Youth Workshops

February 12th-15th 2007:

A Youth Participant Workshop took place at Inuksuk High School, Iqaluit, from 1:45 p.m. – 3:05 p.m. each day. The workshop leaders were Judith Rudakoff and Andrew Cheng. The ten Youth Participants were drawn from the high school’s Grade 11 and 12 drama programme. Common Plants chronicler Myles Warren documented the process and Drama teacher Mrs. Renata Solski observed. The workshop followed a major blizzard that closed the school the during the previous week, as the winds of up to 135 km per hour had torn part of the roof off the building. For the first day of the workshop, there was no internet access. (This report was prepared with the assistance of notes from all three Common Plants researchers on site.)

February 12th:

On February 12th, Rudakoff  introduced the goals and methods of Common Plants to the new Youth Participants, focusing on The Four Elements and on Lomograms. She also welcomed back those who had participated last year, in person during the February 2006 workshops and on the Common Plants website through the Inuksuk High School blog in the BLOGarden and individually on the site’s Ground Forum and encouraged all to consider interacting with the South African participants who would be undertaking a parallel workshop simultaneously. In Cape Town, South Africa, at University of Cape Town, ten Youth Participants from Khayelitsha Township were following a similar set of Common Plants exercises, lead by facilitator and Common Plants collaborator Mandla Mbothwe.

During the introduction, Rudakoff introduced some of the core research questions of the project, including “Is home where you are or is home where you come from?” and “Is home a place or something else to you?” A discussion ensued about identifying home as a place or a person or a state of being and the Youth Participants declared their individual interpretations. They were then asked to consider how they might represent home in one object or one person or a smell or a time, leading one Participant to declare, “Home is where my bed is,” an indication that what is considered to be “home” can change, move location, or be found when or where it is least expected. The group also discussed how home can be either a nurturing positive environment or a dangerous, threatening environment.

During this first day of work, each Youth Participant was issued a disposable camera and a sheet of prompts. Rudakoff explained that each prompt could be interpreted through the particular participant’s filter and that the photographs could be poetic, metaphoric, realistic, humourous, interpretational, documentative. These prompts were:

- 3 photographs: what is home?

- 3 photographs: what is love?

- 3 photographs: what is time?

- 1 photograph: your shoes/boots in a peculiar place

- 1 photograph: your past

- 1 photograph: your present

- 1 photograph: your future

- 1 photograph: something that makes you laugh

- 3 photographs: water

- 3 photographs: fire

- 3 photographs: air

- 3 photographs: earth

- A self portrait

The next part of the workshop started with Rudakoff asking each Youth Participant to randomly choose one of the Lomograms. When all ten Participants had selected a Lomogram, she instructed them to turn the card over, view the image and then write without editing or judging their writing. The Youth Participants wrote for approximately ten minutes and then each, in turn, volunteered to read their writing aloud. As each piece was read, Rudakoff, Cheng and Warren gave dramaturgical feedback, indicating how each initial piece of writing could evolve into a specific style of type of performance.

For example, Teresa Inooya’s piece evoked a narrative rich in visual cues that could lend itself easily to video interpretation, given its multiplicity of locations, changes of light and directional movement and shifts in time. Ritchy Collin’s piece introduced a man surrounded by barriers of many types and explored the dire situation of a man who is struggling to change his life, perhaps through escape. Sam Tilley created a man, to his surprise, in the throes of a midlife crisis, about to change his life. Oshea Jephson’s writing provided the option of a one person performance about a man’s journey to a new place where everything smells different, is different.

These dramatic contexts and characters provided and will continue to provide much creative material. When the Youth Participants were given the feedback that each quickly written piece was evocative and held the potential to be evolved and performed they were pleasantly surprised. In addition to the dramaturgical feedback on their writing, Rudakoff also introduced The Four Elements and worked with the Youth Participants to identify some element qualities (individual and combined/interactive) in people, behaviours and landscapes.

Rudakoff then collected the Youth Participants Lomogram writing exercises, and she, Cheng and Warren, with the Participants permission, posted them on the Common Ground Forum on the website so that the South African Youth Participants, in their parallel workshops, could read them.

February 13th:

The high school internet was fully functional on this workshop day, so Rudakoff took the opportunity to introduce new features of the Common Plants website to the Participants and to explain to the new members of the group how to register on the Forum. In addition, she showed the Youth Participants their published writing on the site and pointed out that in one day there had already been 32 viewings of the writing. For all the Participants, this was their first experience with having their work disseminated publically and, in fact, internationally.

