AN ACT OF TRANSLATION

What do directors need to know about their young audience? What role does this topic play in artistic training? Do you need a special attitude towards this audience? What possibilities are there for children and young people to participate in decision-making processes in the theater? Three directors exchanged their thoughts via e-mail about these and other questions about directing in the theater for young audiences. Leandro Kees, at the time was working on a youth novel in Patagonia, Mina Salehpour was directing at Staatsschauspiel in Dresden and Verena Regensburger was working in Munich. The digital discourse was nevertheless stimulating and made the three directors, who have not yet met in person, curious about the work of the other participants.

Left side: Scene from THESE TEENS WILL SAVE THE FUTURE, Münchner Kammerspiele,

directed by Verena Regensburger. Photo: Josef Beyer

Gerd Taube: What special attitude does it take to direct shows for a young audience?

Mina Salehpour: As a director I have to take children seriously. Only then can they believe the stories I tell them. But that doesn’t mean that I have to limit my directing language or aesthetics, or that I have to stage a children’s version of it. As a child I hated nothing more than being treated like a child. The “children’s table”, or the so-called “cat table” at family gatherings for example!!! The thought of it still makes me angry. I hate the expression “you’re just a child”. That means something like “you have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA”. I don’t believe that. Children notice everything. They can only too well distinguish truth from lies. And yet, for me the theatre is a place of fiction. In all my work it should triumph over reality. So it’s a fine line to tell a good story, with all that fantasy can offer, without betraying the essential truth. But that equally applies to my work for non-children. The difference – at least for me – only lies in the actual choice of themes. I would never call myself a director for children’ and young people’s theatre. There is no difference in my approach between developing a concept for Staatsschauspiel Dresden or for Junges Schauspiel Düsseldorf, for GRIPS Theater in Berlin or Det Norske Teatret in Oslo. My team and I always work the same way. The themes are decisive. Nothing else. It is not necessary to explicitly identify directors for young audiences. At most, this will result in them earning half as much. At least in Germany.

Leandro Kees: That’s a broad question in a field of very different institutions. At German municipal theatres – to limit the question – I would like to see more courage to experiment in our work for young audiences. Children’s and young people’s theatre in Germany is often very much shaped by conventional theatre, unlike in Belgium, for example. This leads me to the question of how theatre for young audiences positions itself in relation to the broad spectrum of contemporary art forms, and which discourses, assumptions and paradigms influence its practice. The future development of children’s and youth theatre in a global society is a topic that moves me deeply, not only as an artist but also as a teacher of future directors. I have been involved in artistic management for a long time and this has also influenced my understanding of the subject. In order to reflect on the future perspectives of TYA, it is crucial for me to look at how and where prospective theatre makers are learning; that is, to focus on the connections between training, practice and mediation.

GT: What role did theatre for young audiences play in your professional training? What would you have hoped for there?

MS: I did not have any special training in working for young audiences. Since I started as an assistant director and did not study directing or anything similar – I did not study at all – the question never came up. I don’t think that you necessarily need some kind of training in theatre pedagogy to stage productions for young audiences. But you certainly need curiosity and empathy, and you must not shy away from a dialogue with your audience, but rather keep looking out for it.

LK: In my case, theatre for young audiences was not a field of learning in either acting or dance training. You knew it existed, but that was all. It wasn’t until years after my training, when I was offered the opportunity to create plays for young audiences, that I became aware of the genre. I would say that training for theatre for young audiences seldom receives enough attention and recognition. I don’t think it is necessary to study it as a special subject, but universities and colleges would certainly benefit from recognising and teaching theatre for young audiences as a serious field. This is not always the case. In dance not at all, in acting quite rarely.

Verena Regensburger: During my theatre studies at the Ludwig Maxi - milian University in Munich, there was hardly any focus on theatre for young audiences. My time as an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele can also be partly understood as a training period. Right at the outset I had the opportunity to stage a winter fairy tale

but tend to address adult generations with the challenge of winning them over as allies for their demands. It would be wrong to believe that theatre with young people does not reach an older audience and vice versa, that theatre for adults excludes a young audience. Theatre for all! Theatre with everyone! To create theatre for young audiences and with children and young people, and to really give them a stage, is particularly successful when we are not talking about them, but rather when we are discussing things with them; when we not only discuss their topics of interest, but when they can express themselves and show what they are capable of. There is an enormous inherent power in the development of plays with young people, when a structure is created in which these different types become visible.

Peter Pan, Schauspiel Hannover 2013, Regie: Mina Salehpour. Photo: Katrin Ribbe

GT: How can we ensure that this power is part of the process and visible on stage?

for children. Following the motto “very little means, very little expense – lots of magic, lots of illusions", the children’s fantasies were transported into a world specially created for them. As I recall, my experiences with such an impartial and direct audience, with their honesty and involvement, were formative and strengthened my thinking about creating theatre.

LK: Teaching theatre for young audiences is a natural part of my theatre landscape. It would be impossible to ignore that. I teach selfmanagement (also known as career management) for prospective theatre makers, I offer this regularly as a guest lecturer at the Folkwang University in Essen and in workshops in other institutions. In this field of knowledge it would be hard not to take theatre for young audiences seriously, because many of my colleagues have spent their entire artistic and professional development within this branch.

