opens up a dream however unrealistic that is worth having for whatever reasons.’”

andrew : 

The ensemble of actors begins a kind of interpretive dance behind Andrew. They intermittently add sounds to underscore Andrew’s ongoing speech and also undermine any of its potential preciousness. If an unbridled “group life force” has been an ongoing obstacle for others to speak over/through, it should be no different for Andrew. I must confess: I didn’t have a drama class or a drama teacher in high school. We had an extra-curricular dramatic society. I went to an all-boy Jesuit high school, and we’d rehearse after school with the kilted girls from St. Mary’s (who had a real drama teacher, Madame Beauchamps). At St. Mary’s they did musicals like Oklahoma! and Into The Woods. At St. Paul’s, my school, we did famous comedies like 18 Nervous Gumshoes

andrew : 



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and Buckshot and Blossoms. You know. Those famous ones? (1) The motto at our school was “Men for Others” or “Man for Others.” And I took that in. I spent all of theatre school and the early part of my career as an actor and writer dealing with this nagging feeling: “You’re not making a difference. Come on! Make a difference. Come on! Stop playing around and do something!” kathleen:  And then you met Antonio. andrew :  Yes. In my mid-twenties, I met this guy, Antonio. He ran a community-engaged theatre company that was looking for a playwright. A playwright who could work with young people in the youth shelter system. I recognize now, that my starting to work with youth may have been for others but I had my own selfish reasons too. To quiet the artist guilt. And another thing, something that only became clear to me when I walked up to that youth shelter for the first time. I recognized in myself a low-grade fear of young people and I wanted to do something about that. Why do we get scared of young people? Especially teenagers. (1) I made a play from my time in the shelter. Kathleen saw this play when we toured it through Toronto high schools. And we performed at Middleview. She came up to me right after and said, “I like your play. You’re clearly a Man for Others.” (The ensemble groans at his bad joke.) No, she didn’t. No. But something important was set into motion that day. A friendship. A collaboration. She would later tell me that it was obvious to her that she needed a playwright in her next research project. That theatre might be able to convey, in a different way, what she was receiving in the drama classroom. (1) I hope so.

Scene 11: Canley Youth Theatre PROJECTION: COVENTRY, ENGLAND, 2016. We hear the sound of Canley Youth Theatre group, pre-interview, conferring excitedly. ANDREW speaks to the audience. June 26, 2016. Kathleen and I have flown to Coventry, England. It’s the week of the Brexit Referendum. Coventry is located 138 kilometres northwest of London – a one-hour train ride – and is home to the Coventry Cathedral (which was brutally bombed by the Germans in the Coventry Blitz). The research

andrew: 

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site here is Canley Youth Theatre, a well-funded drama club for teenagers hailing from one of Coventry’s most struggling suburbs. A whoop is issued by the young people as their group life force surges and then gives way to KATHLEEN. First of all, thank you for coming on the bus from school. (Various youth, overlapping voices, relay how it was their pleasure.) There was so much surrounding coming here, with the Brexit vote just three days ago, and you, in the middle of all of it. You performed your play last night and that cut to the heart of all of it for me. There wasn’t anywhere else in the world I wanted to be other than right there, right then.

kathleen: 

NEENA and OPHELIA say “Awwww,” then giggle. How are you guys feeling? through a laugh or giggle almost constantly) It was amazing. It really was. Literally. It was. I really enjoyed it. And I was so happy that it went very well and…and the audience was on our side! So that was really good./ kathleen:  Oh yeah/ ophelia:  They left leaving the room really inspired. Yeah, so I thought it was really fun, to be a fourteen-year-old and, like, do that. I don’t know what you think. neena:  My Mom was just complimenting me the whole night. luke:  Yeah, so, I was pleased with how it went. kathleen:  Was she? neena:  She said it was a lot better than the other play I did. kathleen: 

ophelia: (speaking

Laughter. john:  And

I think some people were a tad nervous about that, but then, it’s like we’d rehearsed it in bits and bobs, and in the end the bits and bobs all came together/ luke: Yeah. john:  I think every time you do a performance like that, with people, we all were kind of close together, because you’ve shared an experience. various students: Yeah. john:  And days like yesterday stay with us forever. In the future you maybe make references to yesterday and stuff.



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I felt like it was a good performance and we got good reactions from the people. kathleen: Mm. luke:  I felt like I had done something really good ’cause the way I see it, that in life, I feel, like, in life, not every person in the world has to do something world changing. Not every person in the world has to cure a disease. I just think anyone who can go through life and do something small – even improve one person’s life just a little bit, and make them feel welcome, then you’ve had a good life. ophelia:  I’m really, really, like – I’m really fast when I’m speaking because I really want to say something, so but when I’m on stage, I’m very, very different. I take my time, and I think this is my stage, and I want to/ like show – neena:  No, Ophelia. This is our stage – kathleen:  It’s both. It’s both. (laughing) neena:  It’s everyone’s stage. And the audience. It’s/ our stage. john:  Makes me feel so confident. I feel so, I feel most alive when I’m on stage. bruce:  And then the other people in the group were very caring, so that’s what’s good about having Canley Youth, yeah. kathleen:  And do you imagine theatre is something you’ll keep up? ophelia:  Oh, I’m an actress. kathleen:  You’re an actress. neena: (laughing) You’re just, “an actress!” You don’t even have to act to be an actress. You are just naturally an actress. max:  Well that is, like, one thing I always like to think about which is kind of a big question a bit too early. I don’t know. For career choices, do I go with science or do I go with acting? And, um, and it’s a pretty big choice because I love both of them and they are complete opposite things. kathleen:  And when do you have to make those decisions in school where you have to focus on one or the other? max:  Well, it’s when you take, well science is always compulsory but it depends on your option sheet. Do I take drama or not? So that’s the kind of time where you really make your mind up and you need to...This is...basically it’s like “Here’s a street that can change your life forever. Choose wisely. Good luck!” andrew:  Can I ask how old you are? max:  I’m twelve, twelve and a half. ophelia:  Yeah – this one time, this one time, I remember we were doing prime numbers and we were doing this prime number rap and I was doing this (moving to her own beat) and I was singing with bruce: 

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it, and everybody kept looking at me, like, “What is she doing?” And I’m, like, “Prime! P-R-I-M-E. Factors – P-R-I-M-E” (She dissolves into laughter, her peers have been encouraging her.) Once KATHLEEN clocks that BRUCE is unable to speak over the other youth’s excited group life force, she gives him her attention. The other youth follow suit. No, um, before like I did that performance I was – I’d be more, like, sit back, let someone else take the leadership role, and I’d chip in there, like, ideas but I was never really a leader person. I’d more sit back and – not let everyone else do the work but I’d never, I wasn’t confident to take leadership myself. But in the performance. I stood up in front of everyone and I said: “I’m not afraid, I’m not embarrassed to say I’m a foster child anymore.”

bruce: 

(2) kathleen: 

That was a very powerful moment. In the performance.

bruce: Yeah.

I’m going to repeat my quote from Confucius, one of my favourite quotes, “Find the job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” kathleen:  That’s a good one. john:  You just had – andrew:  That went in. john:  You just had your world rocked. (laughter) luke:  One more thing. I think obviously there are loads of people, young people, that don’t know what they’re talking about, but then again, there are loads of adults that don’t know what they’re talking about. max:  The news is showing that in the referendum the sixty-five, the sixty-five and older, they voted the most to leave, and the average time they’ll have to live with the decision was about nine, nine years or something. With us… luke:  We’ve got the rest of our lives. john: 

Murmurs of agreement. We usually alter information to say part of the truth, but not actually say the full truth, because we’re too afraid to say the full truth. So the fact that, at, in the performance last night, our stories cloaked truth so that truth could be accepted, is, quite, I thought that was quite symbolic.

bruce: 



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Scene 12: After the Show A part of the Canley Youth Theatre performance soundtrack plays in background, “Immunity” by Jon Hopkins. KATHLEEN and ANDREW speak to the audience. We can’t try to recreate what these young people did on stage. It doesn’t translate. kathleen :  That kills me. Because it’s so important to understand, it’s not just young people putting on a play. I mean, the enormous impact it had on all the reliable adults. What people need to get is that, for instance, one of the miraculous things is that the youth are on stage with Rachel’s master’s students from Warwick. So these Canley youth are sharing their stories and the stage with a Portuguese theatre director, a Chinese sociologist, a Malaysian schoolteacher, who in turn are telling their own stories. The Brexit campaign had exposed these young people to such ugly, hateful language around immigrants and foreigners. But here, in this place, they were in deep relationship with these international students. Making a play. The opening sequence of their performance used this song. andrew:  Beyond that, it would be really weak to reproduce anything from this performance. kathleen:  Because you will be thinking, “It was kids in a leisure centre putting a little thing on. Mothers came. Really?! It was that impactful?! Come on. It’s just about kids feeling good. It’s not art. Call it what it is: Kids Feeling Good.” (1) It was more than Kids Feeling Good. andrew: 

OLLY emerges from the crowd, takes a place in front of a microphone and camera for his interview. RACHEL joins him. The atmosphere is that of a lively lobby after the Canley Youth Theatre performance. Well, headline! with the audience) Because the impact on them and the adults in the room was so palpable. How do we make people feel it?

olly: 

kathleen: (still

Focus shifts to OLLY and RACHEL standing together, speaking with ­Andrew. Rachel has a Liverpudlian accent. olly: 

Fun with Depth. Five stars! Full disclosure, you’re Rachel’s husband.

andrew: 

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One and only. Husband to Dr. Rachel King. Yeah. Rachel… rachel:  I’m Rachel King, assistant professor at Warwick. I’m Kathleen’s international collaborator here at this site in Coventry. And I co-directed the play that we all saw tonight. andrew:  And so Olly, your unbiased review. rachel:  Oh god. olly:  I – I smiled…through…out…the entire thing. Even strangely through the profoundly moving bits because…the depth there was real. Thought it was charming, um, the playfulness of that mess, and then (2) um (2) what was it – swimming through that mess, with with with such joy and…then…playfully noticing the audience, and then sweeping it away – which was quite cathartic… um (2) these points are not well connected. If I were to critique my review so far. I just liked it a lot. And you can quote me on that. (1) And you probably will. olly: 

andrew:  And

Focus shifts over to a pair of mothers doing an interview with Kathleen. I’ve seen it changing Brian, yeah. (She waves to Brian, who waves back from across the room.) connie’s mom:  I think it’s like a little group for them, like a little family thing. kathleen:  So you must have seen the changes in Connie? connie’s mom:  Mmm, hmmm. kathleen:  And in the play, what did you think about this idea of them telling their own stories or telling what was important to them? brian’s mom:  Oh that was good. Yeah. connie’s mom:  Yeah. Somewhat different. brian’s mom: 

Focus shifts to OPHELIA’S DAD who speaks with Andrew. Ophelia’s always had a lot of, um, things she wants to say in some ways. Yeah. Yeah. (3) And I think the difference was, drama kind of helped her to (2) I noticed that as she started into drama, she started to vocalize more kind of rationally at home. (1) She could still be angry and shouting but she was actually just speaking sense as well. So we realized, ’cause what, as a Dad, sometimes, when she’d roar off, I’d kind of roar back which didn’t help. It made it worse. But as she started to vocalize, I started to understand.

ophelia’s dad: 



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Focus shifts to ANGELA, JOUVAN, and RACHEL speaking with both Andrew and Kathleen. These three comprise the adults who lead the Canley Youth Theatre program. You know, when we first started, Bruce, Bruce put his hand up like this every now and again. Now he puts his hand up. andrew:  Can you quickly introduce yourselves, because you’re important? angela: (light laugh) I’m Angela, I’m in Youth Services, we’re a partner on this project with the Belgrade and Warwick University. I’m a social worker. jouvan: Extraordinaire. angela:  Stop. (laughs) jouvan:  Don’t know how you do it. angela:  You just do. (laughs) andrew:  And Rachel, you co-directed the show with… jouvan:  I’m Jouvan. I run Canley Youth Theatre. I’m an arts practitioner. andrew:  And Canley… rachel:  Well, it’s known to be a deprived area here in Coventry. Between two bus stops, one in Canley and just outside Canley, there’s a life expectancy difference of twelve years. Between two bus stops. angela:  Um, it’s one of the most deprived areas of the city/ rachel: Mm-hmm/ jouvan:  Let’s just say they’re not the kids that have a bit more money that can catch the bus or they have the confidence to come into a space like a theatre. rachel: Mm-hmm/ angela:  I’ll say I wasn’t sure how they would be able to cope with the demands of the performance tonight and then, that we’re going into summer exam timetable and so forth...But anyway, roll with it. Flexible and adaptable. And I was so proud of them and what the parents were saying afterwards and their appreciation. We’ve not had that before, have we? jouvan: No. angela:  It really hit home. rachel:  We see it in systems everywhere, don’t we? Who can perform the best?! I know that world. It’s not my world. For them to be admired for who they are as human beings is for me, that’s just the gift, isn’t it? If you can make that happen. jouvan:  Like Bruce? angela: 

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Andrew Kushnir

Yes, exactly. Like Bruce.

BRUCE becomes part of the stage picture. He stands on a chair, as if in mid-performance. This is my Nintendo DS. I got it in 2011 about three months after I went into care. It’s cool because lots of people pooled together to get it. rachel: (to Andrew and Kathleen) The youth were supposed to bring objects of significance to help create their scenes. Not games consoles. I remember, in the moment, feeling the group’s irritation and disappointment with Bruce’s offering. bruce:  But it’s not just for games. I took loads of pictures on it, and I like to look back at them as memories because…they are pictures of someone out there I don’t see anymore, some people, memories, places, and stuff; it’s kind of basically like an archive of memories… as well as for playing games (he smiles). rachel: (to Bruce) I didn’t know that you could store pictures on there. I had no idea. bruce:  Yeah, you can… bruce: 

RACHEL comes back to Kathleen and Andrew. BRUCE fades away. That’s what can happen when youth are given the stage. And this is the week when we needed it most. jouvan: Yeah. angela:  Yeah, yeah. (2) The Brexit result has changed/ everything. jouvan:  Don’t get me started. rachel: Jouvan. rachel: 

JOUVAN gestures like “I don’t want to go there.” The scene has shifted from the lively lobby after the show to drinks in Rachel and Olly’s kitchen. It is much more subdued. Singer-songwriter Laura Mvula’s “Can’t Live with the World” plays on a small stereo. angela:  And

when I’ve got young people coming to me, and you know they voiced it in the group – I am somebody who’s private, I do hold back, that’s just the way I am – but when youngsters are coming off the performance last night and coming over and hugging me and saying, “Just thank you for everything,” I can’t describe what that means to me. (ANGELA begins to cry.) (4) Sorry. (1) Sorry. They said it in the play when they were performing.



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It is about being on the journey with that young person and sometimes it’s when the crap is really coming. It’s just being with them. (2) You’ve probably heard already. But they want to cut our funding. olly:  This is what they want to cut. I mean it makes no sense. (1) My sister voted Leave and I can’t help but think, had she seen this tonight – I mean I don’t want to hyperbolize – but I can’t help but think, if she’d seen this before the vote earlier this week, maybe she would have thought twice. RACHEL picks something up, turns to Kathleen and Andrew. I promise to make this brief. Kathleen. Andrew. A small gift. (2) For me, this book is the opposite of hope and care really. It’s a book about an island that’s lost its way. Fitting for the times, perhaps. Hopefully not fitting for long. It’s a book for kids. Which means it’s a book for all of us. And I think it’s something that I think you’ll draw great meaning from, particularly after this week we’ve had together. May this book be a stimulus for imagining new stories.

rachel: 

(2) olly: 

Oh, let’s have one more drink. What can I get everyone? or some wine?

rachel:  A pint

The kitchen party fades away. ANDREW speaks to the audience. We have one last drink. Laura Mvula’s song plays: “Can’t Live with The World.” There is banter, there is some laughter. I find myself worried for my new friends. Eventually, Kathleen and I take our leave. (1) The book Rachel gave us was called The Island by Armin Greder. (quoting the book’s blurb) “When the people of an island find a man sitting on their shore, they immediately reject him because he is different. Fearful to the point of delusional paranoia, the islanders lock him in a goat pen, refuse him work, and feed him scraps they would normally feed a pig. As their fears progress into hatred, they force him into the sea.”

andrew: 

Over the course of this speech, a “taxi cab” has materialized on stage – ­simply evoked with the use of a few chairs. KATHLEEN and ANDREW take a seat in it.

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Scene 13: Departures In the driver seat is an elderly cab driver. This CABBIE is hard of hearing and speaks from the other side of a plexiglass barrier, at times almost s­ houting. You’re Canadian. We are. cabbie:  Yeah, yeah. I nearly said you were Americans but I didn’t want to swear. cabbie: 

kathleen: 

Laughter from all three. How long you been here for? Um. Just ten days here. cabbie: Sorry? kathleen:  Ten days/ here cabbie:  Ten days. kathleen: Yes. cabbie: 

kathleen: 

(1) cabbie:  What have you done wrong? (1) I have a terrible sense of humour.

The CABBIE laughs. You’re headed home? No, to Greece in fact. cabbie:  Greece? (1) That’s a mess, isn’t it? andrew: Well/ cabbie: I had a German in. And I’m, I’m eighty-three years of age. andrew:  Oh wow. Congratulations! cabbie:  He, uh, he said you have any flights from Europe? I said we do. He said, you have any flights from Germany? I said not as many as we got between 1940 and 1943. (laughs) He didn’t think that was funny. kathleen:  I’m sure. cabbie:  Ah well, Germans. We’re soon to be coming out of Europe anyway. andrew: Right. cabbie:  We need change. andrew: Change? cabbie: 

andrew: 



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BRUCE has entered the stage picture. He is in his own reality, distinct from the cab, penning a letter. His voice, one that has been growing in strength over the course of the Coventry story, is now more impassioned than ever. Dear Mr. Jim Cunningham MP, House of Commons, London. We don’t like being told, the British – that means Wales, Scotland – we don’t like other countries telling us what to do. And that’s from Brussels. bruce:  I write to you to ask for your urgent support in opposing the proposed cuts to Youth Services across the city of Coventry. andrew: Right. bruce:  I am a participant in the Canley Youth Theatre. cabbie:  We’re very independent. bruce:  My confidence has grown so much since I started there over a year ago. As you will see, this matters to me and my friends so much. cabbie:  I think Australia’s got it right. They put their illegal immigrants on an island hundreds of miles into the ocean. Alright, almost there. bruce:  Where will I go to make friends? Where will I try things I’ve never before dreamed of doing? cabbie:  Yeah, I think…you’ll make your flight. kathleen:  Alright, we’re in your hands. cabbie: (can’t hear) Sorry? kathleen:  We’re in your hands. bruce:  Where will I try things I’ve never before dreamed of doing? bruce: 

cabbie: 

The image of the cab dissolves as the CABBIE, KATHLEEN, and ANDREW start leaving the playing space. KATHLEEN looks back at Bruce one last time before she goes. BRUCE sits in a chair, the only one left on stage. He wraps his foot around one of the legs. He clutches his backpack. He looks around his drama room, then hears the sound of a plane taking off. He follows its arc overhead, across the sky.

– END OF ACT 1 –

Figure 27.  Actor Stephen Jackman-Torkoff in the prologue of Towards Youth. “And maybe we can meet it and be a gateway or a door.” Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic (2019)

Figure 28.  Ensemble of Towards Youth depicting Middleview (starting top, clockwise): Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, Amaka Umeh, Emilio Vieira, Tim DowlerColtman, Loretta Yu, Zorana Sadiq, Aldrin Bundoc. “But then again, how do we get that, like, foot in the door?” Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic (2019)

Figure 29.  Actor Zorana Sadiq as Bruce in Coventry. “Where will I try things I’ve never before dreamed of doing?” Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic (2019)

Figure 30.  Ensemble of Towards Youth depicting the site in Tainan. Wan-Jung: “Don’t compromise.” Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic (2019)

Figure 31.  Actor Amaka Umeh depicting a Prerna student, Jyoti. “Aabh kuch kar sakhthi hai. [And they’re smarter than boys.]” Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic (2019)

Figure 32.  Ensemble of Towards Youth in the play’s final passage (L to R): Liisa Repo-Martell, Jessica Greenberg, Loretta Yu, Amaka Umeh, Zorana Sadiq, Stephen Jackman-Torkoff, Tim Dowler-Coltman, Aldrin Bundoc, Emilio Vieira. “Adjust.” Photo by Aleksandar Antonijevic (2019)

ACT TWO

Scene 1: Dangerous Times An audio recording is played of NIKOS (international c­ ollaborator in ­Athens) giving a presentation on the state of Greece. Along with his voice, journalistic slides are projected that depict what he’s ­referring to: poverty, failed democracy, debt crisis, refugee crisis, and so on. First, I would like you to see the map of Europe as it is today. It wasn’t like that a few years ago and probably won’t be in the next few years. And these are dangerous times when maps change. Dangerous times is the economical crisis, it is dangerous times for us. Twenty-five per cent unemployment, pensioners trying to find food in garbage bins. Forty-nine per cent of the young people unemployed. A large number of people impoverished. These are dangerous times for us. When markets rule instead of people, they are – these are dangerous times for us. When you’re having a police state, these are dangerous times for us. And when there’s not much democracy around this is even worst because you don’t really know how to handle this. How can you handle when people vote and then you got the markets say: “No, ok, we don’t really care what you voted, but you have to follow that rules. You have to follow that program no matter what you have voted.” So, these are really dangerous times that influence our work as you can imagine. So…um…Is there any hope in this? I can’t see anything than that.

nikos : 

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Scene 2: The Drama Club On the back wall, PROJECTION: ATHENS, GREECE. We hear the sound of children playing on the school playground. TANIA ushers in ­ANDREW and KATHLEEN. The group life force conveys the students’ excitement about having visitors. manolis: 

Hello! I am from Greece!

andrew: Hello. manolis: 

Hallo! Hallo!

All the students laugh. tania: 

They want to be part of you.

