Is the performing arts a game changer for Youth?

An informal writing piece for PACOFS social cohesion 2023

Dearest colleague and friend in the arts. I want you to close your eyes. Take a few deep belly breaths in and breathe out through your mouth. While breathing, take your memory back to your childhood. Think about a moment when you were happy, carefree, and confident. What are you doing? How are you feeling? What can you hear, see, taste, smell or feel? Who is with you? If anyone is with you, how old are they? Who are they?

Good day everyone. I do hope you have a big smile on your face now as you reflect on a moment in your childhood. For me, it was playing Barbie dolls in a big dolls’ house my father built for me. I could play and enact scripts for days on end. All alone, but with my mom peeking through the door and listening to the storylines. I guess that’s where it all started for me.

I am Schoemé Steenkamp, born and bred in Bloemfontein. I share many happy memories in PACOFS. From being part of the Bloemfontein Children’s Choir, whose home PACOFS was, back then, to performing with various productions on the beautiful stages. The choir spent many Saturdays there and I am so thankful for the discipline I learned through being part of the choir. A type of discipline changing the game for me as an adult many years later.

Today, I would think of myself as a Creative Entrepreneur with a tremendous love for children and a desire to make a change in their and their intermediate caregivers lives. I am the owner of PuppeTrix, a theatre company specializing in creating work for Very Young Audiences, especially Baby Theatre for Babies 4-12 months old and Educational Theatre in Pre-Primary Schools for 2–6-year-olds. My husband always reminds me that babies and toddlers, do grow up and become teens. I must admit, I am a bit afraid of working with teens. However, my experience with older age groups includes drama classes, workshops, adjudicating and being an art facilitator in schools. I mention this, because this is my framework and experience from where I would deliver this dialogue today and I hope you can relate it to your own or PACOFS’ own context and experience.

The question at hand today is: Is the performing arts a game changer for youth?

I don’t think we would all be gathered here today if we didn’t believe the performing arts to be a game changer. However, do we believe it to be a game changer for our youth? From babies, toddlers, tweens and teens? Do we treat this market as such?

Let’s look at the playfield from three different points:

· Who is our youth audience?

· What do we want to achieve or address for this audience?

· How do we achieve this or measure our success?

On the first point of, Who is our youth audience?, I’d like to read the explanation of Youth from today’s Concept Note:

“7.1 Youth

The youth comprise a large segment of the South African population, however policies and discussions by government and social partners on challenges facing the country continue to address this component of the population as an afterthought. There is no coherent, long-term approach to engaging their position in society, and the type of consciousness the youth will require as they become adults, functioning in the work force and in the social spheres of a society that continues to display growing divisions of an apartheid legacy.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, our younger audiences should not be merely treated as an afterthought. We should not simply stage children’s theatre because a program requires it. Our younger audiences form our future adult creators and audiences. The youth, from babies to teens, is our foundation audience. They need us and we desperately need them.

Children are not human becoming’s; children are human beings. The work we create for them, should respect their capability of perceiving an artistic experience. I despise statements like: “children can’t concentrate for too long, or we need to keep their attention.” No, let’s rather look at the flipside of the coin, maybe our work should be better developed for them to want to engage for longer periods. Yes, it is possible. Yes, babies do sit still and watch a theatre performance of about 30 minutes long. Let’s remember: who is our audience?

A baby is born with 100 billion brain cells, with few connections/paths between these cells. From birth to the age of 2, about 700 new connections are formed per second. 700 brain pathways per second, 700 opportunities… Amongst other things, creative stimuli and social structures form positive structural brain pathways for babies. Creative stimuli within a social structure - A wonderful recipe found in theatre – don’t you think? By the age of 3, a youngster’s brain is about 90% developed. Let’s not miss the opportunity of letting the performance arts be a part of this development.

Martin Drury former arts director of the Arts Council of Ireland and acclaimed cultural advisor states the following: “Many things could be said about the shared space between the arts and child development, one is around the unique presence of childhood and the need to provide and not merely allow for all two-year-olds, three-year-olds, four-year-olds and five-year-olds to make and tell stories of being 2,3,4 and 5. For them to sing the songs, dance the dances, create and enact the dramas and make the images of their concerns, hopes, fears, dilemmas, dreams, fantasies of being 2, 3, 4 and 5. A five-year-old is not a 1/3 of a 15 year old or a quarter of a 20 year old. Being 5 is not a fractional experience. It is a very complete state, and you only get 365 days to be five. So, it is really urgent that it is as rich and as comprehensive an experience as possible. The arts are fundamental to that richness and completeness. As a unique and fundamental set of human symbol systems, engagement in high quality and age-appropriate arts experiences, in a sustained sequenced and cumulative way, is critical to child development. It’s not something that is random or optional or that can be postponed to adolescence or adulthood.”

This is our young audience, ladies and gentlemen, and the arts can only be a game changer for them if we consider and respect them as a serious group of audience members, capable of more than a wishy-washy children’s theatre production just for the sake of doing a children’s theatre production. Let’s be critical about this when selecting productions, creating, acting for or viewing the arts aimed at youth.

Apart from looking at childhood development, you and I are also aware of who our audience is, by means of a social and physical context. Our youth faces so many challenges in South Africa. If we are to call ourselves artists, this should break our hearts. We do not have enough time this afternoon to even mention all the challenges, but the following resonated with me in the context of our discussion this afternoon.

