The Beginning of a Movement
Posted by Claire Orzel on 7/02/2010
(Claire is a member of Steppenwolf For Young Adults‘ Young Adult Council)
In October, the idea to send a teen delegation to the annual TCG conference was brought up by Hallie Gordon, the Director of Steppenwolf for Young Adults. The fact that we were eventually allowed to attend and had the privilege of leading a breakout session was a tremendous feat that I do not credit to us teens at all.
In the weeks leading up to the conference, I began obsessively Googling TCG and the conference. I memorized the schedule and labored over which breakout session I was going to attend (the amazing diversity of those breakout sessions and the affinity groups from which to choose didn’t make the decision easy).
The descriptions of the events couldn’t hold a candle to the events themselves. We hopped from readings of international plays to lectures about decision making, from discussions about education and outreach to parties at Chicago Shakespeare and much, much more. I barely had a chance to breathe and absolutely loved every minute of it. We were confronted with new conceptions of theatre, race, gender, and education that challenged and strengthened our personal views. The conference reinforced my belief that theatre is an international, interracial, inter-gender and inter-everything-else way of bringing people together to share ideas.
Our goal, as members of the Steppenwolf Young Adult Council, was to spread ideas about how to get teens more involved in theatre and how theatre companies could work on getting teens into their theatre. Adults are constantly discussing how to get teenagers into the seats in their theatres, but they rarely ask the teens themselves. We were able to act as a focus group for all the TCG members who would listen to us, and many did. Everyone was so open to us being there. They asked questions and listened to our answers and really seemed to respect us and care about what we were saying. As the conference continued our ideas got grander. During the three day conference, I started to think that if we could get enough theatres around the nation to invest in teen programming, we would be fostering a new generation of theatre-goers. No matter where these teens moved when they grew up, they would be invested in theater thanks to the investment made in them by their first local theater communities.
Hopefully, the conference was the beginning of that movement. We collected enough business cards to fill two wallets and talked to everyone from Artistic Directors in New York and Directors of Education in Arizona, to a man who plans international theatre exchanges, and every single one promised to at least bring the idea of some sort of teen program back to their theatre. I have the profound satisfaction of participating in the beginning of a movement that will hopefully continue and grow for years to come.