MYRTO, TANIA, and KATHLEEN speak off to the side. ANDREW ­suddenly finds himself in the cluster of young people, all vying for his attention. Nice to meet you. I’m Andrew. This – I’m Angelo (pointing to his own nametag). You are Andros. And you are with Kathleen Gallagher. andrew:  I am. angelo:  You are her boyfriend. andrew:  angelo: 

All the youth cackle with laughter. No. I’m, I’m a playwright and friend. Do you understand playwright? various youth: Yes. angelo:  We are the start of your play. andrew:  I think so. Yes. 5 angelo:  Say karagiozis. andrew: 

5 This is the first of many instances to come of transliteration (a form of phonetic representation of a language) in the script. Each piece of transliteration in the script was created with our international collaborators. They would translate the original language heard at the site into both English (for meaning) and into rough English phonetics for predominantly English-speaking actors to engage with. A dialect coach, along with language specialists in Greek, Mandarin, and Hindi, respectively, did private coaching with performers. During rehearsals, fluent speakers of these languages sat in and offered feedback on the accuracy of the pronunciations and cadence. The transliteration in this published version of Towards Youth represents



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Noooo! It means ridiculous and stupid together. andrew: (slowly) Karagiozis. various youth: marianna: 

TANIA comes to fetch Andrew in order to commence formal introductions. andrew: 

They told me it means “I’m handsome.”

The youth laugh even more. tania: 

No. It means stupid.

The youth cackle with laughter. TANIA appears to be briefly disappointed in them. tania: (to

the room) Ok! Please! Show your cards.

The students step forward and show name cards that hang on strings around their necks. For any actor playing more than one role, the card is flipped to reveal another young person’s name. My name is Manolis. can I ask your age? manolis:  I am fourteen years old. andrew:  And tell us something you’d like us to know about you. manolis:  I like to dance. Ballroom. And hip hop. angelo:  I am Angelo! I am eleven. So in my neighbourhood, nothing has changed from the day I’m living here. Also my parents told me I was wasting my time with swimming and taekwondo and I should be an actor. Because I am very good at telling lies. marianna:  Marianna. Thirteen. I don’t know what to say. adrian: Adrian. anatola: Anatola. maria:  Maria. Fourteen. I like trees. I would like to see more trees in Athens. manolis: 

andrew:  And

NIKOS and MYRTO, the two international research collaborators at the site, take the floor. our process rather than offers a functional way of pronouncing the Greek, Mandarin, and Hindi in the play. This intercultural work embodied the spirit of Kathleen’s letter (“a deeply respectful forgery”) while striving to represent the polylingual feel of each site.

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Now we want to welcome Dr. Kathleen Gallagher and Andrew Kushnir. Nikos and I have been working with you, yes? And your teacher, Ms. Tania, for several month. We have told you about Kathleen and Andrew.

myrto: 

Youth, variously nod, say “yes.” nikos:  Andrew, ehm, (he launches into a lengthy explanation in Greek)

pou gráfei érga me vási aftá pou akoúei aˈpó óla ta méri pou episképtontai...sta scholeía, diladí pou páne, me ósa akoúei kai ósa kánoun oi mathités, e...gráfei érga apó ta lógia tous k’ap’ tis idées tous, kai ta loipá...tha prépei na tou zitísoume na doúme ti eínai aftó, e...6

(1) A few youth nod. NIKOS, smiling, turns to Andrew. They are excited. We are too. Hello. It’s very good to meet you. We’ve heard a lot about you from our collaborators here in Athens. Thank you, Myrto and Nikos. We’ve heard from your teacher Tania, who we’ve just met today. And we’re very happy to be here. tania:  And what will you do? nikos: 

kathleen: 

KATHLEEN is struck by the question, looks to Andrew. The basis of the research project is to observe classrooms, not lead the drama being made in them. So here’s one of the important things that I think. I think that young people, when they are making theatre, they are communicating their ideas in very significant ways.

kathleen: 

Some students turn towards their peers and translate. Do you understand? Yeah? Do you agree with me? Do you think that’s true? various youth: Yes. nikos: 

kathleen: 

(1) 6 Though not translated in the production to an English-speaking audience in any way, Nikos says: “Andrew, ehm, who writes shows based on the things he hears from all the places they visit, then, where they go, with all he hears and whatever the students are doing, he writes shows from their words and their ideas and so forth. So, when he writes something about us, we’ll have to ask him to see what it will be.”



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Our improvisations are containing things that we are hiding. On purpose we would hide these things. But our improvisations are bringing things that are otherwise under the surface. kathleen:  Yeah, I agree. marianna:  Why did you choose our school? kathleen:  Well, Myrto and Nikos found you, and your teacher Tania, for this research project. We are outsiders, we can’t understand Greece. We only have what you can teach us. And that’s why we’re here. tania:  But not just observe. You will stop us and tell us what to do. kathleen: (momentarily thrown again) Well, that’s not our intention. I mean, we could lead some exercises, but what we’d really like is to see what you do in the drama classroom. manolis: 

(2) Yes, we have pulled these students from their other classes for this full week. Mm. If you see something you want to see more, you will tell us.

tania: 

(2) KATHLEEN looks to Myrto, Nikos, and Andrew, then back to Tania. Ok. We can do that. Ok! Now. Let’s make a circle. Now we are going to play this game, fruit salad. (She goes around assigning a fruit to each member in the circle.) Peach. Apple. Orange. Eh. Banana. Peach. Apple. Orange. Banana.

kathleen:  tania: 

While the students play, KATHLEEN, ANDREW and MYRTO step to the side.

Scene 3: The Refugee Scene Some time later in the day. tania: 

Ok! They will now show you the improvisations you suggested.

The students come forward. They put on their scene: a hotel owner) My salary has been decreased because we have lost our clients because of the refugees.

manolis: (as

310 kathleen: (to

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Myrto) They’re working in English now?

Myrto nods. Then shrugs. a hotel owner) Our clients are afraid of coming in our island and in our hotel, which is next to the refugee camps.

manolis: (as

TANIA, smiling, starts smacking her thigh – prompting more commitment, more “drama.” an unemployed man from the island in question) Yes, the same thing. Witnessing the same reality, the same hotel. I am a father of two children, I am divorced, I am unemployed, and I’m trying to find a job. But because there are refugees in the area and they ask almost nothing as a payment, people prefer them than me because they will take less than half than I would ask. anatola: (as a refugee) I’m a refugee. angelo: (as the unemployed man) Yes, you are! angelo: (playing

There is a titter of laughter from the youth. herself) They have undergone after very tough experiences, so they need more than we need now. They are in our country and we must help them. kathleen: (as a journalist, in role) Now I have a question to ask you hotel owners and employees/ tania:  This is the end of their scene. kathleen:  I realize that, I’m just going to ask, and feel free to stay in character, if there is no option to send the refugees away back to countries of war, what other ideas might you have to make your own lives more reasonable in this time of change and also to meet the needs of the influx of refugees? anatola: (as herself) Maybe we can take some money from the organization that our teacher told us about. tania:  In character! In character! anatola: (she attempts a character to complete her thought) So they can stay in a house and not be like that and this would be a solution we see. andrew: (as a journalist, in role) Well, I hear that money might be the solution, but my concern is that there’s some money management problems in Greece/ marianna: (speaking as herself) Yes, we have this. Sometimes the moneys are not used for the aim they are supposed to be used. For anatola: (as



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this reason, this should not be undertaken only by our government or our country. andrew: (as a journalist, in role) Who can we trust in? kathleen: (as a journalist, in role) The European Union signed an agreement and then disregarded it. marianna: (as herself) Maybe we can ask the help of a country which is outside the European Union. kathleen: (as a journalist, in role) Like who? anatola: (as herself) Germany. angelo: (as himself) America. kathleen: (as herself) Trump? We’ll call Trump up now. (group laughs) I’m sure he’d be happy to oversee – angelo:  Canada. (more laughing) maria: Australia. andrew:  Why Australia? maria:  We are just saying countries because we don’t know what to say. Students laugh. The improvisation has fully dissolved. (2) Should we move on? You have something else planned. kathleen:  We do. If that’s ok. tania:  Yes, of course. kathleen:  If we can get everyone in a circle. kathleen:  tania: 

Scene 4: The Suitcase Exercise ANDREW speaks to the audience as the group reconfigures into a circle. MYRTO has entered the space with a small rolling suitcase. Myrto leads the exercise that we had come up with. She enters the room with a suitcase. She tells everyone that refugees have started arriving at the school and that as a group we were to decide what to do. myrto: (to the young people) We must discuss because their suitcases have started arriving. andrew: (continues narrating to the audience) And for a moment the young people can’t tell whether or not she’s telling them something in real life or in play. andrew: 

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the narration, to the audience) I mean it’s not farfetched. The school had been holding emergency meetings about rooms or areas of the school that could house the latest arrivals, having already filled to capacity, with asylum seekers, many of the surrounding Greek islands. andrew:  This game was skimming close to life, which makes it the perfect game. And they caught on quickly, as young people always do. They confer for some time. Maybe it’s this. No, maybe it’s this. Finally, Maria says: 7 maria:  Horaia, as tin a’niksoyme! andrew:  And they do. They open it. They find a balloon, a doll, a blanket, toothpaste. These were items we’d found in the trunk of Myrto’s car and in Kathleen’s purse. kathleen:  They start trying to make a riddle of the objects. What story do these objects tell? andrew:  Very quickly what they’re saying is what they think we want to hear. And they’re mildly dissing each other’s ideas as if there was only one right answer. Then/ tania: (to the students) In your roles. Don’t just speak as yourselves. No. That means play teachers, parents, students. Get in your part. kathleen: (to Nikos) They are. Why – nikos:  Because they’re not. All of them, they’re playing themselves. kathleen:  That’s ok. myrto:  Ok. (to the group) What if we share items around the circle in silence? And see what story they tell us. kathleen: (joining

The objects (a doll, a blanket, toothpaste, a balloon) get passed around the circle, in silence. The objects make their way around the circle in silence. And then Myrto asks them to share stories again. And this time, they’re not trying to best each other. What we get is “To me, the suitcase is this and this and this.” “I imagined this and I imagined this.” A constellation of possibilities. Angelo says:

andrew: 

While ANGELO speaks, Nikos translates in real time. Ypárhe ánas pathéras ka mea metára/ me dýo paidiá. To balóni antiprosopéthi potee genethike to paidí.

angelo: 

7 Maria says: “Well, let’s open it!”



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Pestévo óti ta paidià den zoun pea. I metára pire to balóni mazí tis gia na tes theymízei to paidí tis. To rouho einai gia na kratàei ta morá, to ble rouxo. Prépei na einai éna apó ta piio agapiména antikeímena tou mikroú paidioú. nikos:  There’s a father and a mother with two children. The balloon represents when a baby is born. I believe the two children are not alive anymore. The mother has taken the balloon with her just to remind her of her child. The cloth is to hold the babies, the blue cloth. This must have been one of the favorite objects of the little child. andrew:  There is a natural pause. Then: myrto: (to the young people) If this was something for ourselves, what would we put in a bag? If we were in this moment of having to leave our home? (3) Let us think about this for tomorrow. Thank you. The students applaud. The young people are dismissed and make their way out of the drama room. TANIA speaks to a few of them as they go. ANDREW and KATHLEEN come together, MYRTO comes to them, NIKOS next. That was extremely well done. My brain has exploded with ideas, it depends on/ myrto:  What we do tomorrow. kathleen:  It seems to me this suitcase exercise is such a rich turn for writing. myrto: Yes. nikos:  So what’s the plan. What are we doing? kathleen:  Well, we have to think of a plan. We have to think of/ nikos:  So. The improvisations they did before, I realize one thing. When we’re talking about refugees, it’s always us and them. And it’s in the rhetoric actually, not their beliefs. You see, you’re not always refugee. You certain period in your life you might be refugee. But you’re a person. For me it was revealing today. kathleen:  Nikos, I feel like you have ideas of where we can go with this. tania:  Can I, can I say something? (1) But the way we do the whole situation here, I heard the children say that they were a little bit bored today, with all this questions and answers. They, they are expecting more theatre, more drama. More techniques. More active…active part. Do you understand what I mean? They, they are waiting from you, something new. But not just questions and being kathleen: 

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in a room with what do you think and what do you think and no – not any more of this. They’re, um, they were saying, as they were leaving, saying, “No more of this. To… tomorrow.” nikos:  Too much talking for them, you think? tania:  Too much talking, yes. They want theatre. They want to/ nikos:  To play around. tania :  Ok. I would like you to consider, consider this, because this is what they are expecting from you. They, they are expecting something that we didn’t – we don’t do – I mean a new, new things that they haven’t heard from us. You understand what I mean? No? kathleen:  I totally understand. tania: Ok. kathleen:  I just don’t know if that’s what we can do. We might need you to do that work. A moment of tension. (2) Eh, what uh, d-do you think – what would you want to do tomorrow? In what way? kathleen:  We had a number of ideas just now based on what we built today, but if that’s not of interest – nikos:  They were producing new things today. tania:  Ok. Today it was ok. But tomorrow. We want more conversation? Do you have in mind more conversation like this? kathleen :  I don’t have anything in mind yet. We didn’t come with an agenda to, you know, to do something. So we’re, we’re also trying to understand…how you work. And you have a long relationship with these kids. So. You know, we, we didn’t really imagine that we were coming to be workshop leaders for the week and to do fun things. We can do fun things, we certainly can do that/ tania:  Of course/ kathleen:  But there is a research project too. tania: Yes. kathleen:  With big questions that we want to ask about their lives. tania: Uh-huh. kathleen:  So just playing games, doesn’t always get us to those places. tania:  But we can do both. They want more…drama. More theatre. For acting. They want to, to, to make longer scenes. Mercy, mercy with these refugees. Today is was, uh, ehm, I mean/ myrto:  They chose to do very short improvisations. tania: 



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tania:  Because they were expecting more. They didn’t understand that

this was it. (2) You understand what I mean? So if you have, uh, big questions for the research, we can still, of course you can still do, of course. But let’s play a little bit with them because they, they are getting bored. And they will not cooperate in a little while. They will be “ah-ok.” No. So we have to have them with us. Uh. That’s my suggestion.

Another moment of tension. (3) kathleen: (to

Myrto and Andrew) We can talk about that.

(2) nikos: Ok.

However, I have to say, I don’t have the impression that they are bored. andrew:  Yeah, me neither. myrto:  When they/ participate. kathleen:  Me neither. tania:  When they participate. But when they are here and they loo– they wait for their turn/ myrto:  But these people that are giving answers, they are not bored. tania: That’s/ myrto:  I’m not saying, I’m saying they might feel bored, bored but there’s something – I have the impression what is going on for them…um/ nikos:  Me too/ myrto:  Which is equally important. myrto: 

TANIA sighs. We can play games, in between other/ exercise. They don’t ask only games. We can do both./ We can do both. I have to insist on that. They need – what they do. I need this to be clear. nikos: (firmly) But Tania, they’re not here to offer us new techniques. New drama techniques. That’s not the reason they arrived. nikos:  tania: 

(2) tania: Ok.

If they had this impression, it was the wrong impression. They’re not here to give us more ideas on how to perform a play. We can do that actually. (he laughs) Ok. Let’s go.

nikos: 

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Scene 5: Adrian’s Mother The students sit on the floor, writing. the audience) We spent the night coming up with some solution, some exercise to satisfy Tania’s needs and also to maintain the connections we were making with her students. 8 tania: (to her students) Tha mazépsoume ta heerógrapha sas. You write clearly. We will collect your pages after. andrew:  The students have taken up places on the ground. They are writing, using objects from the suitcase as points of inspiration. andrew: (to

KATHLEEN and ANDREW observe. TANIA is interrupting some of the students, asking them questions. MYRTO approaches Kathleen. myrto:  Adrian’s

mother is here. She is willing to speak with you. That’s great. Let me – can I just say something to the room? (to the room) So you’re writing a monologue from the perspective of your object, yes? The object in the suitcase that spoke to you most. Understood? (Various students say yes.) And so, perhaps the adults in the room, we’ll take a step back and let you explore that without our help. nikos:  And if they have questions. andrew:  We’ll let them interpret. They’ll figure it out. andrew: 

ANDREW looks to Kathleen as if to say: “Sorry, I had to say something.” They shift over to the side of the room, where ADRIAN’S MOTHER waits for an interview. We’re very happy to be here. It’s a lovely school. When will you be gone from this? kathleen:  Sunday. So short. adrian’s mother:  Yes. So, I like your work. There. Because it’s a play of drama, and I understand that you want to research something. What is this? kathleen:  I want to understand how young people are understanding the world that they’re living in. Your son is Adrian, and he comes to the drama club. kathleen: 

adrian’s mother: 

8 Tania says: “We will collect your manuscripts.”



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He likes theatre, he likes drama school, he likes his teacher, and he told me, “In the future, I would be actor.” That, I saw, you must study all the books. The theatre, to be an actor, I believe as a mother, have no future. Must be very good, the best, to have work, to give money to it. andrew:  My parents are first generation Canadian. My grandparents came from Ukraine. Do you know, north of the Black Sea? Ukraine? adrian’s mother:  Just a minute. I’m from Albania. andrew:  Oh, wow. Ok! adrian’s mother:  I am foreigners here. Not like refugees but I had twenty-two years to live here and married to a Greek man. I understand it. andrew:  And so my grandparents fled from great instability, so the idea of having a grandson, or of my parents having a son that was interested in the arts is very destabilizing, is very – kathleen:  It worries them. andrew:  It worries them. But I have found a way to do it. adrian’s mother: 

ANDREW realizes he has inadvertently overstepped. adrian’s mother:  Are

you advising me not to oppress about his choices? andrew:  Um. (1) Well, I…I don’t know the situation in Greece well enough. But I understand your anxiety. On some level. I… myrto:  They’re ready to show. kathleen:  Oh. Ok. I’m – ANDREW and KATHLEEN are whisked away to some audience chairs to watch the youth performance.

Scene 6: “This Was My Life” tania: Ok.

MANOLIS and ANATOLA alternate lines, sometimes fragments of lines. These passages of Greek are projected in English surtitles. They use the doll and the suitcase to create a kind of physical poem to accompany the spoken one. Hemoun e agapiméni tis koúkla. Thymàmai ten próti forà poy gnoristekame. Ma angáliase.

manolis/anatola: 

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Káthe vrádi élege kalynýxta, kai kata tiviarkia tis iméras ta mystiká tis. Me rotage th gnómi moy gia via fora prágmata. Den me áfise poté apó ta héria tis. Kemótan mazí moy, étroge mazí mou, zoúse mazí moy. Akoúsoume vomves kai fovisméni anthrópi na fonázoun. Den ksero pou einai. Aan zei, an eínai kala. Pesteve óti ta prágmata mporousan na hetan kalýtera. To móno pou thymámai eínai paidia na mou myrízounde. Aftí etan i zoe mou. [I was her favourite doll. I remember the first time we meet each other. She hugged me. And every night she was telling good night, and during the day her secrets. She was asking me my opinion on things. She never left me from her hands. She was sleeping with me, eating with me, living with me. We could hear bombing and scared people shouting. I don’t know where she is. If she’s alive, if she’s okay. She believed that things would be better. The only thing I remember is children smelling me. This was my life.] Applause. TANIA goes over to Andrew. tania: 

They did not understand your exercise.

Scene 7: Tania MYRTO, in isolation, speaks to Kathleen and Andrew. TANIA finds herself on the complete opposite end of the stage. Tania asks me, every single lesson: “What are we doing? So, again, Myrto. Explain. What are we doing? What do they want to see?” Always. And I have seen this as a very big problem in our Greek education system. We cannot work with things outside our curriculum, and this is part of this one-dimensional truth and knowledge that students and many teachers feel they have to repeat. And so drama, as a space of elaboration, of discussion, of ideas to be generated – it is difficult in our context. For all of us. Add to this, when your state tells

myrto: 



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you, the last five years of crisis, you’re a failure, you’re a failure, you’re a failure, what impact does that have on your psychology?

Scene 8: Focus Group MANOLIS, MARIANNA, ANGELO, ANATOLA, and NIKOS do a focus interview with Kathleen and Andrew. We have two final questions for you, before we go. We hear the word crisis a lot, and it came up in our work here in the drama classroom and it’s come up in the conversations we have had here in Greece, and so I would like to ask you, could you explain to me what is the crisis? angelo:  In Greece? kathleen: Yes. nikos: (translates Andrew’s question to the students) Akoúme poly te léksi kríse, kai tha ethela na sas rotíso, mporeite na mou ekshgeisete ti einai e krísi?9 kathleen:  andrew:

(2) We cannot make it in economic terms. That’s it. We are owing money and we cannot get it back. angelo:  My parents almost broke up because of this. kathleen:  So that’s a big impact. angelo:  But fortunately they didn’t. kathleen:  They survived it. angelo:  They said we will broke up, but they didn’t. manolis:  I think that we don’t have a, a, we grow up too much fast. Too fast. And we can’t enjoy our teenage life because we think about what we going to do when we grow up and our grades and everything. marianna:  Um, I – (Laughs. Stops herself.) anatola: 

(1) manolis: 

Everybody is angry.

(2) 9 Nikos says: “We hear the word crisis a lot, and so I would like to ask you, can you explain to me what is the crisis?”

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Last question. Can you describe for me what your best imagined future is. What is your best, imagined future?

kathleen:  andrew: 

Silence. (3) Then they all chuckle and look at one another. manolis:  Ah

yeah! Uh, I think the best future for me is that you are doing what you love, uh – andrew:  Which is what? manolis:  Dancing, to be honest. MANOLIS smiles shyly. MARIANNA chuckles. My future. I think that (claps hands) what I want most of all is to (claps hands) pass my exams and become a doctor and I want to go somewhere where I can study about medicines, like I want to find actually a cure for some diseases that we haven’t found, or develop a medicine, I think now. (2) I wanted to become a…writer? A writer because, I don’t know, I just like writing essays and stuff like that. Also an artist. andrew:  How many dreams do you have? (smiles) marianna:  Many. (laughs lightly) I don’t think you can count someone’s dreams on your fingers or something like they are ten or fifty. You have many dreams. (Marianna smiles, but it doesn’t come easily.) andrew:  A big file. marianna: Yes! andrew:  Thank you. nikos:  Alright. Good. There is a bit of food still, in the library. Have a snack and we’ll see how the other group is doing. marianna: 

All leave but ANGELO. He looks to Kathleen. If you want, can you please tell me the path from where you are here and from where you began? kathleen: (big breath) I had a father who believed very strongly in girls and women and so he was my cheerleader. I had a father who said there’s no difference between boys and girls. You do everything you want to do. That was a very big gift that he gave me. I believed him. angelo:  And I think you made an excellent choice. kathleen:  It was a pleasure to meet you. angelo:  It was an honour for us. I hope we collaborate again. angelo: 



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Me too, yeah, that would be very good.

