Many Iberoamerican TYA artists recognize that the way to change this current trend is to surge forward and include adolescents in their audiences, even though doing so might run the risk of failure. In response to this need, Iberoamerica introduced an extension of what was originally a European project called “Schoolyard Stories.”

The 1st National Conference on TYA was a unique event in India attended by over 150 theatre persons, writers, educators and parents from all over India, as well as eight guests from abroad. Together they debated, networked and suggested ways of strengthening TYA throughout the country. A special feature of the Conference was the writers’ workshop, designed for writers/directors to explore the raw materials for playwriting, in keeping with the needs of their young audiences.

WLPG Roving Reporter Jenny Anne Koppera writes that the American Alliance for Theatre and Education recently sponsored a group of seventeen theatre artists (students and recent alumni from the University of Texas – Pan American) to attend the AATE Lakeside Reflections Conference in Chicago, Illinois early in August 2011. Through a multimedia and documentary performance piece entitled Crawling with Monsters, the group brought to life the largely unreported, war-like conditions in Reynosa, Mexico, and the surrounding region.

Verbatim theatre is a modern form of documentary theatre in which the playwright uses the real words of interviewees to construct a play. Like its theatrical forebears, such as the 'Living Newspapers' produced by the Federal Theatre Project in the US in the 1930s, it is often associated with coverage of current events and controversial political issues. Black Watch, by Gregory Burke, portrayed British soldiers in Iraq in their own words, while David Hare's The Permanent Way documented the privatization of the UK railways.

But what about using verbatim theatre as a form to capture the lives of young people in their own words? David Megarrity is doing just that with students at the Queensland University of Technology, developing a play around the theme of ‘love,  adrenaline and transitions’.

For the past 10 years, the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, Georgia has chosen 20–24 teens to participate in a summer high school playwriting program envisioned by Artistic Director Susan V. Booth and entitled 'The Collision Project."

The young people extract what is interesting and meaningful within the classic text and create their own play in response to the original work. 

 

The source text may be a play, a novel, a poem, a speech or any other written word that is considered “classic”.

 

 

Playwright Amaranta Leyva and puppets go WAY back. 

Her parents founded the Marionetas de la Esquina before she was born, so puppets have always been a part of her life, in the plays she writes for the company, in plays she writes for children and for adults.

Check out the article in the Toronto Star on line

 

 

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing, on July 30 of Nancy Swortzell, one of the great women theater for young audiences and educational theater in the USA.  Most relevant to the 'write local play global' community may be her co-founding the New Plays for Young Audiences program at the Provincetown Playhouse, which helped develop over forty new plays for children and young people with playwrights from the USA, Ireland, the UK, and Australia.