VR: In my bachelor’s thesis “Only those who play along can win” I examined the spectator as a co-actor. The audience is always a co-player. Based on my last production THESE TEENS WILL SAVE THE FUTURE, I tend to think indirectly about (young) audiences. Because young performers do not specifically address their peers,

VR: In THESE TEENS WILL SAVE THE FUTURE the young people preserve their compelling honesty and at times their disarming naivety. They are not acting, they are. They are speaking for the collective or standing up for their own personal demands. As Mina Salehpour rightly states, “as a director I have to take children seriously” – whether they are on stage or in the audience. I am interested in the persons, characters, irrespective of the fact of whether they are professional actors or performers who are appearing on a stage for the first time. In these productions, the amateur performers are the experts in everyday life, if you like. The rehearsal process is all about bringing out the different areas of expertise. It’s all about cooperation between all those involved, developing the play jointly. As a director, I bring points of view into a theatrical context, but the statements and expressive possibilities of each individual already contain their own respective relevance. Only when the actors are freed from a formative corset, can they become truly visible. Young people experience theatre as a potential meeting place for personal and social reflections and political debate; and art as an act of translation.

GT: What possibilities do you know of for involving children and young people in decision-making processes in the theatre?

VR: Many of the teens for my last production I approached at demos. I invited them to take part in the project, with the additional remark: Let’s get into a conversation – I don’t want to make a play about your concerns solely on the basis of the research and materials I can obtain from the media. I want to know what is driving you, what you have to say. Nobody has to stand on stage at the end, but everybody is welcome to do so. The young people speak their texts on stage – statements that they have formulated in the conversations during the rehearsals. The team puts them in a sequence, but always in a feedback loop with the teens. Such a large group needs patience in all questions – be it regarding text, stage or costume – to confront each other on equal terms and give due weight to every opinion. But it is more than worth the effort. This is the only way to create an evening that teens want to share with others by communicating directly and honestly.

MS: In my work, children and young people have not been involved as actors so far. And although this is not planned for the near future, it has by no means been ruled out. Searching for a suitable concept for a theme, for a material always begins anew. In our production Paradies, which is currently running at Junges Schauspiel Düsseldorf , we invite the audience to join us on stage right at the beginning. The actors play in the midst of the au

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Scenes from TRASHedy, performing:group, directed by Leandro Kees. Photos: Paul Schopfer

dience and in this way the audience becomes a physical part of the play. Their presence on stage creates a common space.

GT: Leandro began by speaking of his utopia of a potentially universal theatre language for a global audience. How could this utopia become reality?

LK: I must admit that I can never be sure whether a play will reach its audience or not. But I believe that some of my pieces are globally compatible. TRASHedy and Chalk About, for example, have each been performed more than 200 times in over 20 countries. I worked with a number of radical limitations on both pieces. For example, I ignored all the literature on young people’s theatre and limited my material to newspaper articles. I accepted that I will neither know nor understand what makes young people tick or what interests them. I simply asked myself what interested me and tried to “talk” about it as honestly as possible. And with the word “talk” I come to the next limitation, because we often do without speech as such. Along with a team of colleagues, we asked ourselves how we could find scenic metaphors to address certain issues. And when language was used, it was often minimal, in the form of audio sequences or videos. Because we are not dependent on any respective national language, our performers can just as easily perform in Delhi as in Berlin or Osaka. Nowadays I also write more text-intensive plays and enjoy staging texts at municipal theatres. But it goes without saying that these plays can only be performed in specific language areas. Those are the rules of the game. I think young directors would discover an enormous amount about themselves if they could avoid verbal language from time to time. There you have neither rules nor methods. You are forced to understand dramaturgy in a completely new way. Limitation brings with it a kind of “compulsion to innovate”. I find it extremely healthy to go through these processes. It is also an attempt to create plays that overcome language barriers. The world is becoming more global, why not theatre as well?

VR: I sincerely hope that I will soon be able to see one of your works with no spoken language. This is an incredibly attractive approach to creating theatre without specifically verbal means: not creating music or dance theatre, but rather finding a visual and acoustic language of its own. By first restricting oneself and thus putting oneself under the pressure to innovate and experiment, seems to me the most desirable approach for artists to create new works. Have the courage to be innovative!

Leandro Kees, born in Patagonia (Argentina), works mainly with the production ensemble

performing:group using a variety of media in the fields of video, dance, theatre, installation and

performance.

Verena Regensburger, born in Bad Aibling (Germany), works as a director with young female actors

at Munich Kammerspiele.

Mina Salehpour, born in Tehran (Iran), worked as a director at various theatres and is currently on a

permanent contract at Staatsschauspiel Dresden.

Gerd Taube, born in Marienberg (Germany), heads the Kinder- und Jugendtheaterzentrum

(Children and Youth Theatre Centre in the Federal Republic of Germany) and is the artistic director

of the National Biennial of the Theatre for Young Audiences Augenblick mal! in Berlin.