(2) I am a child but until now my childhood memory is this one, is the thing I live now, is that (wipes eye under his glasses) I have the opportunity to work with some very nice people. I just want to say thank you. I just want to say thank you. That’s that. And…(take off glasses, tears up further)

angelo: 

He hugs Kathleen and cries. He then goes. ANDREW and KATHLEEN look to one another. TANIA enters. She sits. How long have you been teaching? Oh many years. Thirty years now. kathleen:  Oh wow. So you’ve seen a lot of changes. tania:  A lot of changes, a lot of students, a lot of children, yes. kathleen:  How long have you been at this school? tania:  Ok, nine years now. kathleen:  Ok. And when you got here, did you, was the drama club in existence, did you bring it, did you start it/ tania:  No, no, we did it. We/ kathleen:  You started it. Because drama is not a subject in Greek schools. tania:  Not in the high schools. No. But I used drama in, ah, history/ kathleen: Hmmm/ tania:  And in ancient literature also. kathleen:  Wow, ok. tania:  With children, if they don’t care, they don’t learn. And with teachers, if they don’t care, they don’t teach. My relationship with them…it’s not like give only, I take much. Nobody gives only. kathleen: Hm-mmm. tania:  And I see that lot of children, that they, don’t exist in the classroom. They don’t exist, but they flourishing in the drama class. And they need this. We are very stressed about everything. Every day is a big disaster in Athens, in ah, Greece. I don’t know how we are surviving, you know. kathleen:  Do you see different things about the crisis from your perspective as a teacher? tania:  I don’t understand that. kathleen:  How do you think the crisis and austerity has affected the children that you’re seeing, that you teach? tania:  They could not focus in the beginning five years ago. We could see that – there were children in other areas of Athens that were kathleen:  tania: 

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fainting – of ah, hunger. And they had to, you know, lots of things. (1) We have changed, all of us. Nothing is certain anymore. kathleen:  Has it changed the way you see Greece? tania: Greece? kathleen:  Um-mmm. Your country. tania:  My country or the people? (laughs) Greece is fine. It’s beautiful. I would never change anything. kathleen: Hmmm. tania:  We are hospitable. This is also a, a good thing about the Greeks’ character. kathleen:  Of course. tania:  Let us go back to the students, yes? TANIA gets up and leaves. KATHLEEN and ANDREW are left on their own.

Scene 9: The Sea ANDREW speaks to the audience. andrew:  After

our last afternoon with the students, Nikos and Myrto take us to the sea. Tania was not wrong, Greece is a beautiful place. (1) Kathleen once told me: “I don’t think we’re headed towards crisis. No. We are in crisis. We didn’t turn a corner, our leaders are the embodiment of a place we’ve already been living in. And that’s what sickens me.” (1) When I started on this project, I didn’t feel such a visceral connection to Kathleen’s sense of catastrophe and how we might see it in the drama classroom. Maybe I was inured to the awfulness. Maybe it’s my privilege showing. Probably. Yes. Maybe I thought things were stable enough. Going into this, Kathleen and I shared a lot of values. But I didn’t necessarily share in her same sense of alarm. When I started. kathleen:  What is the wisdom of a place or a people under siege? andrew:  I don’t know if we heard them. If it was possible. (1) I push myself to imagine what world has happened to Tania before 9 am…before she meets that young person. How does she proceed? With herself and everything she’s carrying with her into that classroom. And so maybe you have to play the fruit salad game, day in and day out. Keep it light. No hard questions. Because life is hard enough. But what does that do to the way young people



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dream about the world and what’s possible for them? (1) What do you think? kathleen:  I don’t know. (1) I’m thinking…

Scene 10: Night Market A big shift. PROJECTION: TAINAN, TAIWAN. Some youth and adults are wearing cotton face masks. KATHLEEN and ANDREW find themselves in the whir of a night market with the young people from the Taiwan site. This is the night market that is popular on Tuesday. What do you think? andrew:  Look at all these people. 10 iris: Tāmen chī guò pídàn ma. rolsha:  She wants to ask if you guys have tried the thousand-yearold egg. kathleen:  I haven’t yet. Not yet. Is it good? webber:  You can ask Andrew. kathleen:  Andrew tried it? That’s right! He liked it. webber:  Yes. Yes. kathleen:  But what do you think? Do you like it? rolsha: 

Students respond: some yes, some no. andrew: 

What about stinky tofu? Do you guys like it?

students: Yes.

What is stinky tofu? chī guò chòu dòufu ma?11 12 iris: Wǒ qù mǎi yīxiē gěi tāmen ba! webber:  Have you seen this app? kathleen:  This, no. What am I looking at? rolsha:  It’s for pollution. There are a lot of bad wind from China. kathleen: 

rolsha: Tāmen

Overlapping voices affirming Rolsha’s statement.

10 Iris asks: “They eat (experienced) skin-egg?” 11 Rolsha asks: “They eat (experienced) stinky-tofu?” 12 Iris responds: “I go buy some to/for/give them (let)!”

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The pollution is medium. We have different colours. Red is bad. And purple, very very bad. webber:  Sometimes yellow. andrew:  Should we be wearing? (refers to masks) webber:  No, you’re fine. rolsha: 

The young people laugh. I can’t help but think that those masks – don’t they make it challenging to meet new people or make new friends when you’re in a place like this. It hadn’t occurred to me that this pollution must make it hard to socialize. webber:  Well, masks are really in fashion now. kathleen:  What do you mean in fashion? kathleen: 

WEBBER dons his cotton face mask and walks the “catwalk” like a runway model. The young people laugh. Oh yeah, everyone is wearing them because they think they’re very sexy. They think they’re, yes, you know, because it’s mysterious and everyone is doing it now, because it’s considered very attractive. kathleen:  Oh. (2) (high voice, self-accusing, looking to Andrew) Assumptions. Ok. Ok. So it’s not about resenting global warming and bad winds from China. Ok. rolsha: 

IRIS arrives with stinky tofu. juédé jīntiān de méiyǒu zhème lìhài.13 rolsha:  Ok, Andrew. Time for you to try. andrew:  Oh my god, it really smells. iris: Wǒ

Students all laugh. rolsha: 

Don’t forget the sauce. Get the sauce.

ANDREW puts a square of stinky tofu in his mouth. There is a moment of suspense. andrew: (with

mouth full) Oh! It’s good.

13 Iris says: “I think today’s didn’t have so tremendous and awesome.



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The youth cackle with laughter. ANDREW is overwhelmed by the unfamiliar flavour. They laugh more. The youth restore their masks.

Scene 11: Focus Group Intermittently, the sound of a fighter jet is heard overhead. This classroom is not far from a military base. WAN-JUNG takes centre stage. My students. Their ages are eighteen to twenty-two usually, but only with some exception. People might go to the military service before they come to college, but usually it’s this range. What you are hearing… andrew:  The fighter jets. There’s a base nearby? wan-jung: Yes. kathleen: (to the audience) Wan-Jung is our international collaborator in Tainan. She’s an exceptional professor and drama teacher who specializes in community and cultural memory. I’ve known her for years. (back to the room) andrew:  Can I get your names? rolsha: Rolsha. leah: Leah. easan: Easan. andrew: Ethan? easan:  No, Easan. iris: Iris. webber: Webber. andrew: Webber. kathleen:  Is it mandatory, the military service you mentioned? wan-jung:  Just for young men, because we have this opposition with men in China always preparing to go to war. I don’t think it’s a good idea, myself. kathleen :  Who would Taiwan be going to war with? What was the/ wan - jung :  The young men and the retired soldiers would go to war. kathleen :  But to fight with the Chinese army against other enemies? wan-jung:  No. If they are attacking us. kathleen: China? wan-jung:  If China are attacking us, Taiwan will rise and fight against them. wan-jung: 

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So that’s why. Their missiles are still targeting us every day. Personally, I don’t feel the threat has been diminished. No. rolsha:  I was in Sunflower Movement. wan-jung:  The students occupied the Legislative Yuan to protest a trade and commerce contract with China. And government conceded. kathleen:  Really. That’s amazing. andrew:  And you participated, Rolsha? kathleen: 

wan-jung: 

ROLSHA nods yes. andrew:  And

does this make you feel better about your future. Not really. andrew: No? rolsha: 

They laugh a little. the group) Now, do you all talk about that anxiety, that sense of threat, or is this not on your radar? wan-jung: Nǐ Men zhī zhōng yǒu shéi guān xīn zhōng gúo de wēi xié? Néng bù néng jyǔ ge shǒu?14 andrew: (to

Only a few put up their hands, like LEAH and ROLSHA. You see, not all of them. But this complacency is what frightens me. We are the only democracy in the region. But we live in the shadow of a superpower. kathleen:  Canada shares some similarity with that feeling. wan-jung:  And our democracy, our independence is young. And the danger is we have lost our own voice. wan-jung: 

ROLSHA speaks to Wan-Jung in Mandarin. bù xiāngxìn zhèngfǔ hàn tāmen biǎomiàn shàng shuō dehuà, suóyǐ wǒ néng líjiě tóupiào gěi chuānpǔ de rén, yīnwèi tāmen yě duì zhèngfǔ shīqùle xìnrèn.15 (Then, to Kathleen and Andrew) Our government is…not good.

rolsha: Wǒ

14 Wan-Jung says: “Is anyone of you concerned about the threat of China? Can you raise your hand?” 15 Rolsha says: “I don’t trust/believe government and they ostensibly said words, so I can/able understand vote give (for/to) Trump (of) people because they also towards government lost trust.”



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Other students react. He says: “I don’t have trust to the government propaganda. So I have sympathy towards those voters in America who vote for Trump who has lost the trust, too, of the government.” (to Kathleen) But that’s why I worry, is that youngsters like Rolsha will feel sympathy. Our government has problems, serious problem. Lost the trust of the young people. Youngsters have lost trust in big change. But I want them to keep that spirit, that fire in them. “Keep trying hard. Keep banging on the walls. Trust yourself. Trust each other.” This is why drama is so important to their lives. This spirit is embedded in the work they create. I encourage it. They write plays about homosexuality, about class difference, right? (youth respond in the affirmative) About struggle with filial piety. andrew:  Can I ask how your families feel about drama as a – wan-jung: 

Students laugh and groan. That bad, eh? bìng méiyǒu xiǎngyào biànchéng míngxīng, wǒmen méiyǒu xiǎng “wǒ yào biànde hěn hóng!”16 wan-jung:  He says none of us want to be superstars or want to be music stars, to have a CD published, or say “we want to be hot!” andrew:  And that’s not what you want? students: No. kathleen:  What is your greatest worry about the future? What’s your biggest worry? leah:  Shèhuì shǐ wǒmen gǎndào méiyǒu xīwàng, suóyǐ wǒmen bìxūyào tiáozhěng zìjǐ. Wǒmen bì xū yào qù jiàngdī zìjǐ de biāozhǔn bìng suōxiǎo zìjǐ de yuànwàng.17 wan-jung:  She said society makes us hopeless so we better make adjustments by ourselves. We can live a happy and convenient life in Taiwan. Many foreigners come here and feel comparatively safe with other countries in the world, but if we want to have our dreams, we better go abroad to realize our dreams. So if we want to stay here, we have to lower our standards, lower our desires so that we can have a good life. That’s why the small fortune, which is a popular saying now in Taiwan. Everybody wants a little bit of luck. (another andrew: 

webber: Wǒmen

16 Webber says: “We don’t have want to become superstar. We didn’t think and want ‘I want to become very rad (famous)!’” 17 Leah says: “Society make/let us/we felt without hope, so we must to/need to adjust self. We must to/go cut down self’s standards and zoom out self’s wishes.”

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fighter jet sound overhead) We can make sure we can have a little bit of breakfast. We can have a good boyfriend. That’s good enough. If her dream is like this, she has to narrow her wish more small so she can survive. She can not make the victory come true in any way in this society. (to Kathleen and Andrew) That makes me so sad. andrew: (to Iris) And would you share? In the middle. Crying is good. IRIS has been crying. wan-jung: 

Crying is good.

IRIS speaks slowly through tears, nearly sobbing. ANDREW and ­KATHLEEN look to one another. Iris speaks in Mandarin; she is not ­translated by Wan-Jung. Wó xiǎng yào xiězuò, wǒ xiǎng yào biáoyǎn, wó xiǎng yào shuō wǒde gùshì. Kěshì zài nǎlǐ wǒ cáinéng zhème zuò ne? Yòng wǒzìjǐ xiǎng zuò de shì ràng wǒzìjǐ fāguāngfārè.18

iris: 

WAN-JUNG speaks very quietly to Iris in Mandarin. Then: Andrew and Kathleen) Sorry. I have to talk to her first. Please. Please.

wan-jung: (to andrew: 

WAN-JUNG speaks to the crying student, Iris, soothingly. Eventually, all the youth in the focus group are crying. bùxiǎng shuìfú nǐ zǒuchū nǐ de bēishāng, nà shì bù kěnéng de, bēishāng shì shēngmìng de yíbùfèn. Dàn wǒ juéde, nǐ yǒu hěn bàng de xiě zuò tiān fèn. Nǐ zhèngzài jīnglì de zhèng ràng nǐ biànchéng yíge gèng hǎo de rén, nǐ bù yídìng yào chéngwéi yíge dà zuòjiā, nǐ zhǐyào qù xiě ní xiǎng de hàn ní suógǎnshòudào de, nà shì nǐ de tiānfù. Hái nǐ shì yígè háo yǎnyuán19 (breaking into

wan - jung : Wǒ

18 Iris says: “I want/would like writing, I want/would like perform, I want/would like say/tell my story. But in where I then actually can so...like this do? Use myself want do thing let/make myself be shine and be hot like fire and light (shining).” 19 Wan-Jung says: “And I don’t want to persuade you to walk out of the sadness, which is impossible, it’s just part of life, but I think you are such a wonderful writer. You have such wonderful writing potential. What you have been through has made you a wonderful person, and you have great potential to be a wonderful writer. You



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English now, but still speaking to her students) Do something that makes you happy. Ok. Yeah. And if you’re not happy, just talk it out and cry. Pour your heart and you won’t cry. I cried a lot when I was young. That’s good. That’s because we are artists and we have to cherish that part of ourselves. And we are human. Don’t compromise. (1) the audience) Wan-Jung says we’re artists and everyone is saying it’s okay to cry. Our grief has a place...But, all the quantitative research that we’ve done across all sites, when we, when we are looking for hope, where is hope for young people? When we cross-tabulate hope by race, ethnicity, by uh gender, by sexuality – the, by far, the most statistically strong co-relation is with age. Age and a diminishment of hope. andrew:  So the older you get… kathleen:  The less hope you feel. This translates across all the sites. So this experience of Tainan, all of that breaking down, and we say to ourselves: “Are we missing something in the translation?” And we very likely are. (light laugh) But in addition to that, now the hard numbers we have – the numbers are telling us very clearly that there is a strong positive correlation between age and the loss of hope. rolsha: (to Andrew and Kathleen) But I have a question about the young people from Canada. How does Canadian youth grow up? Do they grow more open and less hopeless? kathleen: (to

Scene 12: Regal Heights The actors speak to the audience as themselves as the Tainan site fades away. 1:  The UN’s most recent WORLD YOUTH REPORT states that the global youth population stands at 1.2 billion. actor 5:  The INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANIZATION has determined that nearly sixty-seven million of these young people actor

don’t have to be a big writer, you just have to write what you think and what you feel. It is your gift. And you acts so well. You’re an actress.”

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between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four report that they are actively searching for work but are unable to find a job. actor 2:  As high as 39.4 per cent in Spain, 36.9 per cent in Italy, and 42.8 per cent in Greece. actor 8:  According to the ILO’s report, an estimated 600 million jobs would need to be created over the next decade to absorb the current number of unemployed young people. actor 3:  UNICEF Report Card 14 – the most recent data that looks at the young people’s own sense of emotional well-being next to other nations – ranks Canada at twenty-ninth place among the forty-one rich countries listed. A new classroom begins to materialize in the background. PROJECTION: REGAL HEIGHTS, TORONTO. MR. L speaks to his students. So what goes through your mind? They didn’t tell him he was under arrest or anything. kathleen: (to the audience) Regal Heights has been my most recent Toronto research site. It’s in Toronto’s east end. Not far from here. mr. l: 

zaida: 

MALIKY stands and speaks to Kathleen. I know about all this stuff cuz I go on my newsfeeds, I watch CNN, I watch CBC news, and I just – hearing all this bad stuff that’s happening to us. (1) Umm, and the more you hear, like, if someone were to give me a topic, I would have lots to say and I would advocate for a lot of different things. Like, right now for me one of the biggest problems, and I’m not undermining any other problem, is it’s about race. Because it affects me. kathleen: (to the audience) Their teacher, Mr. L, identifies as a cis male, gay, Black Canadian of Guyanese descent. mr. l: (speaking to Kathleen) I think a lot of that I think is systemic. I think most Black students in the school have just, have followed this pattern of, if they felt misunderstood, consistently, they go, “I’m not going to talk. If there’s no way I’m going to be understood, then there’s no point in me talking.” It’s a hostile environment, and they just feel very marginalized. Some of them will make an attempt. If they get shut down, that’s it. It’s just a microcosm of what’s going on, I think in schools in general. kathleen: (to the audience) At this site, there’s a drama project about police brutality. And I remember observing, very subtly, the white girls in the room, working together, adjusting the pedagogy to the maliky: 



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blackboard. So what started as this circle, the drama circle, became this “let’s face the same direction and get our ideas down on this blackboard.” And that may not seem in and of itself like a terrible thing, except that when that shift happened, all the Black boys – who’d been contributing passionately up until that point – all the Black boys in the class fell silent. (to Maliky) Do you remember that moment? Can you remember what happened? maliky :  Um, for me it’s just a little weird in that class when someone of a different race is asking me, “oh what’s wrong.” Like, I like venting about the problems with people of my own race. People that understand. And as much as you can try, you can try to understand, as much as facts you know, you’ll never, like, really grasp it. And it’s weird, like, sometimes you don’t wanna, you don’t wanna be the person, you don’t wanna be the activist some times. So, like, a lot of the times when people ask me what’s the issue here, I don’t wanna, like, if I start talking to them I’m just gonna talk forever. And I don’t, I don’t wanna feel obligated to do that. kathleen : (back to the audience) My student Dirk and I did an analysis of why the white girls took over the way they did, and it isn’t only because they may be subtly racist and were suddenly uncomfortable with the quite sudden passionate contributions of the otherwise silent Black boys. It was because students are rewarded, in our system, for what looks like leadership. And leadership is not the circle; leadership is that blackboard. There’s this constant pressure to adjust our bodies back to that blackboard. And of course the system will reward those who do it. MALIKY has taken a position next to Kathleen. As she speaks, he begins to move stylistically. His “‘dance” evokes images of a student putting his hand up, being silenced, undergoing the torment of feelings and ideas unexpressed. The movement is equal parts succumbing to and resisting. We have a system that is telling young people to adjust. Adjust to the way it is. Adjust to the way it will be for you in the world. Adjust or shut up. And it is a system that so easily, and so insidiously mutes their anger and their passion and – and limits the roles that they can take up in the classroom. And these hidden curricula persist...these unacknowledged lessons that minimize, or round the edges of young people, so that they’ll

kathleen : 

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slide into that system more easily. (1) To keep that very system going. MALIKY takes a position in front of Kathleen. He assumes the same pose as Maxx did in the Middleview “Power Exercise,” when he “blocks the picture.” In this moment, Maliky, Maxx, and Actor 2 are simultaneously evoked. After a beat, the actor recedes as URVASHI steps forward and speaks to Kathleen. You know, in terms of education, I really was very dissatisfied with my own. I topped my school by the way and that school has the best results in the country. I still thought it was pretty… incomplete. (You know, I would use stronger language but I think you get the idea.) Because it really left all my – it didn’t even look at me as a person. It didn’t even look at my life. It never even considered existential questions that teenagers have, that kids have. Left all those questions unanswered. I was left struggling and I remember always thinking that, god, I need to learn how to live. School wasn’t doing anything to help me do that. And of course, as a girl, it never empowered me to aspire to anything better than my parents had lined up for me. Or what the social system had lined up for me. I said, “Nah, there has to be a better way. Stop lining me up. How do we change this?” I was told: “You know, you should start a school.” “I, you must be kidding. I didn’t even have a degree in education. I have no training.” But I was told, at a key moment in my life, “Yeah, but you have all the right questions.” I said, “You can do things with questions?”

urvashi: 

Scene 13: Prerna PROJECTION:  LUCKNOW, INDIA. On the back wall is projected an image of the uniformed girls of Prerna, standing in a large semicircle. The girls have just come back from a class trip to Jaipur. For many, their first time out of Lucknow. (to her students) How many people (on with it)? How many on with it? Put your hand up high. One, two, three, four, who came close? Who came almost close? (back to Andrew and Kathleen) I am asking them about who got sick on the trip. andrew:  There is no shame about car sickness. No shame. urvashi: 



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Train sickness. Train sickness. andrew:  No shame with train sickness. urvashi:  And what about, does anybody remember what happened with Tanvi? uma:  She lost her purse. andrew:  You lost your purse? (Students respond together, at once.) Oh. urvashi:  And the museum? andrew:  And what did you see there? uma:  We saw swords. Old swords. andrew:  Swords. Like weapons. urvashi:  And then who did you see? vaishali:  Young king! andrew:  You saw young king? all students: Yes. andrew:  In the museum? all students: No. urvashi: 

kathleen: 

The girls laugh. kathleen: 

Like a real king?

urvashi: Yes,

How old is the king? Sixteen or seventeen? He’s a young king.

andrew:  jyoti: 

JYOTI almost blushes. She and her peers run off. URVASHI, in this moment, assumes the role of narrator for the play. There should be an appreciable power shift here in which she becomes the lead voice and lead storyteller. urvashi: (speaking

to Kathleen and Andrew, but also directly to the audience) So Prerna is a school for girls, from preschool all the way to class twelve. And we have 800 girls. Nineteen per cent of them don’t have electricity in their homes. Eighteen per cent do not have lavatories at home. Forty-eight per cent live in huts or temporary homes. Thirty-nine per cent of their fathers, unschooled in any way. Seventy per cent of their mothers, unschooled in any way. We recruited them house-to-house. They come from very challenging backgrounds where they are vulnerable to domestic violence, sexual violence, to very early forced marriages and discrimination of every kind which you can think of.

