A New Hearing: Representation and Relationship in the Making of Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope

Abstract

In 2014, I received an invitation from my friend and colleague Dr. Kathleen Gallagher: would I become the “embedded artist” in a multi-year, multi-sited, international ethnographic research project examining the power of drama in the lives of young people today? The prospect aligned with my evolving practice as a playwright and community arts worker but was in-and-of-itself without a Canadian precedent, in terms of scale and scope. How was I to translate multiple drama classrooms around the world (and the multiple worlds of any drama classroom) to an uninitiated public in a theatrical and meaningful way? My chapter examines the upshot of integrating a theatremaker into the DNA of a long-term research project and the documentary play that resulted from my travels with Kathleen to Lucknow, Coventry, Tainan, Athens and sites in Toronto. More specifically, I have examined how the drama classroom became more than a location of research. In grappling with the transcultural and transgenerational exigencies of the play I created, the drama classroom and its inspiring young residents provided creative methodologies for the art-making itself. How do contracts of care and languages of imagination co-exist and correlate? My sense of ethical responsibility and desire to expand the possibilities of representation would prompt me to embrace E. M. Forster’s concept of “round characters” and Ishiguro’s efforts to write “three-dimensional relationships”. This chapter explores how the Radical Hope Project propelled artists and audiences to contemplate how we might better listen to young people and one another.