Next, the workshop focused on writing “There are stories about…” and reading the work aloud. As this second piece of writing from each Youth Participant was read, Rudakoff and Cheng were able to discuss each unique creative voice that was emerging, demonstrating to each Participant the type or genre or style of work they were creating and about what prevalent theme or idea was emerging. Sam Tilley wrote with great humour about sporting events, but also spoke with pride about the first Inuk to become a professional hockey player. Bjorn Simonsen evoked the end of an era in a piece that combined nostalgia with longing. Seané d’Argentcourt-Printup wrote of the beauty and ugliness of daily rituals, repeated until new ideas, challenging ideas break the patterns.

Rudakoff, Cheng and Warren collected the writing and posted these new “There are stories about…” on the Common Ground Forum that evening.

February 14th:

On this final day of the workshop, the group met in the high school Drama Room, a studio space. In this open space, Rudakoff asked Andrew Cheng to work with the texts created on February 11th and February 12th  by the Youth Participants and with them build physical manifestations in a theatrical context.

To begin, Cheng asked each Youth Participant, in turn, to select a volunteer cast of devising performers to enact the central idea of their Lomogram or “There are stories about…” writing in a set of two fixed tableaux, each representing a point in the action of their evolving play. The Initiator was tasked to choose two moments in the piece that offered a distinct shift or change in emotion to ensure that each moment would present moments fraught with dramatic action rather than state of being.

As each Initiator moved about the room, placing their actors in positions, Cheng continued to ask them dramaturgical questions to develop the emerging narratives, to set a theatrical context for each moment and to ensure that the initiator’s intention was being communicated to the audience.

Cheng also asked each Initiator to name the two tableaux with a unifying title. These are the titles:

Harris Ali: Street Lights
Ritchy Collin: Confusion, Certain
Seane d’Argencourt-Printup: Standing on their Glory
Teresa Inooya: Lost
Oshea Jephson: Darn
Hannah Lewis: Escape
Conor Mallory: Shattered
Bjorn Simonsen: Sweet Sixteen
Lauren Solski: I Want…
Sam Tilley: Protecting

As each tableau was set, Cheng directed the Initiator to ask the audience for interpretations and then, based on these responses, he gave each Initiator one further opportunity to edit the physical vocabulary and revise their tableau. Then the audience was again asked for feedback and the Initiator was asked to capture an image of each of their two Active Moment tableaux.

Most of the viewers understood the intention of the tableaux and quickly realized that this combination of physical and interpretive exercises required that they “show not tell or explain” what their intention was. The distinction between action (the reason for doing) and activity (doing) was clearly demonstrated in their work. Further, the Youth Participants, both as Initiators and as performers, worked confidently and creatively, using their dramatic tableaux to communicate with few inhibitions.

With respect to themes communicated, there was an emphasis on power: lack or possession thereof. For example, Bjorn Simonsen (Sweet Sixteen) first presented a young woman, devastated, standing apart from two of her peers who glared at her with hate and resentment. Through feedback from the audience, Simonsen shifted his tableau to show a sad woman, prone, as her peers looked on, delighting in her misery. The second tableau in this sequence showed the sad woman empowered, looking away from her tormentors, towards a distant horizon, with arms outstretched towards her new future elsewhere. In this second tableau, the tormentors were shown struggling with their loss of power of the bullied girl, unable to prevent her from leaving.

Oshea Jephson’s (Darn) first tableau presented two adult men, but he characterized them as elemental beings or animals with human characteristics. One lay dead and the other was engulfed in grief. Standing between them was the murderer, a fully human man, who took pleasure in the sadness of the grieving being. Jephson’s second tableau took place in the moment before the murder, and showed the two elemental beings stealing the food of the man who would become the killer. The audience of peers agreed that the man was hungry, with limited food and that his crime was motivated by need and anger. As such, the audience suggested that the killer’s vengeful glee would only be temporary, until he realized what he had done.

Seané d’Argencourt-Printup’s (Standing on Their Glory ) initial tableau offered a powerful woman sitting on the floor, immobilizing two other women who were hovering above her, by the sheer strength of the expression in her eyes. The second tableau was of the powerful woman standing over the defeated pair, now lying on the ground, their feet entwined.

Lauren Solski’s ( I Want…) first tableau introduced a man longingly observing two people struggling to reach a common goal. In her second tableau, Solski had the man realizing that his goal was different from the others, and feeling relief as he saw them fail to reach their objective.

Teresa Inooya’s (Lost)first image was of a man lost and uncertain, peering around a corner. Her second tableau showed the man finding a place to be that gave him comfort, safety and confidence.

This final day of the workshop worked to physicalize dramaturgical image and metaphor as a means of transmitting idea without relying on text while the first two days were structured to use Lomogram images and text to transmit the meaning of a metaphor without movement. They discovered that their theatrical work communicated to others both through their original words and through their devised physical tableaux. Perhaps most importantly, this multifaceted set of exercises in an intensive three day workshop offered the Youth Participants increased confidence in their emerging creative skills and in the power of their personal histories.

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