A man has shown up, MUNI (tech guy at Prerna).

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This is Muni, our “court photographer.” (Muni shows Urvashi an iPad and she reviews photos for the website.) He takes lovely pictures. Except for today, apparently.

urvashi: 

MUNI acknowledges her dry sense of humour. She sends him off to take a few new pictures. She picks up again with Kathleen and Andrew, without missing a beat. They start working at the youngest seven and eight. They go with their mothers – they work as domestic help in homes – to supplement the family income, so at Prerna we hold classes in the afternoon or they wouldn’t come. We need tea, yes? Andrew, jetlag is only a state of mind. kathleen:  And you use drama in the teaching of every subject here. urvashi:  We do. We say: to imagine greater possibilities. urvashi: 

Another man has entered the space, PRINCIPAL GUPTA. urvashi:  Ah,

Principal Gupta, from the rural school, meet Kathleen and Andrew, our visitors from Canada.

MUNI has returned to take a photo of the group. urvashi:  And

Muni, always at the right place and the right time. Kathleen, put your chin up. You’ll thank me later. (She resumes the whirlwind tour.) So the funny thing is people say to me: “They don’t study at Prerna. They just have fun.” (laughs) So I have to explain – at an interview – I got almost accused, oh you know in a dismissive manner, that yeah “The one good thing about Prerna is that everyone is very happy.” And I said (suddenly direct and firm): “And I want to stop you right there. (1) That happiness is a very complex emotion. You know stop dismissing happiness as (laughs, gestures)/ kathleen: Suspicious…radical…unacademic/ urvashi:  Exactly. But here’s the thing: our Prerna girls do as well if not better on the national test scores. kathleen:  Unbelievable. How do you pay for all of this? urvashi:  My god. Don’t ask. See. Where do we get it? This is a bit of a Robin Hood thing. They have made it into Urvashi’s office. A STAFF MEMBER comes in with more tea and snacks. URVASHI has a quick exchange with them in Hindi, then, back to Kathleen and Andrew:



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I found a rich person. He is bridging the gap. The rest we are footing the bill. I want another rich person. I’m looking. Very hard.

urvashi: 

ANOTHER STAFF MEMBER enters with paperwork. Drops it off on ­Urvashi’s desk. We’ve got the Prerna Girls as you know, but we started very recently Prerna Boys. kathleen: Prerna Boys. urvashi:  These boys have never been to school. So all they’ve known is our critical feminist pedagogy. Imagine. They don’t know any different. kathleen:  Why did you start that? urvashi:  One of our girls nearly got raped. This was only a few weeks ago. Twelve years old. Because she was going to the toilet. There isn’t a toilet, there’s nothing in her home, in the slum. So she has to use a public toilet. She nearly got raped. And she ran and she managed to save herself. I don’t know what I would have done if she was hurt. But it spurred us. We have to work with these boys, “Hey! Why do we need to behave like monsters?” But it’s not a blame thing. You know what, shall we move there? By the way – we’ll have a session with the boys, you’ll see a critical dialogue with them tomorrow. Come, come. You know, today is an important cricket match. West Indies versus England. One of my donors will host us at their home, to watch on TV. We’ll eat snacks and watch England go down in flames, yes? urvashi: 

Scene 14: The Cricket Match Suddenly, the cricket match plays in the background on TV. URVASHI and ­KATHLEEN sit on a couch, ANDREW sits on the ground, other guests surround them. GUEST 1 and GUEST 2 (both instructors at Prerna) speak to Kathleen. 1:  Women are the couriers of culture. 2:  We show them that everything is linked to patriarchy in their lives.

guest guest

The following unfolds with a fair bit of overlapping voices. Bold text is considered a priority and is given most focus. The cricket game TV announcers (who have English accents) become part of the stage picture.

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game.

Andrew Kushnir

1:  What a dramatic

2:  For me, in this format now, you’ve got to run in with pre-set plan but once – urvashi:  Ok. Come on. Come on. you you have to keep your Down with the English! eye on the batsman until the very last moment and be (2) prepared to adjust subtly, maybe a line or pace. urvashi:  Adjust. Big term in India. Adjust. Like when you are on public transport, any public transport: train, bus…where you have multiple people…if it’s a seat for two people and a third one wants to sit he’ll be like “Adjust.” It’s not “Excuse me.” England, Adjust! Ha!

announcer

Some bowlers don’t think it’s possible, I believe a lot of ­bowlers think about it and do it. announcer

1:  They do.

2:  Bratwaithe has sprayed the breath of life back into the West Indies chase. And history is one run away.

guest

1:  It’s adjust.

urvashi: 

Ok boys!

guest

2:  It’s almost over.

guest

1:  But let’s see./ You can’t say.

announcer

urvashi: 

up./ guest

1: England. Shell-shocked.

Ok! Come on! (2) Time’s

2:  Times up.

announcer

1:  The sun must set on the British Empire!

guest

Cheers.

(chanting):  We want a six! We want a six! We want a six!/ Ok. Here we go.

urvashi

Bowl and hit. It goes into the sky.

(3) Yeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssss!!!!!!! Whooooooooo! People cheering.



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2: CARLOS BRATWAITHE! CARLOS BRATWAITHE! REMEMBER THE NAME!! HISTORY FOR THE WEST INDIES!

announcer

1: Magnificent, dramatic game of cricket! There’ll be dancing tonight!

announcer

announcer

2:  Brilliant game.

announcer

1:  Fabulous game.

announcer

2: A dramatic game.

andrew:  guest

Seems impossible.

1:  Nothing is impossible.

Nothing is impossible. all: 

Nothing is impossible! Nothing is impossible! Nothing is impossible!

Then, suddenly:

Scene 15: Critical Dialogue URVASHI sits in a chair. The Prerna Boys (UNMESH, DEVAL, VINOD, and ALPESH, among a larger group that is “out of frame”) surround her, sitting on the ground. What was that man trying to do? He was trying to rape her. urvashi:  He was trying to rape her, ok. andrew : (to the audience) Urvashi conducts a critical dialogue with the students – both the Prerna Girls and Prerna Boys, separately. Critical dialogues are one of Urvashi’s most important tools. It starts with discussion and then improvised scenes to help young people express themselves. She says: “Drama helps them express that which they cannot speak.” And these critical dialogues help them to see their lives in a different way. urvashi: (to the students) Alright. Now. Once I was travelling to another town and the train was very delayed and I didn’t want to go alone, so I wanted to return the ticket because I didn’t want to travel that late at night. (1) I had to cross the tracks, the trainmaster was on that side, he will be able to do this, change my ticket. I was very scared going from the bridge. I suddenly heard someone chasing me. So then I started shouting and ran away with, like, picking up, urvashi:  unmesh: 

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up my sari, and I ran and reached the stationmaster. (1) I asked the stationmaster about lighting around there. I said: “Why are there no lights?!” So the stationmaster looked at me, and responded, “Why would a woman come here in the night?” (2) I’m so old and this can even happen with me, an older woman in this story. This can happened with all women. Um, do you think the reply of stationmaster, that the reply that he gave me should be the reply? Boys say nothing. (4) should be the reply? Ladkee koe baahurr muthh bhey-joe.20 vinod:  Vaisay hee jaisay stay-shun masturr nay oosusay kahaaa thaa, “thoom yahaaa raath may naheee aaanaa chaiheeyay.”21 22 alpesh:  Aarey ooskee shaaadhee julldhee karvaaa dho. urvashi:  Is this the right response, making her stay in the home? (3) What about turning on the lights? So that she can be safe? (1) Let us play the scene. Who will be stationmaster? urvashi: What deval: 

All the boys’ hands shoot up, with enthusiasm. Then, quickly:

Scene 16: Adjust The Prerna Girls (UMA, JYOTI, and others) take centre stage. uma: 

My name Bapi Hawe.

All the girls laugh. kathleen:  uma: Yeah!

Bapi Hawe?

Who are we interviewing? Her neighbour, Bapi Hawe. She’s going to talk like him.

kathleen:  urvashi: 

20 Deval says: “Don’t send the girl out.” 21 Vinod says: “Like the stationmaster who said ‘don’t come here at night.’” 22 Alpesh says: “Get her married early.”



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kathleen: 

339

Yes, Yes.

UMA responds in Hindi. She speaks with lots of flair and it ignites the room. Thoe kyaa huwaa aghar ladkeeyaa pudthee hai ya aaagay adhyunn ka-ray. Vay aagay pudd ra-hay hai lay-kin kooch naheee hoe-gaa. Vay sochatay hai kee paksheee kee turr-her pankhay oogaayay hai....kee vay subbb jaanthay hai. Unhey ek booray raavai-yay kee samasya milthi hai. Bad att-teee-tuuude! Vay short skart pehenthay hai aurrr lad-koe kay saathh goomtheee hai. Aur yay sabhh aisee sharam kee baath hai. Lay-kin oon-hay sharam nahee aathee. Is-lee-yay...kyaa thoom sumjhaathay hoe kee ladkeeyo kee jaldhee shaadhee karnaa kithnee eempour-tunt hai? Yaa hee aahvashyakh hai?23

uma: 

We hear the girls laughing at the bold characterization. There is applause. Very, very interesting. Translation? OK. She says, she says, so what if girls do study, study higher, they’re studying higher, nothing will happen, once they study, and they get, you know, sprout wings, kind of thing. And then they walk with a lot of attitude, with short skirts, and what else? uma:  Roam around. urvashi:  They roam around with boys, and that is such a shame – “Do you understand now how important it is to get married early?!!” kathleen:  Thank you for that perspective. (Girls laugh, applaud.) Thank you so much for your honesty. uma:  Welcome. Namaste! andrew: Namaste. jyoti:  PM, PM. I’m PM! andrew:  You’re the Prime Minister?! (stunned) I have scooped an interview with the Prime Minister, this is incredible. So please, share your opinion on this issue. andrew:  urvashi: 

23 Uma says: “What would happen if girls study or pursue further education. They are studying further but nothing will happen. They think that, like birds, they can use wings to fly – that they know it all. They have a bad habit – this creates an ­issue – a bad attitude. They wear short skirts and roam around with boys. And these are all shameful things. But shame doesn’t come to them. This is why – and you understand now – why girls must get married quickly is so important to have happen – this is what is necessary.”

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JYOTI stands on a chair. She responds in Hindi. Ladki ki shaadhi athhrah saal me, aur ladka ki umar ho ikkees, ko unkee shaadhi karvani chahiyay. Aur ladki aaj kal ladko si aagay jaa rahee hai. Ladkiya sooyi say lay kar aeroplane thak chalaa rahi hai…aur ladki kya kuch kar ke nath nahin dhikaa sakhthi hoo… sabh kuch kar sakhthi hai.24 urvashi:  The Prime Minister says that girls should get married at an age of eighteen, and the boys should get married at an age of twenty-one. Because girls now have developed, and they use, they know how to use from something as small as a needle to as big as an aeroplane, and they’re about to achieve more, and they’re smarter than boys. jyoti: 

Laughter. Thank you so much, Prime Minister, I really appreciate that comment. Does somebody have a response to the Prime Minister on this side? Yes? One more…

andrew: 

What appears to be a Prerna girl stands up. She receives applause. bella: 

I have a question. (1) How are you going to hear me?

In an instant, worlds and times collide and combine. ANDREW, having taken in Bella’s question, turns to the audience. In Hindi the word “Ohr” means “And.” So in interviews that we conducted, that Urvashi translated, she’d say, “Ohr, ohr, ohr” – it sounded to me like she was asking for alternatives, different possibilities, better answers. But what she was saying is “And, and, and.” She didn’t want different answers, she wanted bigger answers. Things stacked on top of one another. Things that don’t make sense together. The truth is not this or this. Your future is not this or this. It’s this and this and this and this. “Ohr, ohr, ohr.”

andrew: 

All characters hereafter speak to the audience. 24 Jyoti says: “Girls’ marriage at eighteen years, and boys age should be twenty-one when they should get married. And girls nowadays are going ahead of boys. From the needle, girls are now driving aeroplanes…and the girl can’t do anything to make her look bad…they can do everything.”



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341

In a sense, what we’re doing with drama is really subversive. This work we do is a way of saying that this is how young people feel when you forbid them things. This is how they feel. Following the lead of a teacher in a Canadian school that Kathleen told me about, I asked our girls to think of the “doors” in their lives. What did the word mean to them? What did it say to them? They wrote poems and performed them.

urvashi: 

ACTOR 2 brings a small door to the middle of the stage. KUSHBOO, a Prerna girl, recites a poem she wrote. How shall I imagine The universe of my dreams Behind this shut door? Do I not have the right to dream? Do I not have the right to know and be my “self”? urvashi:  In this place they get a chance to be joyful and sad and angry then. And to express their anger, and that is a way for them to understand that they have the right to be indignant. And you need to acknowledge that. So just as you can internalize the oppressor, we use all of this to help them internalize the freer. So that you can start thinking of yourself as free, and making spaces for yourself, right? Adjust. uma: Adjust. rachel: (from the Coventry site) We see it in systems everywhere, don’t we? Who can perform the best?! I know that world. It’s not my world. For them to be admired for who they are as human beings is for me, that’s just the gift, isn’t it? If you can make that happen. urvashi:  I mean…parents think that “ahh school can do what it likes but finally the girls are ours and we’ll just do whatever we have to do.” What they don’t, they underestimate, is the power of the subversive pedagogy. Because it changes you. It changes, once it changes the way you look at yourself, the work is really done. Because then you start acting your life differently, and when you do that people, you force people to look at you differently, right. arzu: Adjust. urvashi:  From middle-class families and teachers I’ve had these criticisms that “aren’t you making them unfit, misfit in their own context?” Yes, we are, in fact, that’s our goal: to help them be misfits so they are motivated to change their context and fit in. What is the alternative? Do nothing? vaishali: Adjust. kushboo: 

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the Athens site) So asking this question for a twelveyear-old, a thirteen-year-old, so what actually do you care for? No, no, no. Not what the others want you to care for, but tell me your real thing. And for us to find a way to take that out. To receive it. Everyday. urvashi:  If you can see anyone minimally then you treat them minimally. jyoti/uma: Adjust. urvashi:  So the goal has been – no you will – let’s conceive them maximally and then find great opportunities and possibilities for them. wan-jung: (from the Tainan site) I have to let go. And, strangely, it just makes me a better teacher when I let go more. And/ support them. Trust them. nikos:  Listening very carefully to what the children are saying and trying to remember myself/ at their age. wan-jung:  Keep trying hard. Keep banging on the walls. You can do it. It will be all right. Trust yourself. Trust each other. nikos:  And I balance myself and think, “How much have I changed?” I think I’ve changed a lot since I was young. Is it ok that I have changed, or not? (laugh) urvashi:  A rich life is one that is very expansive, where they look at the world as theirs. jyoti, uma, rachel, and andrew: Adjust. urvashi:  And then you take action in the world, when you think it’s yours. And to own the world, and to understand that it’s a shared space, and that when you own it, then you feel responsible for it. actor 2:  I will not forget the space behind the closed door. actor 7:  That kindled in me the desire to break out! kathleen: Adjust. all: Adjust. kathleen:  I have been with young people, in their drama classrooms, the day after Obama was elected, both times, the day after Brexit, the day after Trump was elected. nikos: (from

Now that the following is established as Kathleen’s words, the ensemble of actors takes over sharing Kathleen’s text as a chorus, as they did with Kathleen’s letter in the opening of the play. Lines are initially delivered with a solo voice, but eventually the stacking of voices does occur. 6:  The not-guilty verdict of Raymond Cormier in the death of Tina Fontaine.

actor



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1 and 8:  The shooting and death of Sammy Yatim by Toronto police. actor 5:  I have found myself with them in their everyday and in their not everyday. actor 2:  And I keep learning and relearning to not make assumptions about which is which for them. actors 4 and 7:  What kind of day they’re having, simply based on what’s happening in the so-called “relevant world.” actor 8:  But there are those moments when everyone is paying attention to the same thing. actor 5:  For instance, I was in the drama classroom with youth in Toronto after the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School/ actors 5 and 3:  And the ensuing protest and challenges to the NRA by a group of yes, actors 3/5/4/7:  Extraordinary drama nerds. all: Adjust. actor 9:  And in the aftermath of that shooting, I catch myself talking to those young people on my walk to work along Bloor Street. actors 5/1/6:  Out loud. actor 6:  I didn’t know they were the school’s “drama kids” at the time. actor 2:  I’d heard something about some of them being in the school play. actor 6:  But I hadn’t realized that so many of them were drama kids. actors 3/8/7:  It was hardly a surprise to me when I found out. all:  Of course they’re drama kids! actors 2 and 5:  And yes, I talk out loud to them. Walking to work. actor 1:  What do you say to them? actor 9:  You go. You show us another way. actors 1 and 5:  Don’t listen to the critics who pit you against one another. actor 6:  When you make things right for all of us/ actors 1/2/5:  When you wake people up to the dangers of this world/ all:  This world we’ve given you/ actor 2:  All communities will benefit. actors 8 and 5:  You keep on. actors 7 and 3:  You keep on figuring out who you are and what you stand for. Be all of who you are. all:  Define yourselves, as you are. actors 1/4/6/8/9:  I salute you. actors

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Andrew Kushnir

2/3/5/7:  I love you. Get it done! angelo:  How are you going to hear me? kathleen/andrew:  Get it done! luke:  How are you going to hear me? kathleen:  And if we listen to what young people have to tell us/ actors 5 and 7:  If we outstretch a hand/ actors 2/3/6:  If we become companions in learning/ actors 4 and 9:  The stuff that can happen in the drama classroom/ actors 2/3/5/7:  But in other classrooms too/ actor 1:  Maybe we can build something different/ all: Together. actors 2/3/6/8/9:  I mean/ all: Adjust. Adjust. Adjust. Adjust. Adjust! Adjust! Adjust! bella:  How are you going to hear me? actors all: 

– END OF PLAY –

Appendix

Survey for Radical Hope I.  Your Feelings about Hope

What does “hope” mean to you? How often would you say you could agree with the following statements? (Check the one response that you think best fits you.) A.

“Having hope is personally important to me.” 1 I feel this way a lot of the time 2 I feel this way some of the time 3 I feel this way a little of the time 4 I never feel this way

B.

“When I have a problem, I believe I can find a good way of solving it.” 1 I feel this way a lot of the time 2 I feel this way some of the time 3 I feel this way a little of the time 4 I never feel this way

C.

“I have people in my life that I believe I can trust.” 1 I feel this way a lot of the time 2 I feel this way some of the time

346 Appendix

3 I feel this way a little of the time 4 I never feel this way D. “I believe I’m getting opportunities to be the kind of person I want to be.” 1 I feel this way a lot of the time 2 I feel this way some of the time 3 I feel this way a little of the time 4 I never feel this way E.

“I believe, overall, my life will be better in the future.” 1 I feel this way a lot of the time 2 I feel this way some of the time 3 I feel this way a little of the time 4 I never feel this way

II.  Receiving Care

What does “care” mean to you? How much care do you feel you receive from the following people? (Check the one response you think best fits you.) A.

Parent(s) 1 I receive a lot of care from them 2 I receive some care from them 3 I receive a little care from them 4 I do not receive any care from them 5 Not applicable

B.

Grandparent(s) 1 I receive a lot of care from them 2 I receive some care from them 3 I receive a little care from them 4 I do not receive any care from them 5 Not applicable



Survey for Radical Hope

C.

Friends I know from school 1 I receive a lot of care from them 2 I receive some care from them 3 I receive a little care from them 4 I do not receive any care from them 5 Not applicable

D. Teachers at school 1 I receive a lot of care from them 2 I receive some care from them 3 I receive a little care from them 4 I do not receive any care from them 5 Not applicable E.

Friends from groups/communities outside of school 1 I receive a lot of care from them 2 I receive some care from them 3 I receive a little care from them 4 I do not receive any care from them 5 Not applicable

F.

Online friends and/or pen pals 1 I receive a lot of care from them 2 I receive some care from them 3 I receive a little care from them 4 I do not receive any care from them 5 Not applicable

G. Romantic friends 1 I receive a lot of care from them 2 I receive some care from them 3 I receive a little care from them 4 I do not receive any care from them 5 Not applicable H. Other family members 1 I receive a lot of care from them 2 I receive some care from them

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348 Appendix

3 I receive a little care from them 4 I do not receive any care from them 5 Not applicable I.

Adults who are outside of your family and school 1 I receive a lot of care from them 2 I receive some care from them 3 I receive a little care from them 4 I do not receive any care from them 5 Not applicable

III.  People Who Influence Hope How much do think the following people change how hopeful you are feeling about your life? (Check the one response you think best fits you.) A.

Parent(s) 1 They make a big difference in how hopeful I feel 2 They make some difference in how hopeful I feel 3 They make a little difference in how hopeful I feel 4 They do not make a difference in how hopeful I feel 5 Not applicable

B.

Grandparent(s) 1 They make a big difference in how hopeful I feel 2 They make some difference in how hopeful I feel 3 They make a little difference in how hopeful I feel 4 They do not make a difference in how hopeful I feel 5 Not applicable

C.

Friends I know from school 1 They make a big difference in how hopeful I feel 2 They make some difference in how hopeful I feel 3 They make a little difference in how hopeful I feel 4 They do not make a difference in how hopeful I feel 5 Not applicable



Survey for Radical Hope

349

D. Teachers at school 1 They make a big difference in how hopeful I feel 2 They make some difference in how hopeful I feel 3 They make a little difference in how hopeful I feel 4 They do not make a difference in how hopeful I feel 5 Not applicable E.

Friends from groups/communities outside of school 1 They make a big difference in how hopeful I feel 2 They make some difference in how hopeful I feel 3 They make a little difference in how hopeful I feel 4 They do not make a difference in how hopeful I feel 5 Not applicable

F.

Online friends and/or pen pals 1 They make a big difference in how hopeful I feel 2 They make some difference in how hopeful I feel 3 They make a little difference in how hopeful I feel 4 They do not make a difference in how hopeful I feel 5 Not applicable

G. Romantic friends 1 They make a big difference in how hopeful I feel 2 They make some difference in how hopeful I feel 3 They make a little difference in how hopeful I feel 4 They do not make a difference in how hopeful I feel 5 Not applicable H. Other family members 1 They make a big difference in how hopeful I feel 2 They make some difference in how hopeful I feel 3 They make a little difference in how hopeful I feel 4 They do not make a difference in how hopeful I feel 5 Not applicable

350 Appendix

I.

