Introducing My Placement
Where I’m Placed
My Placement is with Theatre Direct, “one of the country’s leading theatres for young audiences whose award-winning productions have reached audiences in schools and theatres across Canada and the world” (Theatre Direct, n.d. a). This internship is related to their current project, What Was My Backyard?, a new participatory musical for young audiences, created to tour Toronto schools.
Goals of Theatre Direct
This year, Theatre Direct brought on a new Artistic Director, Lisa Marie Diliberto who "brings her spirit of collaboration and her expertise in community-engaged arts to the company along with a desire to put young people directly at the centre.” (Theatre Direct, n.d. a) With this new leadership, Theatre Direct is striving to include community-engagement as part of its arts education practice, by creating in-school theatre experiences that include students as part of the creation, rehearsal and performance process.
Community-engaged arts is a practice that centres both artistic and social outcomes (Hutcheson, 2017), through actively including “non-artist community members” alongside professional artists (Thinking Rock Community Arts, n.d.). Doing so creates collaborative, inclusive environments that centre the perspectives of diverse participants and connect them to opportunities to encounter and explore new ways of making art and thinking about the world we live in.
To this end, Theatre Direct has partnered with community arts organizations Jumblies Theatre and The Community Arts Guild to present the new musical What Was My Backyard?
About What Was My Backyard?
What Was My Backyard?, co-created by an inter-cultural artistic team of settler and Indigenous artists, “whimsically enters into questions about the land and people of what is now Toronto" and "asks young people to think about what was here before on the land where our homes, playgrounds, parks, streets and backyards now stand.” (Theatre Direct, n.d. b)
The show brings community-engaged approaches into a school setting, with artists undertaking a multi-day residency in a public school, supporting grade 4-6 students to take active roles as singers, dancers, puppeteers, actors, and designers.
The culminating performance for the school community will bring together intergenerational performers of mixed abilities and experiences. I additionally have an artistic role in this project as Music Director, which is separate from this internship.
Internship Details
This internship will give me the opportunity to be involved in thinking through strategies and approaches for a community-engaged arts education process such as What Was My Backyard? to partner productively with Toronto public schools. This will include: assisting with communications between organizations and school staff, supporting teachers to lead follow-up lessons, debriefing the pilot performance with teachers, and contributing to the creation of curriculum guides and lesson plans for future iterations of the project.
Since November, I have begun completing hours towards the internship, through meetings with the Theatre Direct and producing team, to envision the design of a pilot process for What Was My Backyard? at an elementary schol in Janaury 2020. Through this pilot, Theatre Direct intends to develop tools and approaches for a future school tour in 2020-2021, which will include some public/community performances. Materials that I work on will contribute to the project’s future, and can be used as exemplars and models for future community arts/education partnerships undertaken by Theatre Direct and their partners.
This internship is an incredible opportunity for me to bring together some of my big questions about education, community engagement and the arts.
This January, I have been connecting to Theatre Direct weekly to support Internship tasks going into the school pilot. After the pilot production (January 24th), I will take part in debriefing activities with Theatre Direct and school staff, which will inform the creation of the curriculum and lesson resources, with connections to The Arts (dance, drama, music, visual arts), Social Studies and Literacy. I will then contribute weekly hours to contributions to the creation of curriculum/lesson materials for future iterations of the residency.
My Learning Goals
Me taking part in Jumblies Theatre's Community Arts Project, Like An Old Tale. Click to watch a clip from this production!
This internship is an incredible opportunity for me to bring together some of my big questions about education, community engagement and the arts. My work prior to OISE was primarily as a community-engaged artist, through leading community choirs. Now, as I prepare to become a teacher, I am excited to explore ways that these two disciplines (education and community arts), with aligned but differing goals and practices, can come together within the school system, to create engaging, inclusive and educational environments with aesthetically and socially powerful impacts.
Already, this internship has already given me the opportunity to better understand the possibilities of this work, as well as the challenge of supporting artists to navigate educational institutions and to find creative and transformational ways to align arts-based work with curriculum goals – and I’m looking forward to deepening this learning!
Theatre Direct is an ideal mentor organization alongside which I can explore some of these questions in practice, as they have a long organizational history of bringing artists into school and navigating the school system as a platform for presenting new, innovative works for young audiences.
By applying my experience with community arts in this field, with Theatre Direct’s support and expertise, I hope to learn strategies and approaches to bring community-arts practices into a school setting. I hope to develop new skills to collaborate with school staff (including administration, classroom teachers and itinerant teachers), and develop confidence and language to communicate about art projects with educational professionals, and vice versa.
Additionally, I hope to learn, through collaborating with Indigenous artists, new ways to infuse Indigenous perspectives and histories into participatory, arts-based learning experiences in classroom settings.
Through taking part in the creation of lesson plans and curriculum guides, that capture and reference this hands-on, intercultural, community-engaged work, I hope to find equitable ways to represent these approaches in educational materials that can be used by other Ontario educators These are conceptual and tangible skills that will contribute to developing my own arts-based, community-engaged and social justice-oriented educational practice in the future.
References
Hutcheson, M. (2017). Framing Community – A Community-Engaged Art Workbook. Retrieved from http://www.arts.on.ca/oac/media/oac/Publications/Framing-Community-ACommunityEngaged-Art-Workbook.pdf
Theatre Direct. (n.d. a). About Theatre Direct. https://theatredirect.ca/about/
Theatre Direct. (n.d. b). What Was My Backyard. https://theatredirect.ca/whatwasmybackyard/
Thinking Rock Community Arts (n.d.). About Community Arts. Retrieved from http://www.thinkingrock.ca/the-riversspeak/arts