Where we are in the world makes our art unique. Our context gives meaning to our creative decisions and choices. Context allows us to understand other people.
Where we are in the world makes our art unique. Our context gives meaning to our creative decisions and choices. Context allows us to understand other people.
I am writing from Tasmania – the beautiful Australian island that sits like a heart south of the mainland. I have spent a week being a Provocateur for a wonderful residency program with a focus on theatre and performance for, with and by children and young people. I leapt at the chance to spend a week with a small group of artists who have decided to make new work in this field.
Immediately previous to this week, I was in Okinawa at the ricca ricca Festa and spoke at a symposium on Weaving Peace and Coexistence – a conversation on the role and purpose of theatre arts in the lives of children – with speakers from Japan, Korea, Italy, India, Taiwan and Laos. While there, I had the joy of running a workshop for Japanese artists. At that workshop, we did a small exercise where participants drew or wrote everything they know about a young audience. I wanted to see through this exercise whether the knowledge was the same or different in vital ways from my own, and of course it was… similar but with interesting differences that made it clearer to me what contexts people were working in, in Japan. The same exercise I ran with the group in Tasmania. Again – their island context is different to mine on the mainland.
While in Tasmania with the artists embarking on new work, I talked about the world of ASSITEJ International; how far it reaches, what countries are involved, what we strive to change, our focus on the rights-based argument for cultural inclusion. During this time, I was reading applications and watching videos from all over the world as part of the selection process for the World Congress. I was struck once again by the glaring inequity in our field worldwide and how people’s context shapes their drive to create. Also during this time, I met with artists and ASSITEJ members online to plan for the Asian TYA Network meeting at BICT Fest later in the month and heard from theatre workers from Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan about their contexts and barriers to creating new work in the field of TYA. Our EC meeting this month is in Santiago in Chile, where we will be immersed in that context – attending Famfest and meeting with the IberoAmerican network and deepening our understanding of the issues and barriers faced by artists and audiences. These contexts provide such important information to share. We are not the same, and our field of theatre and performance for, with and by children and young people in the world is astoundingly diverse – can we grow to appreciate this and be in the position of not judging without understanding?
Our ASSITEJ International gatherings are where understanding context is most important. We strive to show a snapshot of work around the world that illuminates the differences between us and how we create. People offer work with their hearts, minds and spirit and with a desire to be understood – to share their context and their creation. In this we are vulnerable, open to misinterpretation. And yet what a privilege for us to be there for such a display of different contexts and the work that emerges triumphant from these? For all the differences in why we make performance, there are a thousand ways of making. Our contexts drawn together show us clearly how limitless this world of live performance can be.
This has been a time of many roads connecting and many layers of understanding being drawn together. A time of energy and new perspectives and of new artists discovering the complexity and purpose of performance and this young audience. It has been a time of relishing the differences that make our unity stronger.