Adults outside of your family and school 1 They make a big difference in how hopeful I feel 2 They make some difference in how hopeful I feel 3 They make a little difference in how hopeful I feel 4 They do not make a difference in how hopeful I feel 5 Not applicable

IV. Mentors Are any of the following people important to you? (Check either yes or no.) A. B. C.

Athletic coach Program/club director Religious leader

1. Yes 1. Yes 1. Yes

2. No 2. No 2. No

Are there any other adults, from outside your family or school, who are important to you? Please write them down. V.  People Who Help You In each of the following situations, pick the top 3 people, in order, who you would try to go to first. (Check one first pick, one second pick, and one third pick.) A.

“If I was feeling hopeless, I would like to talk to…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A close friend

2

2

2

A teacher

3

3

3

A therapist/school counsellor

4

4

4

Another family member (not parent)

5

5

5

An adult mentor (e.g., coach, priest, etc.) 6

6

6

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

7

7

7



Survey for Radical Hope

B.

C.

351

“If I needed to be motivated, I would like to talk to…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A close friend

2

2

2

A teacher

3

3

3

A therapist/school counsellor

4

4

4

Another family member (not parent)

5

5

5

An adult mentor (e.g., coach, priest, 6 etc.)

6

6

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

7

7

7

“If I was feeling proud about something, I would like to talk to…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A close friend

2

2

2

A teacher

3

3

3

A therapist/school counsellor

4

4

4

Another family member (not parent)

5

5

5

An adult mentor (e.g., coach, priest, etc.)

6

6

6

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

7

7

7

D. “If I was feeling alone, I would like to talk to…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A close friend

2

2

2

A teacher

3

3

3

A therapist/school counsellor

4

4

4

Another family member (not parent)

5

5

5

352 Appendix

E.

F.

An adult mentor (e.g., coach, priest, etc.)

6

6

6

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

7

7

7

“If I was feeling worried about something or someone, I would like to talk to…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A close friend

2

2

2

A teacher

3

3

3

A therapist/school counsellor

4

4

4

Another family member (not parent)

5

5

5

An adult mentor (e.g., coach, priest, etc.) 6

6

6

Someone in my online community pen pal

7

7

7

“If I needed career advice, I would like to talk to…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A close friend

2

2

2

A teacher

3

3

3

A therapist/school counsellor

4

4

4

Another family member (not parent)

5

5

5

An adult mentor (e.g., coach, priest, etc.)

6

6

6

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

7

7

7

G. “If I needed relationship advice, I would like to talk to…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A close friend

2

2

2



Survey for Radical Hope

353

A teacher

3

3

3

A therapist/school counsellor

4

4

4

Another family member (not parent)

5

5

5

An adult mentor (e.g., coach, priest, etc.) 6

6

6

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

7

7

7

H. “If I needed advice about an in-class school issue, I would like to talk to…”

I.

1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A close friend

2

2

2

A teacher

3

3

3

A therapist/school counsellor

4

4

4

Another family member (not parent)

5

5

5

An adult mentor (e.g., coach, priest, etc.) 6

6

6

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

7

7

7

“If I might need to confess a poor choice, I would like to talk to…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A close friend

2

2

2

A teacher

3

3

3

A therapist/school counsellor

4

4

4

Another family member (not parent)

5

5

5

An adult mentor (e.g., coach, priest, etc.) 6

6

6

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

7

7

7

VI.  People for Whom You Care Who are the top 3 people, in order, who receive the most care from you? (Check one first pick, one second pick, and one third pick.)

354 Appendix

A.

“I provide care for…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A close friend

2

2

2

A romantic friend

3

3

3

A teacher

4

4

4

A sibling/cousin

5

5

5

A grandparent

6

6

6

Another family member

7

7

7

Someone in my community

8

8

8

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

9

9

9

Not applicable

10

10

10

List people we’ve missed: VII.  How I Care What are the top 3 ways, in order, that you like to show care? (Check one first pick, one second pick, and one third pick.) A.

“I like to show I care by…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

Spending enjoyable time with someone

1

1

1

Encouraging someone with my words

2

2

2

Giving/making them little gifts (e.g., food, art)

3

3

3

Platonic physical contact (e.g., hug, “high-five”)

4

4

4

Offering practical help

5

5

5



Survey for Radical Hope

355

What are other ways you care that are not listed above? B.

“I usually show care by…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

Spending enjoyable time with someone

1

1

1

Encouraging someone with my words

2

2

2

Giving/making them little gifts (e.g., food, art)

3

3

3

Platonic physical contact (e.g., hug, “high-five”)

4

4

4

Offering practical help

5

5

5

What are other ways you care that are not listed above? VIII.  Who Receives What Type of Care from Me Who are the top 3 types of people, in order, most likely to receive from you the kind of care described? (Check one first pick, one second pick, and one third pick.) A.

“On a weekly basis, I probably spend my most enjoyable time with…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A school friend

2

2

2

A romantic friend

3

3

3

A neighbourhood friend

4

4

4

A friend from a non-school group

5

5

5

356 Appendix

B.

C.

A sibling and/or cousin

6

6

6

Another family member

7

7

7

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

8

8

8

I prefer to spend time on my own

9

9

9

Not applicable

10

10

10

“On a weekly basis, I probably spend the most time encouraging…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A school friend

2

2

2

A romantic friend

3

3

3

A neighbourhood friend

4

4

4

A friend from a non-school group

5

5

5

A sibling and/or cousin

6

6

6

Another family member

7

7

7

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

8

8

8

Myself

9

9

9

Not applicable

10

10

10

“On a weekly basis, I probably spend the most time giving or making little gifts like food, cards, art, jewelry for…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A school friend

2

2

2

A romantic friend

3

3

3

A neighbourhood friend

4

4

4

A friend from a non-school group

5

5

5

A sibling and/or cousin

6

6

6

Another family member

7

7

7



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357

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

8

8

8

Myself

9

9

9

Not applicable

10

10

10

D. “On a weekly basis, I probably spend the most time giving practical help to…”

E.

1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A school friend

2

2

2

A romantic friend

3

3

3

A neighbourhood friend

4

4

4

A friend from a non-school group

5

5

5

A sibling and/or cousin

6

6

6

Another family member

7

7

7

Someone in my online community/ pen pal

8

8

8

Not applicable

9

9

9

“On a weekly basis, I probably spend the most time, in a platonic way, hugging, sitting beside, holding hands, and/or play-fighting with…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

A parent

1

1

1

A school friend

2

2

2

A romantic friend

3

3

3

A neighbourhood friend

4

4

4

A friend from a non-school group

5

5

5

A sibling and/or cousin

6

6

6

Another family member

7

7

7

Pen pal/my online community (e.g., emoji)

8

8

8

Not applicable

9

9

9

358 Appendix

Are their unique ways you care for certain kinds of people who weren’t listed already? Take a moment to share some of your examples: IX.  Care in a Drama Context Imagine you were going to dramatize some part of your personal experience and you had someone helping you. What are the top 3 ways, in order, you feel they could be most helpful? (Check one first pick, one second pick, and one third pick.) A.

“They could best help me by…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

Challenging me

1

1

1

Being a good listener

2

2

2

Understanding how I am feeling

3

3

3

Giving me good, practical advice

4

4

4

Making me feel safe

5

5

5

By performing along with me

6

6

6

Leaving me alone

7

7

7

Not applicable

8

8

8

Now, imagine you were going to help someone who was dramatizing some part of their personal experience. What are the top 3 ways, in order, you would try to be most helpful? (Check one first pick, one second pick, and one third pick.) B.

“I would help them by…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

Challenging them

1

1

1

Being a good listener

2

2

2

Understanding how they are feeling

3

3

3

Giving them good, practical advice

4

4

4

Making them feel safe

5

5

5



Survey for Radical Hope

359

By performing along with them

6

6

6

Leaving them alone

7

7

7

Not applicable

8

8

8

In the most recent drama project in which you were involved, what were the top 3 ways, in order, that the project was the most personally helpful to you? (Check one first pick, one second pick, and one third pick.) C.

“The project helped me…” 1st pick

2nd 3rd pick pick

Better express myself

1

1

1

Better understand myself

2

2

2

Better understand other people

3

3

3

Get better at working collectively

4

4

4

Feel some relief from the stresses in my life

5

5

5

Improve my drama skills

6

6

6

Not applicable

7

7

7

Briefly describe the theme and focus of the drama project you had in mind: X.  Demographic Information A.

“I am….” 1. Female  2. Male  3. Other

B.

“My age is…” 1. Under 12   2. 12–14   3. 15–17   4. Over 17

C.

“I consider myself to be in the ethnic minority.” 1. Yes  2. No

D. “I believe my family has less money than most of my classmates.” 1. Yes  2. No

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to Andrew Kushnir’s play Towards Youth, pages 259–344. Page numbers with (f) refer to illustrations; page numbers with (t) refer to tables. REM is an abbreviation for “reports as ethnic minority.” Abhishek (student, Lucknow), 38 Abraham, Chris (co-director, Towards Youth), 218–19, 240, 250, 253, 257, 261 Abramo, Joseph, 17 accuracy of representation: “deeply respectful forgery,” 256, 267, 306–7n1; ethical relations, 228, 255–6; in ethnography, 86; objectivity vs. subjectivity, 225; in oral history performance, 163–5; representations/misrepresentations, 227–8; in verbatim theatre, 217–20, 225, 226–7, 250–1, 255–6 actors. See Towards Youth, actors Aditi (student, Lucknow), 39 adolescents. See youth Adrian (student, Athens), 34–5, 37, 98, 101–2, 262, 307 Adrian’s mom (Athens), 37, 102, 262, 316–17 adults outside home/school, quantitative survey: coaches, 189– 90, 197–8; deferential relations, 198, 204; feeling safe and challenged, 197; hopefulness, 188–9, 195; map

of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); religious leaders, 188–90, 198; REM/non-REM students, 188–90, 195; self-expression, 198; survey questions, 345–59. See also research project, quantitative survey aesthetic ethnography, 85–7. See also ethnography aesthetics of injury, 90 age, quantitative survey: and care, 183, 190, 194, 201–2; decline of hope, 183, 184, 204, 329; demographics, 184–5, 185(f), 359; key findings, 183–7; map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); online friends, 192; REM/non-REM students, 194; response rates between sites, 184–5, 185(f); teacher influences, 196. See also research project, quantitative survey agency, 4, 9, 112 age of research participants, 83(t). See also research project Ah-Cheng (student, Tainan), 41, 139, 262n2

378 Index Ahmed, Sara, 108, 122 Amaka. See Umeh, Amaka ambitious dreams: about, 10–11; Athens, 34–5, 102, 317, 320; Coventry, 27–8, 66–7, 293–4, 303(f); drama as about dreaming, 10, 256, 290–1; hope, 144; Lucknow, 339–44; reality vs. dreams, 32–3, 144; right to dream, 11, 341–2; Tainan, 31–3, 137–8, 240, 303(f), 327–9; Toronto, 144, 151; “try things I’ve never before dreamed of doing,” 127, 301, 303(f). See also hope Ameena (student, Lucknow), 38 Anatola (student, Athens), 37, 98, 263, 307, 310–11, 317, 319 Andrew. See Kushnir, Andrew (embedded artist-researcher) Angela. See Evans, Angela (social worker, Coventry) Angelika (student, Athens), 37 Angelo (student, Athens), 37, 92–3, 100, 262, 306–7, 310–11, 312–13, 319–21, 344 Anita (student, Lucknow), 38 Anjali (student, Lucknow), 39 Anna (student, Athens), 38 Anshu (translator, Lucknow), 38, 59–61, 246n11 anthropology, 83–4. See also ethnography anxiety, 79, 176–7. See also mental health/illness Anzaldúa, Gloria, 19–20 Aparna (student, Lucknow), 38 Arendt, Hannah, 81, 101, 103, 105 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Athens, 37, 89(f). See also Athens, research site Armstrong, Eric, 261 Arnold (student, Tainan), 41 artefacts. See stories and objects

arts, performing. See performing arts Aruna (student, Lucknow), 39 Arvind (director, Lucknow), 38, 246n11 Arzu (alumna, Lucknow), 38, 104, 109–12, 211, 248, 262, 341 Ash (research assistant, Lucknow), 38 Asmi (student, Lucknow), 38 Astrid (student, Toronto), 42, 151–4, 157 Athens (Greece): about, 34–5, 48–52; Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 37, 89(f); economic crisis, 34–5, 48, 88–9, 92–3, 102–3, 239, 309–10, 319, 321–2; LGBTQ+ status, 51; refugee crisis, 34, 49, 89–94, 95(f), 210–11, 311–13, 316–18; stereotypes, 211; theatre, 50, 89–91, 252; youths’ “adult worries,” 5, 101–3, 321, 330 Athens, education system: about, 34–5, 49–53; ambitious dreams, 34–5, 102, 317, 320; arts programs, 34, 49–53, 93–4, 103; controversies, 50–2; curriculum, 49, 318–19, 321; refugee stories and theatre, 89–94, 95(f); teachers, 50–2, 93–4, 103, 238, 318–19 Athens, General Middle High School, After School Drama Club: about, 37–8, 88–104, 89(f), 96(f), 97(f); care, 94, 103; creative resilience, 210–11; democratic citizenship, 100–1; dramabased learning, 50, 52–3, 95–7, 96(f), 97(f); drama clubs, 50, 52; economic crisis, 97–101; hope, 94; parental support, 103; philotimo (pleasure in giving care), 102–3, 239; refugee crisis, 92–4, 97–101; speakers’ corner, 100–1 Athens, quantitative survey: about, 181–5; demographics, 184–5, 185(f), 186(f); key findings, 183–7,



Index 379

202–4, 203(f); online friends, 192; REM/non-REM students, 186(f), 196, 199–201; students as caregivers, 198–201, 199(f), 200(f); teachers, 196. See also research project, quantitative survey Athens, research site: about, 37–8, 48–52, 83(t), 89(f); Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 37, 89(f); demographics, 37n1; digital recordings, 15, 83(t), 100–1; focus groups, 92–3; overview of methods, 83(t); research participants, 37–8, 47(f); socio-economic class, 184; speakers’ corner, 100–1; stories and artefacts, 83(t); time periods, 82, 83(t), 184–5; translations, 132. See also Govas, Nikos (researcher, Athens); Pigkou-Repousi, Myrto (researcher, Athens); research project Athens, Towards Youth: about, 238–9, 305–23; ambitious dreams, 102, 317, 320; composition notes, 238–9; economic hardships, 309–11, 319, 321; ethnographic research, 313–16; group life force, 306; hope, 238–9; multilingual voices, 306–7n1; philotimo (pleasure in giving care), 102–3, 239; scenes, 304(f), 305–23; sound and music, 305; suitcases (refugees), 311–13, 316–18; teachers, 318–19. See also Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) athletic coaches. See adults outside home/school, quantitative survey Attali, Jacques, 251, 252 Atticus (student, Toronto), 43 Atwood, Margaret, 7, 9 Atya (student, Lucknow), 38 audiences: ancient Greek theatre, 252; benefits for others and self, 165–70; co-creation of meaning,

228–9; emancipated spectator, 222; oral performances, 165–70; refugee stories, 91; research methods, 221–2; responses to Muckle’s story, 165–70; statistics on performing arts, 76–7; talkbacks, 212, 221–2; theatre program notes, 230–1; verbatim theatre, 217. See also theatre Australia: drama research, 21, 91, 95–6, 151; Greek community, 98; migrants, 91, 301 authenticity in representation. See accuracy of representation authenticity of self: survey findings, 188–9, 191–2, 194, 196; “true selves” and “be me,” 159–60, 188–9, 341–4. See also ambitious dreams; ethnic minority (REM/ non-REM), quantitative survey Avinash (student, Lucknow), 38 Avni (student, Lucknow), 38 Aya (teacher, Lucknow), 38 Badiou, Alain, 218 Baglia, Jay, 165 Baker, George Pierce, 222 Baker, Sylvan, 16–17 Bala (student, Lucknow), 38 Balfour, Michael, 25, 91–2, 139 Balt, Christine (research assistant, Toronto), 42 Banerjea, Niharika, 85 Barker, Howard, 114, 135 Barker, Roberta, 165 Barthes, Roland, 19, 226n1 Beach, Dennis, 31 Belgrade Theatre, 39, 63–5, 115(f), 297. See also Coventry, Canley Youth Theatre Group Bella (student, Middleview, Towards Youth), 232, 246, 255, 262, 269–70, 272–3, 274–82, 284–6, 302(f), 340, 344

380 Index Benhabib, Seyla, 101 Bhavna (student, Lucknow), 39 Bickford, Susan, 19–20 Bie, Sherry (research assistant, Toronto), 42, 166 Blackbird (play), 176–9, 178(f) Black people: about, 147–54; adjust to the world, 330–2, 342–4; Black Lives Matter, 73, 174–5, 205, 208; docudrama, 148–9; police violence, 73, 148–9, 244–6, 330–1; school clubs, 154–6; silencing of, 147–50, 243–6, 252, 330–2; speech patterns, 152–3; teachers, 154–6. See also ethnic minority (REM/ non-REM), quantitative survey; L, Mr. (drama teacher, Toronto); Toronto, Regal Heights Blank, Jessica, 217 Blatt, Hershel, 261 Boal, Augusto, 210 body: sensory knowledge, 10, 19, 209, 222; vicarious experience, 219. See also dance and movement; listening; speech Bond, Edward, 252 Bond Street Theatre, 56–7 Bonnie (student, Towards Youth), 262, 276–9, 282, 286, 302(f) Bo-Wei. See Chan, Bo-Wei (professor, Tainan) Boys Love (play), 132 Brantley, Ben, 230 Breanna (student, Toronto), 44, 45, 175 Brexit. See United Kingdom, Brexit Brian (youth, Coventry), 39 Brian’s mom (parent, Coventry), 39–40, 263, 296 Bristol, Travis, 154 Brittney Anderson (student, Toronto), 26, 44 Brown, Stephen, 86

Bruce (youth, Coventry), 40, 125–9, 126(f), 211–12, 263, 293–4, 297–8, 301, 303(f) Bruono (student, Athens), 34–5, 38 Bryant, Joanne, 151 Bundoc, Aldrin, 261, 302(f), 304(f) Burvill, Tom, 91 Butler, Judith, 25, 130, 167, 169 cabbie (Coventry, Towards Youth), 262, 300–1 Calista (student, Athens), 37 Cameron (student, Toronto), 45, 125, 159–60, 162–3 Canada: about, 71–8; activism, 75; demographics, 71–3; education systems, 74–6; immigrants, 71–2; Indigenous peoples, 71–4, 267; languages, 73; pandemic’s impacts, 76–7; politics, 72, 174–5, 277–8; racism, 151–2, 174–5; statistics on performing arts, 76–7; US influences, 170–5, 179. See also Toronto (Canada); Toronto, research site Canley (England), 39, 61–2. See also Coventry, Canley Youth Theatre Group Caraballo, Limarys, 150 Cardwell, Nancy (research assistant, Toronto), 42, 166, 175, 177–9, 235 care: about, 11, 94–5, 103; activation of care, 95–6; aesthetics of care, 23–5; confidence and insecurities, 94–5; contract of care, 249–50; ethics of, 15, 21–2; imagining a new social order, 109–10, 112; listening as, 16–20, 95–6, 118, 121; philotimo (pleasure in giving care), 102–3, 239; play the oppressor, 95–6; as political act, 18–24, 184; relationality, 16, 103; research as act of care, 20; research



Index 381

objectives, 80; research questions, 232; as responsibility, 109, 184, 213–14, 217; social value of theatre, 24–5, 28–31; teacher’s caring, 103, 156–8; trust and relationality, 23, 95, 103, 180, 191, 208–9, 212; “universe of care,” 109, 246–8. See also care, quantitative survey; caregivers/ receivers, students as, quantitative survey care, quantitative survey: about, 181–5, 201–4, 203(f); and age, 183, 185(f); care as given and received, 16; care as responsibility to others, 109, 184; contexts for, 201–2; key findings, 183–7, 202–4, 203(f); map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); qualitative questions, 16; REM/ non-REM students, 188–9, 199–201; romantic friends, 188; self-building, 194–5; survey questions, 345–59; “true selves,” 188–9, 191–2; trusting relationships, 188–9. See also research project, quantitative survey caregivers/receivers, students as, quantitative survey: about, 103, 198–201, 199(f), 200(f); and age, 183, 185(f), 199; care practices, 103, 354–9; close friends, 198–9, 199(f), 201; community persons, 198, 199(f); engagement at school, 198; finding care, 201–2; gender/ sex of student, 199, 201; givers vs. receivers of care, 103, 201–2; grandparents, 198, 199(f), 200(f); and hope, 183; key findings, 183–7, 198–201; listening, 201; map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); online friends, 198, 199(f); other family members, 198–200, 199(f), 200(f); parents, 103, 198–201, 199(f), 200(f); philotimo (pleasure

in giving care), 102–3, 239; REM/ non-REM students, 188–9, 198–202; by research site, 200(f); romantic friends, 198–202, 199(f), 200(f); survey questions, 345–59; teachers, 198, 199(f), 200–1. See also research project, quantitative survey Castillo, Juan Carlos, 173 Chan, Bo-Wei (professor, Tainan), 40, 70–1, 137–8 Chang, Rolsha (teaching assistant, Tainan), 40, 262, 323–7, 329 Chaudhuri, Maitrayee, 105 China, relations with Taiwan, 67–9, 133, 135–7, 323–6 Chintan (teacher, Lucknow), 38 Chloe Myron (student, Toronto), 46, 176–7 Choi, Deana (sound design), 251, 261 Chris. See Abraham, Chris (codirector, Towards Youth) Chrysa (student, Athens), 38 Chrysanthemum (student, Towards Youth), 263, 268–72, 274–82, 285–8, 302(f) citizenship. See democratic citizenship Clair, Robin Patric, 85–6 class. See socio-economic class, quantitative survey Clinton, Hillary, 171–2, 241 coaches, quantitative survey, 189–90, 197–8. See also adults outside home/school, quantitative survey Coakley, Carolyn, 19 Cohen-Cruz, Jan, 81 Cole, Desmond, 149n1 collaborative ethnography, 83–7. See also ethnography; research project communication. See listening; speech compassionate witnessing, 6, 9