According to the latest statistics South Africa’s unemployment rate worsened in 2023. Youth unemployment for ages 15-24 years, and 25–34-year-olds were the highest on record. Despite the focus and importance of technical and vocational skills in South Africa, research shows that youth with soft skills are more likely to find employment. Soft skills prove far more important and should form a crucial part of any youth employment process, especially for those who want to start their own businesses one day.

Soft skills are personal qualities that enables a person to thrive and interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. These skills include curiosity, empathy, integrity, self-confidence, problem solving, social and communication skills.

I don’t know about you – but I believe these skills are a product of exposure to the performing arts. If we want to give our youth hope for the future let’s change the game by using the arts as a vehicle for them to develop soft skills.

This reference to the challenge our youth audiences face and the importance of cultivating soft skills, tie in with our second point. If we believe the performing arts to be a game changer for youth – what do we want to achieve, or what do we want to address for our youth audiences?

The youth audience is a blank, but don’t forget capable, canvas full of possibilities. The younger, the more eager they are to soak in everything and make meaning thereof. This however means we have a very big responsibility when creating work for this group. Younger children do not necessarily have a choice in what they are offered. When creating work for the youth, what is our motivation? What is your intention? Does it align to the age groups’ needs or your own personal artistic urge? We should be very careful here. Changing the game can have a negative side as well and the youth is influenceable.

As a personal example. In creating Theatre for Babies, I want to hold a space, for letting the performing arts do what it does best for the babies. Research nowadays suggest that emotional intelligence is more important than intellectual intelligence. Theatre for Babies stimulates emotional intelligence. As the baby experience art, he/she tries to form a pathway in their brain of how they feel. This is amazing to witness as the baby experiences an emotion and “checks in” with a fellow audience member or caregiver to make meaning of what they experience. Imagine if this little “babah” experiences performing arts from birth up until stepping into adulthood. Imagine all the opportunities he/she would have had to grow emotional intelligence and soft skills. This is a part of my why!

For older groups and even for caregivers and or teachers, I sense the need for, and importance of, allowing time to reflect on the performative arts experience. If you create work for teens, make sure that they can engage afterwards and make sense of what they experienced. Which is also a part of our third and final point of discussion, how do we achieve changing the game for youth through arts or how do we the measure the success thereof?

I believe, this really is a practical answer. The success which we are referring to here is not measured by the applause of the audience, how well an actor performed or how great another adult reviewed the production. The impact the performing arts make is in the youth audiences’ reactions, connections and reflections and we should be very finely tuned into it.

For me success, it is a parent saying: I didn’t know my baby was capable of this or a baby mimicking the movements or sounds in the production. For the ASSITEJ Kickstarter project, using the performing arts as a method to assist with the Life Skills module in South African classrooms, success is a teacher testifying that her confusion turned into confidence when using the performance arts to teach, not just Life Skills, but also her isiZulu lessons.

Changing the game is not an end result. It is part of the process. When I had the privilege to perform in a kindergarten in Italy, I quickly learned that their schooling systems do not divide differently abled children into “special schools” or “special classes”. When asking fellow performers how they go about in their performance in such a diverse setting, the answer was: see the invisible child. If what we deliver is of exceptional artistic quality, but we miss the invisible child, the performing arts will not be a game changer in that instance.

Apart from observing our audience and seeing the invisible child, I think it is important to know that creating age-appropriate work for the youth does not mean it is easier work. I’d like to believe it is way more challenging! The International Artistic Association Small Smize refers to a quote from Professor Göran Malmqvist, which I remind myself every once in a while, from hearing it the first time: "One think that one should lower oneself to the child's level. Instead, one should raise oneself to the child's ability to empathy and imagination."

We tend to find adults, ourselves, in a room discussing the importance of youth or reviewing a children’s theatre piece during a festival, without the presence of any child in the room. How silly we are because our answers and successes are found with them. Let’s create and connect, step up into their worlds and be a vehicle for the arts to change their lives, as I believe, the performing arts also changed a lot of our lives, somewhere during our childhood. Which bring us back to our initial question:

Is the performing arts a game changer for Youth?

If you believe this to be true. Ask yourself as an artist or as an entity, do we create these game changing moments for the youth? Do we truly know our youth audience, what they need, what we want to address/achieve and how to measure the success thereof?

Are we a vehicle to create emotional intelligent adults with the soft skills necessary to contribute to a greater society? I hope somewhere in between these questions and my ramblings, you can find your YES, your FIRE, to use the arts as a game changer for youth in South Africa.

Sue Giles, President of ASSITEJ International, writes in her 2023 World Day for Theatre for Youth the following:

“Theatre and performance for young audiences is distinct in its approach; valuing children and young people as discerning audiences, participants and contributors to culture, with the right to experience the arts and to have freedom of expression. Giving space, place and respect to the imaginations of young people gives them foundations on which to build resilience and confidence. Sometimes we cannot take children to the theatre buildings. Sometimes there is no such place. Sometimes physical, economic, geographical or social barriers make it impossible. How wonderful it is, to hear and see so many examples around the world of theatre and performance going to where children and young people are. No matter whether in a theatre building or in a back alley, the creation of wonder or a shared moment or an intriguing ritual is something that can transform a day, or a life, even momentarily. I urge all of us working in this sector to seek out the young audiences that we don’t know and haven’t met yet.”