382 Index confidence and insecurities: about, 3–5, 94–7; agentic self, 4, 9, 112; drama and confidence, 9, 94–7, 293; insecurities, 94–7; problemsolving confidence, 210–11; theatre as metaphor for the world, 205–8. See also problem-solving confidence, quantitative survey Connie (youth, Coventry), 40, 212 Connie’s mom (parent, Coventry), 40, 263, 296 Conquergood, Dwight, 82, 91–2 Conseil québécois du théâtre, 228–9 coronavirus. See COVID-19 pandemic Couldry, Nick, 128 Coventry (England): about, 61–7, 235–7, 291–2; Brexit campaign, 62–3, 116, 118–25, 235–7, 294–5; City of Culture bid, 63, 65–6, 128; economic hardships, 61–2, 65–6, 297; political activism, 126–9; youths’ “adult worries,” 5, 101, 123, 235–8; youth services, 63–6, 122–9. See also United Kingdom, Brexit Coventry, Canley Youth Theatre Group: about, 39–40, 61–7, 114–29, 115(f), 129(f), 291–2; ambitious dreams, 27–8, 66–7, 122, 127, 293– 4; creative process, 18; creative resilience, 211–12; democratic citizenship, 22–3, 126–9, 211–12; foster children, 123, 125–6, 126(f), 211–12, 294, 298; funding cuts, 65–7, 123–4, 126–9, 299, 301; hope as a practice, 116–17, 121–2; A Museum of Living Stories (oral history), 114–15, 117, 126, 126(f), 129(f), 212, 235n6; partnerships, 39, 63–5; political activism, 126–9, 211–12; rehearsal site, 62; story share circle, 117–22, 145, 235,

237–8; Truth and Story (parable), 114–15, 235n6 Coventry, quantitative survey: about, 181–5; demographics, 184–5, 185(f), 186(f), 190; family influences, 190–1; key findings, 183–7, 202–4, 203(f); REM/nonREM students, 186(f), 190–1, 196, 199–201; students as caregivers, 198–201, 199(f), 200(f); teachers, 196. See also research project, quantitative survey Coventry, research site: about, 39–40, 83(t), 115(f); demographics, 37n1; digital recordings, 15, 83(t); education system, 22–3, 27–8, 30, 66–7; overview of methods, 83(t); partnerships, 63–5; research participants, 39–40, 47(f), 64–5; stories and artefacts, 83(t); story share circle, 117–22, 145, 235, 237–8; time periods, 82, 83(t), 117, 184–5; University of Warwick, 62–5, 115(f), 235–7, 295–7. See also research project; Turner-King, Rachel (researcher, Coventry) Coventry, Towards Youth: about, 235–8; absence of youth plays, 240; ambitious dreams, 293–4; Brexit, 235–7, 294–5, 298, 300–1; composition notes, 235–8; group life force, 292, 294; scenes, 291–301, 303(f), 304(f). See also Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) COVID-19 pandemic: about, 6, 205–8; access to performing arts, 76–7, 228–9; moral vision of new world, 116; racism and origin of, 174; social inequalities, 8, 206–7; survival as purpose, 208; theatre as metaphor for the world, 205–8



Index 383

creative space. See drama/creative space Cross (play), 70, 132, 134–5, 139, 140(f) Crow’s Theatre, xvii, 231, 253, 261 Cuervo, Hernan, 21 Culhane, Dara, 10, 86–7 cultural citizenship, 24–5 Dadvand, Babak, 21 dance and movement: drama as about dreaming, 290–1; physicalization of punctuation, 229n2; pig man and Trump, 241–2; power exercise, 280–1; research methods, 82; silencing of Black youth, 243–6, 332; trust lift, 126, 126(f), 212; verbatim theatre, 243–4 Dandy (student, Tainan), 33, 40 Darsh (student, Lucknow), 38 Davis, Leonard, 167 deafness. See Muckles (student, Toronto) Deen (student, Toronto), 43 Deepika (student, Lucknow), 39 Deetz, Stanley, 146 dementia and theatre practices, 25 democratic citizenship: about, 4, 8–9, 11, 21–5, 342–4; activism, 121, 126–9, 131–7; Arendt’s illusion of citizenship, 101; Canadian values, 174; care ethics, 21–2, 25, 109; citizenship education, 21–3; cultural citizenship, 4, 24–5; dialogic democracy, 109–10, 112; engagement of youth, 21–2, 109–10, 342–4; hope, 11, 121–2, 184; key questions, 8–9; “knowledgeable citizens,” 173; listening as political act, 11, 18–24; mainstream politics, 173, 179–80, 302(f); marginalized vs. centralized people, 20, 21–2; misfit

citizenship, 108–9, 341; polarization, 24–5; political personhood, 103–5, 109, 112; political theory of trust, 25; relationality, 22–5; research objectives, 80; self and collective, 138–42; skills to overcome oppression, 134; small changes, 139, 142; social class and politicians, 277–8; social value of theatre, 24–5, 28, 122; teachers’ roles, 134 demographics in survey. See research project, quantitative survey depression, xviii, 79, 176–7, 179. See also mental health/illness Derek (student, Towards Youth), 233, 262, 269, 272, 275–6, 280–7, 289 Devika (student, Lucknow), 39 dialogue: about, 145–6; active listening, 118, 145–6; controversial issues, 149–50; critical dialogues, 57, 60–1, 105, 109–12, 145, 211, 335, 337–8; dialogic democracy, 109–10, 112; diversion in controversies, 149–50; oral history performance, 117; performative qualities, 145–6; poststructural approaches, 145–6; research objectives, 80; story share circle, 117–22, 145, 235, 237–8. See also listening; stories Diamantis (student, Athens), 37, 92, 99–100 Diamond, Catherine, 132 Dilworth, Alan, 229n2, 239 Dinos (student, Athens), 37, 99 Dirk. See Rodricks, Dirk (research assistant, Toronto) disabilities: Muckles’s story of deafness, 162–70, 164(f); norms, 166–7; realism in representations, 165–6 DJ Abraham Lincoln (student, Toronto), 43, 150, 245–6

384 Index Dmitri (graduate student, Coventry), 40 Dobson, Andrew, 20 documentary theatre: about, 10; and social change, 217–18, 226, 229; truthfulness of, 165, 250–1. See also verbatim theatre doors project, 233, 274–6, 282–9 Dovemark, Marianne, 31, 148 Dowler-Coltman, Tim, 233, 261, 267, 302(f), 304(f) drama and theatre. See theatre drama/creative space: about, 3–9, 29–31, 95, 205–10, 232–3, 255–6; agentic self, 9, 112, 343–4; audience to others and self, 95, 165–70; autonomy vs. dependence, 27–8; benefits, 255–6, 296, 321; caring for self and others, 11, 95, 184, 210; classroom materialities, 85; as concentric circles, 7; confidence and insecurities, 94–5; controversial issues, 22–3; creative resilience, 210–12; democratic citizenship, 8–9, 11, 22–5, 95; as dreaming, 256, 290–1; engagement/disengagement, 233–4; ensemble as process, 109– 10, 184; group life force, 251–3; “hearing” student voices, 29–30, 219–20, 232–3, 246, 255, 272–3, 340, 342–4; hope in, 4–5, 210; humour and parody, 95–6; listening, 29–30, 161–2; oral history performance, 168–70; power relations, 22, 95–6, 152, 233–4, 288; problem-solving confidence, 95–7, 196–7, 210–11; prototyping, 5; research objectives, 80; as risky space, 233–4; self and collective, 138–42; sensory knowledge, 10, 209; social value in, 28–31; spatial aspects, 252–5;

story share circle, 117–22, 145, 235, 237–8, 243–6; theatre as metaphor for the world, 205–8; trust and relationality, 208–9, 212; youth’s “adult worries,” 95–7, 101–3. See also ambitious dreams; confidence and insecurities; democratic citizenship; problem-solving confidence, quantitative survey drama/creative space, quantitative survey: about, 196–7; care as responsibility for others, 184; feeling safe and challenged, 196–7; key findings, 183–7; problemsolving, 196–7; rehearsal of care practices, 184; REM/non-REM students, 196–7; survey questions, 345–59. See also research project, quantitative survey drama education. See teacher training dreams. See ambitious dreams; Towards Youth, central ideas Drummond, Rob, 152 Eagleton, Terry, 26, 115 Easan (student, Tainan), 262n2, 325 economic class. See socio-economic class, quantitative survey economic contexts. See Athens (Greece); Coventry (England); Lucknow (India); Tainan (Taiwan); Toronto (Canada) Edgar, David, 225 education systems: about, 26; apathy, 235, 321; autonomy vs. dependence, 26–8; collaboration and excellence, 30; controversial issues, 150; critical movements, 18; deficits in, 21, 26; disengaged youth, 30–1; drama-based learning, 38n2, 50, 52–3,



Index 385

95–7, 96(f), 97(f), 106, 112, 334; eclecticism in scholarship, 18–19; hidden curricula, 331–2; impact on hope, 26; neoliberalism vs. care, 21, 26; relationality, 30–1, 166, 180, 191; socially just systems, 30, 331–2. See also teachers; teacher training Ekström, Mats, 173 Elena (student, Athens), 38, 98 Elias (student, Athens), 37 Ellard, Jeanne, 151 Ellie (graduate student, Coventry), 39–40 Ellsworth, Elizabeth, 150, 222 Engel, Juliane, 85 England. See Coventry (England); United Kingdom Ennis, Jessica Ann, 56–7 Erica (student, Towards Youth), 263, 268–70, 274, 276–8, 280–2, 284–9, 302(f) Estelle (student, Toronto), 26–8, 44, 45, 144, 158, 166 ethics: accuracy in representations, 163–6; aesthetics of injury, 90, 159–60; Arendt’s illusion of citizenship, 101; care ethics, 15, 21–2, 25; democratic citizenship, 8–9; encounters with alterity, 91; political personhood, 103–5, 109, 112; of storytelling, 159–60; verbatim theatre, 228, 255–6, 267, 306–7n1. See also accuracy of representation; care; human rights ethnic minority (REM/non-REM), quantitative survey: about, 186– 202, 186(f); adults outside home/ school, 188–90, 195; age, 185(f), 194; caregivers/receivers, students as, 188–9, 198–202; community, 189–92; demographics, 184–5,

185(f), 359; family, 189–91; friends, 188–91, 193–6, 198; gender/sex, 192, 193–4, 201; grandparents, 188–91; hope, 188, 191–8; key findings, 183–7, 202–4, 203(f); map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); online friends, 188–9, 192, 194; parents, 188–93, 202; problemsolving confidence, 188, 189, 193n8, 196–7; relationality, 187, 191; REM/non-REM, as terms, 187; romantic friends, 188–90, 202; self-reporting, 186–7, 186(f); socio-economic class, 184, 192, 201; statistics, 184–5, 185(f), 186(f), 187, 203(f); survey questions, 359; teachers, 189–90, 189n3, 193, 195–6; “true selves,” 188–9, 191–2, 194, 196. See also research project, quantitative survey ethnography: about, 8, 80–7; aesthetic ethnography, 85–7; collaborative ethnography, 8, 18, 30, 83–7; community engagement, 82–7; critical ethnography, 84, 86; as entanglements, 80, 83, 217; global contexts, 8, 80–2, 85, 97; and imagination, 86–7; power relations, 84–5; qualitative– quantitative spectrum, 81, 181–3; relationality, 8–9, 83–7; research objectives, 80, 83–4. See also research project, methods Eugenia (student, Athens), 38 European Union, 92–3, 97–101. See also Greece; United Kingdom; United Kingdom, Brexit Evangeline Scott (student, Toronto), xviii, 29, 43, 161, 166 Evans, Angela (social worker, Coventry), 39–40, 64–5, 115(f), 116, 122–9, 262, 297–9

386 Index everyday life: and ethnography, 82–3; key quantitative findings, 183–7; teacher training exercise, 283, 322–3; theatre and resilience in, 207, 210–12 Fabian (student, Towards Youth), 263, 268–72, 276–8, 280–1, 302(f) family members, quantitative survey. See grandparents, quantitative survey; parents, quantitative survey family members, quantitative survey, other: family, community, and school, 188–90; REM/non-REM students, 188–91, 199–201; students as caregivers, 199–201, 199(f), 200(f); survey questions, 345–59 Fei-Fei (student, Tainan), 32, 33, 40, 139 feminism, 84, 112. See also Lucknow, Prerna Girls School Ferri, Beth, 166–7 Finding Radical Hope (film), 261 Fine, Michelle, 183n1, 194n10 First Nations, 71–4, 267. See also Canada Fisher, Amanda Stuart, 214 Flora Dulce (student, Toronto), 46 Floyd, George, 149n1 Fong (student translator, Tainan), 40 Foster, Elissa, 165 foster children, 123, 125–6, 126(f), 211–12, 294, 298 Foucault, Michel, 234 Freeman, Barry, 29–30 friends, quantitative survey: caring friends, 194–6; contexts for caregiving, 201–2; family, community, and school, 188–90; gender/sex differences, 193–4; and hope, 193–5; key findings, 183–7; map of hope and care,

202–4, 203(f); REM/nonREM students, 188–91, 193–6, 199–201; students as caregivers, 199–201, 199(f), 200(f); survey questions, 345–59. See also online friends, quantitative survey; research project, quantitative survey; romantic relationships, quantitative survey Friesen, Norm, 35 Frith, Simon, 23 Fuccini, Jouvan (arts worker, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry), 39, 64–5, 115(f), 116, 120, 122–4, 262, 297–8 Fusco, Caroline, 86 Gallagher, Kathleen (principal researcher): about, 41, 273–4, 320; ambitious dreams, 320; ethnographic research, 83–7, 273–4, 291; introduction to Towards Youth, 217–22; Urban School Performances, 231, 250–1; Why Theatre Matters, 233–4 Gallagher, Kathleen, Towards Youth character: consent forms, 271–2; drama as about dreaming, 290–1; ethnographic research, 273–4, 309, 313–16; letter to the actors, 249–50, 256, 265–7, 342; questionnaires, 276; suitcases (refugees), 311–13, 316–18; teacher training exercise, 283 Gallagher, Kathleen, Towards Youth character, by site: Athens, 306–23; Coventry, 291–4, 295–301; Lucknow, 332–44; Tainan, 323–9; Toronto (Middleview), 268–78, 282–3, 287–91, 302(f); Toronto (Regal Heights), 329–32 Gauri (student, Lucknow), 39 Gayatri (student, Lucknow), 39



Index 387

gay people. See LGBTQ+ people Geary, James, 229–30 Geertz, Clifford, 82, 209, 217 Geeta (student, Lucknow), 39 gender/sex: ambitious dreams, 320; misogyny, 170–1; patriarchy, 35, 54, 105–6, 333; theatrical realism, 165. See also LGBTQ+ people; Lucknow, gender oppression gender/sex, quantitative survey: caregiving and care receiving, 202; hope, 184; key findings, 183–7, 202–4, 203(f); online friends, 192; REM/non-REM students, 192, 193–4, 199–201; response rates between sites, 184–5, 185(f); school friendships, 193–4; social categories, 183n1, 194n10, 359; students as caregivers, 199, 201; survey questions, 183n1, 194n10, 359; teachers’ influences, 195–6. See also research project, quantitative survey Germany, refugee crisis, 34, 98–100 Ghazavi, Vafa, 116 Gholami, Reza, 22–3 Ghosh, Susanta, 56 Giorgio (student, Athens), 38 global research. See ethnography; research project; research project, participants and sites Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope (Gallagher, Rodricks, and Jacobson), 9n1 GNC (gender nonconforming). See LGBTQ+ people Görlich, Anne, 31 Govas, Nikos (researcher, Athens), 35, 37, 50, 90, 93–5, 101–2, 238–9, 262, 305, 307–9, 312–16, 319–20, 322, 342 grandparents, quantitative survey: care and trusting relationships,

188–9; deference to, 204; map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); REM/non-REM students, 188–91, 199–201; students as caregivers, 199–201, 199(f), 200(f); survey questions, 345–59. See also research project, quantitative survey Greder, Armin, 299 Greece: about, 48–9; crises, 321–2; economic crisis, 5, 34–5, 48, 88–9, 92–3, 97–101, 102, 305, 309–10, 321–2; education system, 93–4, 321; Greek Orthodox Church, 51–2; LGBTQ+ status, 51; political controversies, 51–2; refugee crisis, 5, 34, 49, 89–94, 95(f), 97–101, 210–11, 309–13; theatre community, 50, 89–91; unemployment, 330. See also Athens (Greece); Athens, research site Greek, 261. See also languages and translations Greenberg, Jessica, 233, 261, 304(f) Greenblatt, Natasha, 261 Greg Tran (student, Toronto), 43, 159, 160 Gross, Jonathan, 11 group life force, 251–3. See also Towards Youth, production (2019) Grumet, Madeleine, 218 Guloien Theatre, Toronto, 253, 254 Han (student, Tainan), 41 Hannah (student, Toronto), 44 Hao (student, Tainan), 40, 141 Haraway, Donna, 84 Hare, David, 229 Harris, Anita, 149–50 Harris, Eric, 148–9 headphone theatre, 16–17 health, mental. See mental health/ illness

388 Index hearing. See listening Heathcote, Dorothy, 35–6, 238, 239n10, 273 Helen (graduate student, Coventry), 39–40 helpers. See caregivers/receivers, students as, quantitative survey Hindi, 261. See also languages and translations hope: about, 26, 121–2, 180, 188; age and decline of, 183, 184, 204, 329; and agency, 112; cultural democracy requires conditions to enable, 11; drama/creative spaces, 4–5, 210; as guide to action in present, 122; moral vision of new world, 116; as political alternative, 3; as a practice, 26, 116–17, 207; radical hope (active in the present), 113, 232; research objectives, 80; research questions, 207; social hope, 122; story share circle, 117–22, 145; trust and relationality, 180 hope, quantitative survey: about, 181–5, 188, 345–6; age and loss of hope, 184, 329; hope scale, 188, 194, 204; key findings, 183–7, 202–4, 203(f); map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); outside relationships, 191–2; REM/non-REM students, 188, 194–5; and school friends, 195; survey questions, 345–59; “true selves,” 188–9, 191–2; trust and relationality, 191. See also research project, quantitative survey Howard, Sue, 209 hugs, 79, 177–9 human rights: Arendt’s illusion of citizenship, 101, 103; political personhood, 103–5, 109, 112. See also democratic citizenship; ethics

Hung-Hung (student, Tainan), 40 Hurley, Erin, 166, 180, 219 Hwei (student, Tainan), 41, 141 identity. See ambitious dreams; authenticity of self; ethnic minority (REM/non-REM), quantitative survey; gender/sex; racialized people and racism; socio-economic class, quantitative survey illness, mental. See mental health/ illness imagination: about, 86–7; aesthetic ethnography, 85–7; creating a new future, 112, 168; and hope, 184; key quantitative findings, 183–7, 202–4, 203(f); language of imagination, 249–51; rehearsed futurity, 109–10 immigrants: Australia, 301; Brexit and anti-immigrant sentiment, 236–7, 295; Canada, 71–4, 77–8; Greece, 5, 34, 49, 89–94, 95(f), 316–17; Taiwan, 68–9; US policies, 172. See also refugees Inaara (student, Lucknow), 38 Inchley, Maggie, 16–17 India: about, 53–7; gender oppression, 5, 105–6; Muslim minorities, 21; Uttar Pradesh, 53–4. See also Lucknow (India); Lucknow, research site Indigenous peoples. See Canada; Taiwan Indira (student, Lucknow), 38 Indrani (student, Lucknow), 39 Ingold, Tim, 80 injustices. See democratic citizenship; ethics; human rights insecurities. See confidence and insecurities Iris (student, Tainan), 262n2, 323–5, 328



Index 389

Ishiguro, Kazuo, 220 Island, The (Greder), 299 Izzat (play), 54, 106–8, 108(f), 110 Jackman-Torkoff, Stephen, 243, 261, 266, 302(f), 304(f) Jacobson, Kelsey (research assistant, Toronto), 41, 164–5, 167, 241 Jamal (student, Toronto), 42, 147–54, 157, 243–5 James, Henry, 218 Jandrić, Petar, 153 Janus (Roman god), 275–6 Japanese anime, 132 Jaya (student, Lucknow), 38 Jensen, Erik, 217 Jessika (student, Toronto), 43, 45, 160 Jha, Jyotsna, 54–5 Jia-Jia (student, Tainan), 32–3, 40, 139, 262n2 John (youth, Coventry), 40, 119–20, 212, 292–4 Josh Rontego (student, Toronto), xviii, 29, 44, 144, 166 Jouvan. See Fuccini, Jouvan (arts worker, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry) Julia (student, Toronto), 44, 45 justice. See democratic citizenship; ethics; human rights Justine. See Themen, Justine (deputy artistic director, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry) Jyoti (student, Lucknow), 39, 262, 304(f), 333, 338–40, 342 Kabuki Theatre, 254–5, 258(f), 265 Kalliopi (student, Athens), 37 Kane, Brian, 17 Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 69–71, 132 Kate. See Reid, Kate (research assistant, Toronto)

Kathleen. See Gallagher, Kathleen (principal researcher) Kathryn (student, Toronto), 45, 46, 98, 158 Katie (student, Toronto), 43, 45, 160 Katrina Willis (student, Toronto), 44, 159–61 Katznelson, Noemi, 31 Kavita (student, Lucknow), 39 Kelsey. See Jacobson, Kelsey (research assistant, Toronto) Ken. See MacKenzie, Ken (production design) Kershaw, Baz, 122 Kidder, Annie, 75 King, Rachel. See Turner-King, Rachel (researcher, Coventry) Knowles, Ric, 227, 243 Komal (teacher, Lucknow), 38 Kool Dranks Samson (student, Toronto), 42 Korchinski-Paquet, Regis, 149n1 Korn, Peter, 10 Kostas (student, Athens), 38, 92, 99 Kubiliene, Neringa, 209–10 Kushboo (student, Lucknow), 263, 341 Kushnir, Andrew (embedded artistresearcher): about, 41, 290–1; Brexit interviews, 124–5, 235–8; collaborative ethnography, 86–7, 291; drama as about dreaming, 290–1; The Middle Place, 232, 239; movement exercise, 82; playwright’s notes, 230–1; “puncture” experiences, 146, 226, 233, 243, 247–8; Small Axe, 239; social location, 41, 290–1; youth shelter research, 210, 232, 291. See also Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) Kushnir, Andrew, Towards Youth character, by site: Athens, 306–23;

390 Index Coventry, 291–2, 295–301; Lucknow, 332–3, 337–40; Tainan, 323–5; Toronto (Middleview), 273–4, 283, 290–1. See also Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) L, Mr. (drama teacher, Toronto), 41, 145, 147–8, 154–8, 160, 167–8, 170, 172–6, 179, 214, 244–5, 262, 330 Laclau, Ernesto, 122, 125 Lahr, John, 222 languages and translations: creative process, 242; as gateway vs. door, 266, 302(f); self-doubt, 241; sensory knowledge, 19; survey questions, 181; tempo, 242; in Towards Youth, 19, 248–50, 261, 306–7n1, 308n2 Laramie Project, The (play), 165 Laroche-Francoeur, Eudes, 261 Lashua, Brett, 226–7 Lassiter, Luke, 83–4 Leah (student, Tainan), 262n2, 263, 325–7 legal vs. political personhood, 103–5, 109, 112 Lena (teacher, Athens), 37 LeRoy Fiterbert (student, Toronto), 44, 45, 166 letter to actors, Gallagher’s, 249–50, 256, 265–7, 342 Levinas, Emmanuel, 91 LGBTQ+ people: Blackbird (play), 178(f), 179; bullying, 140; doors project, 282–9; Greece, 51; The Laramie Project (play), 165; Same (play), 70, 132, 139–41, 142(f); same-sex marriage, 67, 70–1, 139–41; survey questions, 183n1, 194n10, 359; Tainan, 67, 70–1, 130–1, 132, 135, 139–41, 142(f), 327;

Toronto, 73, 179, 282, 285–6, 289; trans people, 176, 179, 183n1 liberal thought in drama education, 208–9 Lin, Mei-Chun (professor, Tainan), 40, 136–7 Lin, Wen-Ling (professor, Tainan), 40 Ling (student, Tainan), 40 listening: about, 16–20, 118, 161–2; as caring, 16, 121, 158, 201; in creative processes, 161–2, 213–14; critical theory, 18–19; and cultural democracy, 11; damaging frames, 90–1; as embodied practice, 117–18, 219; “hearing” student voices, 17, 29–30, 219–20, 232–3, 246, 255, 272–3, 340, 344; as interdisciplinary concept, 18–19; marginalized vs. centralized people, 19–20; as political act, 11, 18–24; power relations, 17–18, 90; relationality, 19; in research survey, 197–8; as a responsibility, 213–14; silences, 239; silencing Black youth, 243–6; for stories, 20, 213–14; story share circle, 117–22, 145, 243; talking gourd, 277, 279–80; teachers as receivers, 35–6; verbatim theatre, 16–17, 118, 161– 2, 220. See also dialogue; speech; verbatim theatre Lorrie (graduate student, Coventry), 39–40 Lucknow (India): about, 53–61, 333; caste, 35, 54–5, 56n1, 106, 184; demographics, 53, 333; industries, 53–4; youths’ “adult worries,” 5, 101 Lucknow, gender oppression: about, 54–5, 106–13, 107(f), 333–5; adjust to the world, 108–9, 246–8, 304(f), 336, 341–4; child labour, 106, 112–13; child



Index 391

marriage, 54, 59, 106–7, 112–13, 333, 339–40; creative resilience, 212–13; domestic violence, 54, 106; education of boys, 335, 337–8; education of girls, 35–6, 106; gendered identities, 35, 59–61, 106; Izzat (play), 54, 106–8, 108(f), 110; patriarchy, 35, 54, 105–6, 333, 335; resilience, 247–8; sexual abuse, 54, 59, 106, 335; sexual assault, 337–8; status of girls, 106, 247–8; street theatre, 55–6, 59, 109–10, 112–13 Lucknow, Prerna Girls School: about, 35–6, 53–9, 56n1, 58(t), 104–13, 105(f), 107(f), 108(f); academic strength, 56n1, 58, 111, 334; alumna, 58(t), 104, 109–12; ambitious dreams, 109–12, 248, 332; classroom as safe zone, 61; critical dialogues, 57, 60–1, 109–12, 145, 211, 335, 337–8; dialogic power, 108–9; dramabased learning, 38n2, 106, 112, 334; Gallagher’s research, 57; hope, 111; Izzat (play), 54, 106–8, 108(f), 110; lowest caste girls, 35, 54–5, 56n1; misfit citizenship, 108–9, 341; parent relations, 57; parody and humour, 95–6; pedagogy of theatre, 57; power relations, 57, 106–8, 107(f), 108(f); research participants, 38–9; scholarships, 111; social change, 56n1, 60–1; statistics, 58(t); street theatre, 55–6, 59, 109–10, 112–13; Study Hall Day School, 38, 56n1; teacher training, 59–61, 106; The Trial of Krishna (play), 57; “universe of care,” 109, 246–8; verbatim theatre, 54, 106 Lucknow, quantitative survey: about, 181–5; demographics, 184–5, 185(f), 186(f); family influences,

190–1; key findings, 183–7, 202–4, 203(f); online friends, 192; REM/non-REM students, 186(f), 190–1, 196, 199–201; students as caregivers, 198–201, 199(f), 200(f); teachers, 196. See also research project, quantitative survey Lucknow, research site: about, 38–9, 53–61, 83(t), 105(f); caste, 35, 54–5, 56n1, 184; creative resilience, 134, 211, 247–8; critical dialogues, 57, 60–1, 109–12, 145, 211, 337–8; demographics, 37n1, 38–9, 333; digital recordings, 15, 83(t); education system, 35–6, 54–6; health and literacy, 55–6; overview of methods, 83(t); research participants, 38–9, 47(f), 333; stories and artefacts, 83(t); Study Hall Day School, 56n1; teacher training, 59–61, 106; time periods, 82, 83(t), 106, 184–5; translations, 132. See also research project; Sahni, Urvashi (researcher, Lucknow) Lucknow, Towards Youth: about, 246– 8, 332–44; adjust to the world, 246– 8, 304(f), 336, 341–4; ambitious dreams, 332, 339–44; composition notes, 246–8; critical dialogue, 335, 337–8; education of boys, 335, 337–8; gender oppression, 304(f), 335, 337–44; scenes, 332–44. See also Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) Luke (youth, Coventry), 39, 120, 237–8, 262, 292–4, 344 Maanvi (student, Lucknow), 39 MacKenzie, Ken (production design), 254–5, 258(f), 261 Madan (student, Lucknow), 38

392 Index Maliky (student, Toronto), 42, 154, 157–8, 243–5, 262, 331–2 Mandarin, 261. See also languages and translations M&M Lincoln (student, Toronto), 43 Manika (student, Lucknow), 39 Manolis (student, Athens), 34–5, 37, 101, 262, 306–7, 309–10, 317, 319–20 Marcel Delfigalo-Michaelis (student, Toronto), 26–7, 44, 45, 79, 166, 172, 176, 215 Marcus, George, 8 marginality. See ethnic minority (REM/non-REM), quantitative survey Maria (student, Athens), 307, 311–12 Marianna (student, Athens), 34–5, 37, 98, 262, 307, 309–11, 319–20 Maria Repousi. See Repousi, Maria (Myrto’s mother, informant, Athens) Marina (student, Athens), 37 Martin, Carol, 218 Massumi, Brian, 122 Max (youth, Coventry), 27–9, 34, 39, 118–21, 262, 293–4 Max Roads (student, Toronto), 43, 161 Maxx (student, Towards Youth), 262, 268–70, 276, 278–84, 286–9, 302(f), 332 Maya (graduate student, Coventry), 39–40 McLean, Stuart, 87 Mealey, Scott (research assistant, Toronto), 5, 41, 142, 155, 186n2, 190–1n7, 202n13 Meena (student, Lucknow), 38 Mei-Chun. See Lin, Mei-Chun (professor, Tainan) mental health/illness: about, 5–6, 78–9; anxiety and depression,

78–9, 176–7, 215; continuum, 5; devising theatre, 176–80, 214–15; hug as support, 79, 177–9; stressors, 5–6; supports, 75, 78–9; survey questions, 345–59; unhelpful comments, 79, 176, 215. See also confidence and insecurities Merry, Michael S., 22 metaphors: Aegean Sea as known/ unknown, 238; doors project, 233, 274–6, 282–9; of listening, 17; metaphor for a metaphor in theatre, 240, 253; metaphors as verbs vs. nouns, 229–30; theatre as metaphor for the world, 3, 205–8 Michelle (student, Toronto), 43 Middle Place, The (Kushnir), 232, 239 Middleview School. See Toronto, Towards Youth, Middleview School migrants. See immigrants; refugees Mikey (student, Toronto), 46 Miller, Sarah, 261 Mindy Moore (student, Toronto), 44, 45, 144, 160, 171 Ming (student, Tainan), 41 minority vs. majority. See ethnic minority (REM/non-REM), quantitative survey Money Is the Lover (play), 34, 70, 132, 139 Mother of Dragons (student, Toronto), 46, 171–2 Mouffe, Chantal, 122, 125 movement. See dance and movement Muckles (student, Toronto), 44, 45, 162–70, 164(f), 214 Muni (tech guy, Lucknow), 262, 334 Muñoz, Jose Esteban, 187 Museum of Living Stories, A (play), 114–15, 117, 126, 126(f), 129(f), 212, 235n6



Index 393

music. See sound and music Mvula, Laura, 298, 299 Mya Ibrahim (student, Toronto), 43 Myra (student, Athens), 37 Myrto. See Pigkou-Repousi, Myrto (researcher, Athens) Nalini (student, Lucknow), 39 Nancy. See Cardwell, Nancy (research assistant, Toronto) Nancy, Jean-Luc, 17 Nandy, Lisa, 30 National University, Taiwan, 67, 131(f). See also Tainan, National University course Navas, Eduardo, 226 Neelands, Jonothan, 24, 62, 63, 109, 130 Neena (youth, Coventry), 40, 119, 262, 292–3 neoliberalism, 21, 28, 122, 149–50, 206 Nestruck, J. Kelly, 250 Nicholson, Helen, 25, 208–9, 250 Nikoletta (student, Athens), 38 Nikos. See Govas, Nikos (researcher, Athens) 9/11 attacks, 206 Nita (alumna, Lucknow), 38, 104, 109–12 Nivedita (student, Lucknow), 39 non-REM (no report as ethnic minority), 187. See also ethnic minority (REM/non-REM), quantitative survey Notes Exchange Dostoevsky (play), 132, 241–2 Obama, Barack, 171, 277 objects. See stories and objects Öhrn, Elisabet, 150 Olly (Rachel’s husband, Towards Youth), 262, 295–6, 298–9 Olson, Maria, 173

online friends, quantitative survey: about, 192; hope and care, 188–9, 191–2; key findings, 183–7; map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); REM/non-REM students, 188–9, 192, 194, 199–201; students as caregivers, 198–201, 199(f), 200(f); survey questions, 345–59. See also research project, quantitative survey Ontario, 74–7. See also Canada; Toronto (Canada) Ophelia (youth, Coventry), 39, 119– 21, 212, 263, 292–4 Ophelia’s dad (Coventry), 262, 296 optimism and hope, 26 oral history performance: about, 117; accuracy and realism, 163–5; audience response, 165–70; benefits of, 168–70; collaborative ethnography, 85, 117; Muckles’s story of deafness, 162–70, 164(f); A Museum of Living Stories, 114–15, 117, 126, 126(f), 129(f), 212, 235n6; objects, 117, 125–6, 159–60, 163–4; personal vs. public expression, 146–7; public performances, 165– 70; small group processes, 161–2; story share circle, 117–22, 145, 235, 237–8. See also verbatim theatre Osborne, Harold, 161 outside home/school. See adults outside home/school, quantitative survey; online friends, quantitative survey outside the mainstream. See ethnic minority (REM/non-REM), quantitative survey pandemic. See COVID-19 pandemic panic attacks, 79, 178–9, 215. See also mental health/illness

394 Index parentheses for pauses in playscript, 264 parents: filial piety of students, 69– 71, 137–8, 213, 240, 327; mutuality to care, 103; student confidence, 188, 193 parents, quantitative survey: about, 188–93; deferential relations, 198, 204; hope and care, 184, 188–90, 192–3; key findings, 183–7; map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); REM/non-REM students, 188–93, 199–202; students as caregivers/ receivers, 103, 199–202, 199(f), 200(f); survey questions, 345–59; trusting relationships, 188–9. See also research project, quantitative survey parody, 95–6 participatory theatre, 16–17 patriarchy, 35, 54, 105–6, 333. See also Lucknow, gender oppression Patricia (teacher, Athens), 37 Paul (student, Toronto), 43, 162, 164–5 Pei (student, Tainan), 40, 140–1 Pelto, Pertti, 56 pen pals. See online friends, quantitative survey performing arts: co-creation of meaning, 228–9; collaborative turn, 24; pandemic’s impact, 76–7; performance, defined, 138; remixing arts, 226–7; representations/ misrepresentations, 227–8. See also theatre Petros (student, Athens), 38, 98, 210–11 Phelan, Peggy, 90 Phil McFarlane (student, Toronto), 44 philotimo (pleasure in giving care), 102–3, 239. See also care

Pigkou-Repousi, Myrto (researcher, Athens), 37, 88–9, 92, 99–100, 238–9, 261–2, 306–19, 322 pig man (character), 241–2 Pink, Sara, 10 Pippi (student, Toronto), 45, 160 playfulness, 152 plays. See drama/creative space; theatre; Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir); verbatim theatre Pooja (student, Lucknow), 39 poststructuralism, 145–6 power relations: about, 84–5; collaborative ethnography, 83–7; in creative processes, 161–2; drama/creative spaces, 22, 95–6, 152, 234, 288; drama exercises on, 233–4, 280–1, 288; gender oppression (India), 57; in listening, 17–18, 90, 161–2; police violence, 73, 148–9, 244–6, 330–1; in speech patterns, 152–3 practices of care. See care; caregivers/receivers, students as, quantitative survey; drama/ creative space Prerna Girls School. See Lucknow, Prerna Girls School priests. See adults outside home/ school, quantitative survey Priya (student, Lucknow), 38 problem-solving confidence, quantitative survey: about, 188–9, 196–7; creative resilience, 210–12; drama rooms, 196–7, 210–11; friends, 196; map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); online friends, 188; parents, 188, 193; REM/ non-REM students, 188, 189, 193n8, 196–7; survey questions, 345–59; teachers, 193n8, 196. See



Index 395

also research project, quantitative survey program notes, theatre, 230–1 Project: Humanity, xvii, 210, 231, 261 project on hope. See research project punctuation in playscript, 229n2, 284 “puncture” experiences, 146, 226, 243, 247–8 question mark for upspeak in playscript, 264 Rachel (Coventry). See Turner-King, Rachel (researcher, Coventry) Rachel (Toronto). See Rhoades, Rachel (research assistant, Toronto) racialized people and racism: adjust to the world, 330–2, 342–4; casting, 151, 221, 248–9; critical race theory, 18; norms, 150; police violence, 148–9, 244–6, 330–1; private racism vs. public denial, 148; silencing of racialized people, 147–50, 243–6, 252, 330–2; Trump’s impact, 170–5. See also Black people; ethnic minority (REM/non-REM), quantitative survey Radha (student, Lucknow), 39 radical hope (active in the present), 113, 232. See also hope; Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) Radical Hope project, 8. See also research project Radical Hope Survey, 181. See also research project, quantitative survey Rafaela (student, Athens), 38 Rajendran, Charlene, 152 Rancière, Jacques, 126, 222 Rawlins, William, 84, 118

realism. See accuracy of representation “Real Thing, The” (James), 218 refugees: causes, 94, 95(f), 101; children’s shared stories, 89–94, 95(f); economic hardships, 309–11; in Greece, 5, 34, 49, 89–94, 95(f), 97–104, 210–11, 309–13; scholarship on, 91–3; suitcase exercise, 311–13, 316–18; UNHCR programs, 89–90. See also immigrants Regal Heights Collegiate, Toronto. See Toronto, Regal Heights; Toronto, research site Reid, Kate (research assistant, Toronto), 42 Reigna (student, Toronto), 45, 46 Rekha (student, Lucknow), 38 relationality: about, 7–10; aesthetics of care, 23–5, 88; caring, 15, 88, 103, 180, 191, 208–9; collaborative ethnography, 83–7; democratic citizenship, 8–9, 22–5; drama/ creative space, 153, 208–9; education systems, 30–1, 166, 180, 191; entangled relationships, 80, 217; ethics of care, 15, 88; hope, 180, 191; key quantitative findings, 181–7, 202–4, 203(f); listening, 19, 118; stories, 159–60, 162, 166, 180; in theatre, 166, 180, 218, 252; verbatim theatre, 152–4, 162, 180. See also care; hope religious leaders, quantitative survey, 188–90, 198. See also adults outside home/school, quantitative survey REM (reports as ethnic minority), 187. See also ethnic minority (REM/ non-REM), quantitative survey Repo-Martell, Liisa, 219–21, 261, 304(f)

396 Index Repousi, Maria (Myrto’s mother, informant, Athens), 37, 50–2 research project: about, 6–11, 80, 207; as an art, not a practice, 217–18; collaboration, 8–10, 83–7; compassionate witnessing, 6–7, 9; democratic citizenship, 8–9, 11, 142; entangled relationships, 80; global research, 8–10, 80–2, 85, 97; hope as a practice, 26, 116–17, 207; key questions, 8–9, 15, 22, 205, 207, 232; objectives, 80; publications on, 81–2; scholarly publications on, 9n1. See also Gallagher, Kathleen (principal researcher); Kushnir, Andrew (embedded artist-researcher); Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) research project, methods: about, 81–7, 83(t); collaborative ethnography, 83–7; data analysis, 81, 82; data creation in theatre, 83(t), 85–6; digital recordings, 15, 81, 83(t), 100–1, 172–3, 232, 271; discourse analysis, 81; ethnography, 20, 80–7, 273–4; field notes, 160, 247, 251; focus groups, 81, 83(t); imagination, 86–7; individual interviews, 81, 83(t); oral history performance, 117, 142; participant observation, 81, 83(t), 314–16; pedagogies, 207; poststructural dialogue, 145–6; power relations, 84–5; qualitative– quantitative spectrum, 81, 181–3; sensory knowledge, 10; sites not compared, 9–10; verbatim theatre, 117, 142; video footage, by site, 83(t). See also drama/creative space; oral history performance; stories; stories and objects; verbatim theatre

research project, participants and sites: about, 26, 37–46, 47(f); consent, 271–2; education systems, 26; entangled relationships, 80; hope and care, 26; questionnaires, 37n1, 276; research collaborators, 117. See also Athens, research site; Coventry, research site; Lucknow, research site; Tainan, research site; Toronto, research site research project, play. See Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) research project, quantitative survey: about, 81, 83(t), 181–204; ages, 83(t), 184–5, 185(f); caregivers/ receivers, 198–202, 199(f), 200(f); deferential relations, 198, 202–4, 203(f); demographics, 83(t), 182–3, 184–5, 185(f), 186(f), 359; key findings, 183–7; map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); percentage of participants at sites, 185(f); qualitative–quantitative spectrum, 81, 181–3; qualitative questions, 16, 81; relationality, 182–3; REM (reports as ethnic minority) and non-REM students, 186(f), 187–202; REM/non-REM by site, 186(f); response rates between sites, 184–5, 185(f); social categories, 183n1, 194n10, 359; text of survey questions, 345–59; time periods, 82, 184–5; translations, 181 resilience, 209–12 Rey (student, Tainan), 41 Rhoades, Rachel (research assistant, Toronto), 41–2, 159, 175 Ridout, Nicholas, 8 rights. See human rights Robinson, Fiona, 15



Index 397

Rodricks, Dirk (research assistant, Toronto), 32–3, 41, 98–100, 137–9, 160, 235, 241, 243, 247, 261, 331 Rolsha. See Chang, Rolsha (teaching assistant, Tainan) romantic relationships, quantitative survey: care and trusting relationships, 188–9; contexts for care receiving, 202; hope and care, 184; key findings, 183–7, 202; map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); REM/non-REM students, 188–90, 199–202; students as caregivers, 199–201, 199(f), 200(f); survey questions, 345–59. See also research project, quantitative survey Roopa (principal, Lucknow), 38 Rorty, Richard, 121–2 Rosvall, Per-Åke, 150 Ruhl, Sarah, 222, 228, 252 S, Ms. (Toronto teacher, Towards Youth), 232–5, 262, 268–71, 274–6, 279–90 Sabina (student, Lucknow), 39 Sadiq, Zorana, 261, 302(f), 303(f), 304(f) Sahni, Shibani (Urvashi’s daughter), 246–7 Sahni, Urvashi (researcher, Lucknow), 10, 35, 38, 56n1, 57–9, 105–8, 110–11, 134, 211–12, 246–8, 261, 263, 332–42 Salverson, Julie, 90, 159 Same (play), 70, 132, 139–41, 142(f) Sapna (teacher trainer, Lucknow), 38, 59–61 Sassen, Saskia, 97 Scarlet (student, Toronto), 42, 150, 151, 157, 245–6 Scarlett (student, Toronto), 44, 46, 159, 162, 171, 175

Schechner, Richard, 138 school friends. See friends, quantitative survey schools. See education systems school teachers. See teachers Schultz, Katherine, 18 Scott. See Mealey, Scott (research assistant, Toronto) Scott, Amelia (video design), 261 Sebastian Two Fango (student, Toronto), 46 security, sense of. See confidence and insecurities See You Again, Kobayashi Village (play), 68–9, 132, 239n10 self-confidence. See confidence and insecurities Sennett, Richard, 121, 206 set design, 253–5, 258(f), 265 sexuality. See gender/sex; LGBTQ+ people Shawn (student, Tainan), 41 SHEF (Study Hall Educational Foundation), 53, 57, 112. See also Lucknow, Prerna Girls School Shefali (student, Lucknow), 38 Sherry. See Bie, Sherry (research assistant, Toronto) Shibani. See Sahni, Shibani (Urvashi’s daughter) Shklovsky, Viktor, 227 Shuan (student translator, Tainan), 40, 140–1 Shuan-Shuan (student, Tainan), 41, 214, 262n2 Shweta (student, Lucknow), 39 Simmons, Catharine Ann, 95–6 Simpson, Jennifer, 146 Singh, Anita, 55–6 Singh, Rajendra, 56 slash (/) for overlapping voices in playscript, 264

398 Index Smith, Anna Deavere, 122, 230 socio-economic class, quantitative survey: and hope, 184; key findings, 183–7; online friends, 192; REM/ non-REM students, 184, 192, 201; students as caregivers, 201; survey questions, 359. See also research project, quantitative survey Solga, Kim, 165 sound and music: group life force, 251–3; sensory knowledge, 17; in Taiwanese theatre, 133–5; in Towards Youth, 251, 298, 305. See also listening; speech Soutar, Annabel, 240 space. See drama/creative space; theatre spatial aspects of theatre, 252–5 spectators. See audiences speech: aesthetic ethnography, 85–7; group life force, 251–3; power relations, 152–3; punctuation in playscript, 229n2, 234nn4, 5, 264; rehearsal exercises, 229n2; verbatim theatre, 152–3, 220, 250; vernacular, 152–3; voice rhythms, 220, 229n2, 234n4, 264. See also dialogue; languages and translations; listening Starkman, Rebecca (research assistant, Toronto), 41 Stengers, Isabelle, 15, 122 stories: about, 80–1; aesthetics of injury, 90–1, 159; creative resilience, 210–12; in documentary theatre, 217; ethical issues, 90, 159–60, 228, 255–6; imagining the future, 168; Indigenous peoples, 213; intercultural storytelling, 80–1; listening for, 20, 118; power relations, 90; of refugees, 89–94, 95(f); research project, 80–1, 83(t); responsibility for, 213–14, 217; sensory knowledge,

10; sharing circle vs. linear space, 147–50, 243–6, 252, 330–2; as social intervention, 81, 237–8; story share circle, 117–22, 145, 235, 237–8, 277–8; trust and relationality, 159–60, 162, 166, 180, 212; Truth and Story (parable), 114–15, 235n6; “visiting” stories, 81. See also listening stories and objects: about, 83(t), 85, 117, 129(f); chocolate bar story, xviii, 29; doors project, 233, 274–6, 283–9; examples, 160, 312; foster child (Nintendo), 125–6, 126(f), 298; listening, xviii, 29–30, 118, 161–2; objects for storytelling, 117, 129(f), 158–60; oral history performance, 117, 125–6, 158–60, 163–5; personal sharing, 158–60; research project, 83(t), 85, 117, 125; suitcases (refugees), 311–13, 316– 18; talking gourd, 277, 279–80 Stories We Tell, The (play), 164 Streetcar Crowsnest, 253, 261 street theatre, 55–6, 59, 109–10, 112–13. See also Lucknow, gender oppression stress. See mental health/illness Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF), 53, 57, 112. See also Lucknow, Prerna Girls School Subramanium, Ramya, 54–5 Sukarieh, Mayssoun, 137 SuperJet (student, Tainan), 33, 40, 139 Suresh (student, Lucknow), 38 Susan Goldridge (student, Toronto), 46 Sushma (student, Lucknow), 39 Tainan (Taiwan): about, 31–4, 67–71, 132–3; activism, 67–8, 131–7, 325–6; China’s domination,



Index 399

67–9, 133, 135–7, 323–6; economic struggles, 32–4, 135–8; filial piety, 69–71, 137–8, 240, 327; Indigenous peoples, 68–9, 132, 184, 213, 239n10; LGBTQ+ people, 67, 70–1, 130–1, 132, 135, 139–41, 142(f), 327; military service, 325; social class, 70–1; Strawberry Generation, 132; Sunflower Movement, 67–8, 131– 3, 136, 326; theatre, 32, 132, 241–2 Tainan, National University course: about, 40–1, 69–71, 130–42, 131(f), 212–14; activism, 131–7, 325–6; ambitious dreams, 5, 31–3, 69–71, 137–8, 240, 303(f), 327–9; creative processes, 134–5, 140, 212–14; democratic citizenship, 134–42; feelings, 133–5; filial piety, 69–71, 137–8, 213, 240, 327; Indigenous stories, 132, 213–14; LGBTQ+ students, 130–1, 132, 135, 139–41, 142(f), 213; listening, 213–14; music, 133–5; oral history performance, 117, 132; research participants, 40–1, 47(f); self vs. the collective, 138–42; traditional theatre, 212–14; translations, 132, 242; youth’s “adult worries,” 5, 31–4, 67–71, 101, 132, 135–42, 325–9 Tainan, plays: absence in Towards Youth, 240; Boys Love, 132; Cross, 70, 132, 134–5, 139, 140(f); Money Is the Lover, 34, 70, 132, 139; Notes Exchange Dostoevsky, 132, 241–2; Same, 70, 132, 139–41, 142(f); See You Again, Kobayashi Village, 68–9, 132, 239n10 Tainan, quantitative survey: about, 181–5; care, 194; demographics, 184–5, 185(f), 186(f), 190, 194; family influences, 190; key findings, 183–7, 202–4, 203(f);

online and school friends, 192, 194; REM/non-REM students, 186(f), 194, 196, 199–201; students as caregivers, 198–201, 199(f), 200(f); teachers, 196. See also research project, quantitative survey Tainan, research site: about, 31–4, 40–1, 83(t), 131(f); cultural events, 132; demographics, 37n1; digital recordings, 15, 83(t); education system, 31–4, 140–1; familybased stigma, 184; interviews, 70; listening, 213–14; National University, 67, 131(f); oral history performance, 15, 117, 158; overview of methods, 83(t); research participants, 40–1, 47(f), 70; time periods, 82, 83(t), 133, 184–5; translations, 132. See also research project; Wang, Wan-Jung (researcher, Tainan) Tainan, Towards Youth: about, 239–42, 323–9; absence of youth plays, 240; activism, 325–6; adjust to the world, 304(f), 327–9, 342–4; ambitious dreams, 303(f), 327–9; composition notes, 239–42; “don’t compromise,” 303(f), 329; night market, 239–40, 323–5; scenes, 303(f), 304(f), 323–9; youth’s “adult worries,” 325–9 Taipei (Taiwan), 7, 67, 69, 132, 136 Taiwan: about, 67–9; activism, 67–8, 131–7; China’s domination, 67–9, 133, 135–7, 323–6; demographics, 67–9; earthquakes, 7–8; economic uncertainties, 5, 137–8; ethnic groups, 68–9; Indigenous peoples, 68–9, 184, 213; languages, 70; same-sex marriage, 67, 70–1, 139–41, 142(f); Sunflower Movement,

400 Index 67–8, 131–3, 136, 326. See also Tainan (Taiwan) Talwar, Neelima, 55–6 Tania (teacher, Athens), 37, 102–3, 238–9, 263, 306–18, 321–2 Tannock, Stuart, 137 Tanvi (student, Lucknow), 39 Tara (student, Lucknow), 39 Tarun (student, Lucknow), 38 Taylor, Astra, 21 Taylor, Sunaura, 167 teachers: apathy in education, 235, 321; Black teachers, 154–6; care giving and receiving, 103, 106; as receivers, 35–6, 273; volunteers, 103, 238–9; working conditions, 30, 103, 318–19. See also drama/ creative space; L, Mr. (teacher, Toronto); S, Ms. (Toronto teacher, Towards Youth); Tania (teacher, Athens); teacher training teachers, quantitative survey: about, 193, 195–6; age of students, 196; care and trusting relationships, 188–9; as caregivers/receivers, 103, 201–2; family, community, and school, 188–91; hope and care, 193; key findings, 183–7, 193n8, 195–6; map of hope and care, 202–4, 203(f); as problem solvers, 193n8; REM/non-REM students, 189–90, 189n3, 193, 195–6, 199–201; students as caregivers, 199–201, 199(f), 200(f). See also research project, quantitative survey teacher training: about, 95–7, 180; activist skills, 134; as caregivers/ receivers, 106; critical dialogues, 57, 60–1, 109–12, 145; dialogic power, 108–9; exercise on everyday life, 283, 322–3; hope, 110, 116–17; liberal thought, 208–9;

in Lucknow, 59–61, 106; pedagogy of the invitation, 117; relationality, 138–42, 180, 191; teachers as receivers, 35–6, 273 Testaments, The (Atwood), 7, 9 That’s What I Would Say (play, Toronto), 152–4, 153(f) theatre: about, 76–7, 228–9, 252; aesthetics of injury, 90; co-creation of meaning with audience, 228–9; collaborative ethnography, 83–7; cultural citizenship, 4, 24–5; democratic citizenship, 8–9, 24–5; entangled relationships, 80, 217–18; Kabuki, 254–5, 258(f), 265; as living community, 126; making the ordinary “strange,” 227–8; as metaphor for the world, 205–8; as public pedagogy, 222; reading plays aloud, 230; as relational space, 166, 180, 218, 252; representations/ misrepresentations, 227–8; social value in, 24–5, 28–31; spatial aspects, 252–5; theatre for development, 56–7; and “the now,” 208. See also audiences; democratic citizenship; oral history performance; verbatim theatre Themen, Justine (deputy artistic director, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry), 39, 64 Theo (youth, Coventry), 40, 212 Thessaloniki, Aristotle University of, 37, 89(f). See also Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; Athens, research site Thompson, James, 23–4, 88, 143 Ting-Ting (student, Tainan), 41, 262n2 Toronto (Canada): about, 5–6, 71–8; activism, 73–4; arts survey, 76–7;



Index 401

demographics, 71–2; economic uncertainties, 5–6, 78–9; education system, 74–6; immigrants, 71–4, 77–8; Indigenous peoples, 71–4, 267; languages, 72, 73; LGBTQ+ people, 73; police violence, 148–9, 244–6, 330–1; racism, 5, 73–4, 148–58, 330–2; youths’ “adult worries,” 5–6, 101, 170–5, 330, 342–4 Toronto, quantitative survey: about, 181–5; demographics, 184–5, 185(f), 186(f); gender/sex differences, 201; Indigeneity, 184; key findings, 183–7, 202–4, 203(f); online and school friends, 192, 194; REM/non-REM students, 186(f), 194, 196, 199–201; students as caregivers, 198–201, 199(f), 200(f); teachers, 196. See also research project, quantitative survey Toronto, Regal Heights: about, 41–6, 77–9, 143(f), 144–6, 329–32; academic streams, 78, 147; activism, 78–9; alienation, 145; ambitious dreams, 144, 151; Black students, 147–58, 330–2; dialogue, 145–6; diversity, 77–8, 145, 156; economic uncertainties, 5–6, 78–9; Equity Committee, 156; hope, 144; immigrants, 77–8; marginalization, 145; mental health/illness, 75, 78–9; racialized students, 77–9, 147–8, 243–6, 252; racism, 78–9, 148–58; uncertain futures, 78–9, 144 Toronto, Regal Heights, drama education: about, 78–9, 143(f), 144–7; arts clubs, 78; arts curriculum, 75–6, 147, 179; creative processes, 161–2, 179–80; dialogue, 145–6; listening, 161–2;

performances at assemblies, 169–70; power relations, 152, 161; sharing circles, 145, 147–8, 243, 331; teacher (Mr. L), 41; warm-up exercises, 152. See also L, Mr. (drama teacher, Toronto) Toronto, Regal Heights, research year 1 (Grade 12 Drama): about, 77–9, 146–58, 214–15; ambitious dreams, 151; demographics by semester, 147; docudrama, 148–9, 151; gender tensions, 145–7, 150–1, 214, 331; leadership, 148–50, 331; material inequalities, 146, 151–2; racialized students, 147–54, 214, 243–6, 330–2; research participants, 42–3, 47(f), 77–9, 143(f), 147; sharing circle vs. linear space, 147–50, 243–6, 252, 330–2; That’s What I Would Say, 152–4, 153(f); uncertain futures, 151; verbatim theatre, 146–54, 153(f) Toronto, Regal Heights, research year 2 (Grades 10–12 Integrated Drama): about, 77–9, 146–7, 158–70, 214–15; accuracy and realism, 163–5; audience response, 165–70, 214; benefits for students, 168–70; creative processes, 161–6; feelings, 158–60; Muckles’s story of deafness, 162–70, 164(f), 214; objects and stories, 158–60; oral history performance, 146–7, 158–70; research participants, 43–5, 47(f), 143(f), 158; The Stories We Tell, 164(f) Toronto, Regal Heights, research year 3 (Grade 12 Drama): about, 77–9, 146–7, 170–80, 214–15; Blackbird (play), 176–9, 178(f); creative processes, 179–80, 214–15; curriculum flexibility, 76, 147, 179– 80, 214–15; democratic citizenship,

402 Index 173–5, 179–80; devising theatre, 176–80; draft of Towards Youth, 170; hall of voices exercise, 171; mental health/illness, 78–9, 147, 176–80, 214–15; research participants, 45–6, 47(f), 143(f), 170; trans rights, 176–80; US politics, 170–5, 179 Toronto, research site: about, 41–6, 74–9, 83(t), 143(f); creative processes, 161–2, 179–80; dialogue, 145–6; digital recordings, 15, 83(t), 172–3; education system, 26–7, 74–6, 147; objects and stories, 158–60; overview of methods, 83(t); research participants, 37n1, 41–6, 47(f), 77–8, 143(f); stories and artefacts, 83(t); teachers, 145, 179–80; time periods, 82, 83(t), 144, 184–5. See also L, Mr. (drama teacher, Toronto); research project Toronto, Towards Youth, Middleview School: about, 231–5, 269–70, 302(f); ambitious dreams, 303(f); “be a gateway or a door,” 266, 302(f); composition notes, 231–5; disengaged student (Derek), 233–4, 282–9; doors project, 233, 274–6, 282–9; drama as about dreaming, 290–1; as earlier research, 231–4; group life force, 251–3, 268, 270, 272, 274–5, 279–80, 283, 290; journal writing, 276, 281–2; LGBTQ+ students, 282, 285–6, 289; power exercise, 280–1; scenes, 268–91, 302(f), 304(f), 342–4; social categories, 276; social class and politics, 277–8, 302(f); talking gourd, 277, 279–80. See also S, Ms. (Toronto teacher, Towards Youth); Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) Toronto, Towards Youth, Regal Heights: about, 243–6, 329–32; composition

notes, 243–6; racial tensions, 243–6, 252, 330–2; scenes, 304(f), 329–32, 342–4. See also Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) Towards Youth, actors: about, 218–21, 302(f)–304(f); casting, 221, 227–8, 248–9, 250, 262–3, 302(f)–304(f); Gallagher’s letter to, 249–50, 256, 265–7, 342; letters from collaborators, 219; listening by, 219–20; list of, 261; name cards, 307; punctuation in playscript, 229n2, 234nn4, 5, 264; as selves, not characters, 249–50; speech patterns, 220, 229n2, 234n4, 264 Towards Youth, central ideas: about, 226; adjust to the world, 108–9, 246–8, 304(f), 327–9, 330–2, 336, 341–4; ambitious dreams, 127, 301, 303(f), 341–2; “drama is about dreaming,” 10, 256, 290–1; group life force, 251–3; “hearing” student voices, 17, 232–3, 246, 255–6, 272– 3, 340, 344; radical hope, 113, 232 Towards Youth, composition: about, 231–48; absence of site plays (Coventry, Tainan), 240; Athens, 238–9; Coventry, 235–8; digital recordings, 232; early draft, 170; editing, 231; Gallagher’s collaboration, 218–19, 291; Kushnir’s notes, 231–48; as oneact plays, 231; Tainan, 239–42; Toronto (Middleview), 231–5; Toronto (Regal Heights), 243–6; working titles, 231n3 Towards Youth, formatting in text: ellipsis, 229n2; / overlapping text/voices, 264; (x) seconds in a pause, 264; (?) upspeak, 264 Towards Youth, production (2019): about, 218–20, 248–52, 261–4;



Index 403

audience research, 221–2; black box theatre, 253–5; casting, 248–9, 250, 262–3; critical reception, 250; Crow’s Theatre, xvii, 231, 261; ethical issues, 228, 255–6; group life force, 251–3; group life force in stage directions, 268, 270, 272, 274–5, 279–80, 283, 290, 292, 294, 306; multilingual voices, 248–50, 261, 306–7n1; performances, xvii, 261–3; punctuation in playscript, 229n2, 264; set design, 254–5, 258(f), 265; sound and music, 251, 298, 305; territory acknowledgment, 267; voice rhythms, 229n2, 264. See also Abraham, Chris (co-director, Towards Youth); Kushnir, Andrew (embedded artist-researcher) Towards Youth, scenes by site: all sites, 265–7, 342–4; Athens, 304(f), 305–23; Coventry, 291–301, 303(f), 304(f); Lucknow, 304(f), 332–42; Tainan, 303(f), 304(f), 323–9; Toronto (Middleview), 268–91, 302(f), 304(f), 342–4; Toronto (Regal Heights), 304(f), 329–32, 342–4 Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir): about, 10–11, 217–22, 225–31, 261–4; accuracy of representation, 217–18, 225, 255–6, 267, 306–7n1; aesthetic ethnography, 85–7; audience research, 221–2; collaborative ethnography, 25, 86–7; ethical issues, 228, 255–6; Finding Radical Hope (film), 261; Gallagher’s introduction, 217–22; Gallagher’s letter to actors, 249–50, 256, 265–7, 342; Kushnir’s composition notes, 231–48; Kushnir’s introduction, 225–31; multilingual voices, 19,

248–50, 261, 306–7n1, 308n2; “puncture” experiences, 226; radical hope, 113, 232; text of play, 265–344; title, 218; as verbatim play, 10, 217–18, 221, 226; youths’ “adult worries,” 101, 222, 321, 325–9. See also verbatim theatre training, teacher. See teacher training translations. See languages and translations trans people, 176, 179, 183n1. See also LGBTQ+ people Trial of Krishna, The (play, Prerna), 57 true self. See authenticity of self Trump, Donald J., 170–5, 241–2, 311 trusting relationships, 208–9, 212. See also relationality Tsai, Yi-Ren (assistant professor, Tainan), 32, 40, 135–6 Turner-King, Rachel (researcher, Coventry), 39, 64, 115(f), 116, 118–21, 125–6, 128–9, 212, 262, 295–9, 341–2 Uma (student, Lucknow), 39, 263, 333, 338–9, 341–2 Umeh, Amaka, 255, 261, 302(f), 304(f) unemployment, youth, 330 United Kingdom: citizenship education, 22–3; City of Culture bid, 63, 65–6; education system, 30, 66–7; refugees, 100; youth services, 65–6. See also Coventry, research site United Kingdom, Brexit: about, 62–3, 121–5, 235–7; antiimmigrant sentiment, 236–7, 295; arts funding, 123–4, 299, 301; generational differences, 120–1, 124–5, 235–7, 294–5, 300–1; hope, 121–2, 237–8; statistics on votes, 62, 120, 124–5; street interviews, 124–5, 235–6; as stressor, 5, 62–3,

404 Index 235–8; youth’s “adult worries,” 118–25, 298 United States: gun violence, 343; immigrants, 170–2; police violence, 149n1; political polarization, 170–5; racism, 149n1, 170–1; Trump, 170–5, 241–2, 311 University of Warwick, 62–5, 115(f), 124, 235–6, 295–7. See also Coventry, research site Unmesh (student, Lucknow), 262, 337 Upasana (student, Lucknow), 39 Urban School Performances (Gallagher), 231, 250–1 Urvashi. See Sahni, Urvashi (researcher, Lucknow) Utkarsh (student, Lucknow), 38 Vaishali (student, Lucknow), 39, 262, 333, 341 Vanessa (student, Toronto), 44, 45, 177 verbatim theatre: about, 10, 217–19, 225–6; accuracy of representation, 217–18, 250–1, 256, 267, 306–7n1; creative processes, 161–6; “deeply respectful forgery,” 256, 267, 306–7n1; documentary theatre, 165, 251; embedded playwrights, 231n3; emotional bonds, 165–6, 250; ethical issues, 163–6, 222, 225, 228, 255–6; fiction/non-fiction binary, 10, 226; headphone theatre, 16–17; listening, 16–17, 118, 161–2, 220; past vs. present, 229; playfulness, 152; remixing processes, 226–7, 234n4; scholarship on, 16–17; speech patterns, 152–3, 220, 250; trust and relationality, 152–4, 162, 166, 180. See also accuracy of representation; languages and

translations; theatre; Towards Youth: a play on radical hope (Kushnir) Vicky. See Adrian’s mom (Athens) Vieira, Emilio, 261, 302(f), 304(f) Visha (student, Lucknow), 38 Walford, Geoffrey, 182, 183 Wang, Wan-Jung (researcher, Tainan), 32, 40, 69–70, 117, 130, 132–41, 158, 213–14, 240–2, 261, 263, 303(f), 325–9, 342 Warwick, University of, 62–5, 115(f), 124, 235–6, 295–7. See also Coventry, research site Watershed, The (Soutar), 240 Waterworth, Jayne, 112 Watkins, Megan, 30 Webber (student, Tainan), 262n2, 323–7 Wei (student, Tainan), 40, 138, 262n2 Weinman, Michael, 103–5, 109, 112 wellness. See mental health/illness Welsh, Jennifer, 24 Welty, Eudora Alice, 20 West, Cornel, 26 Wolvin, Andrew, 19 Woodson, Ashley, 156 Xaviar (student, Toronto), 44, 46, 79, 166, 175–9 Xiao-Wen (student, Tainan), 41 Xiao-Yi (student, Tainan), 41 Xiao-Ying (student, Tainan), 41 Xzibit (student, Toronto), 44, 45, 158, 159–61, 159n3, 172–3 Yi-Ren. See Tsai, Yi-Ren (assistant professor, Tainan) Yosso, Tara, 106 youth: agentic self, 4, 9, 112; apathy, 235, 321; autonomy

vs. dependence, 26–7; global demographics, 329–30; stressors, 5–6. See also ambitious dreams; confidence and insecurities; democratic citizenship; drama/ creative space; research project Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary, 8, 261. See also research project

Index 405 Yu, Loretta, 261, 302(f), 304(f) Yuan-Yuan (student, Tainan), 41 Yun-Shuan (translator, Tainan), 40 Zeida (student, Toronto), 43 Zoe Jenkins (student, Toronto), 44, 45, 160, 171–2 Zofia (student, Toronto), 44 Zournazi, Mary, 122