Sideshow and Bear with Me

Child Voice in Research led by Creative Practice

David Megarrity is a Senior Lecturer in Drama in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice,  a proud member of the Centre for Child and Family Studies, playwright,  songwriter and ukulele player. David has been making quality music-led theatre for children since 2000. This year’s Children’s Week sees David in the middle of a couple of creative practice-led projects inclusive of the voices of children and young people in the research. Here David shares an overview of his projects and his research which celebrates children and their important contributions to research and creative practice.

Sideshow

There are 127 Agricultural Shows in Queensland and thus far no one’s written a play centred on young people’s experience of them, so for the last few months, I’ve been working to create a script designed for young people to perform, that explores this topic.  I’ve developed Sideshow in consultation with a small group of young people from Dalby, supported by the Don Batchelor Award in partnership with Toowoomba’s Empire Youth Arts, which has a long history of creating new works with, and for young people. This project is designed to entwine fairly standard approaches to research with enquiry led by creative practice.

The voices of these early adolescents ring through the script I’m creating, but Sideshow is not a verbatim theatre project. Consent was sought and granted to collaborate with a focus group whose contributions shaped the developmental stages of writing this new play.

This interaction has involved the group discussing their local knowledge, personal experience and key concerns, performing creative tasks, reading, and responding to the script that’s being generated, and setting and reviewing homework for me as the playwright/researcher. This is a simple inversion of the standard relationship between adult and child when it comes to ‘who tells who to do what’, which the group seemed to rather enjoy, but more importantly, it honours their position as experts of their own experiences.

In writing this piece I’ve examined over 30 scripts written in the last 20 years (from Nick Enright’s Spurboard onwards) that address growing up in regional Australia. It turns out that, like Sideshow, many authors are very keen to point out that their provenance involves a research, consultation, or workshop period with young people to ensure the work is grounded in their experience, yet the final script almost always ends up being owned by the author. There’s a clear flavour of ‘authenticity anxiety’ around apparently un(adult)erated representation of young people’s voices onstage which I’m interested in exploring further in my research and writing around the project. In collaboration with Dr Jenna Gillett-Swan, we’ve built an aspect of enquiry into Sideshow designed to find out what these young people think about being research participants and voice how they see themselves ‘voiced’ in the creative work.

Though the script is a work in progress, some themes are emerging.

• The experience of young people in rural Australia is often to do with separation and reunion, yet while geography has an impact on making and keeping relationships, they manage much in an environment that brings constant change.
• Young people often have to wait, often in order to embark on some pretty rickety contraptions. Literally, here at the Agricultural Show’s Sideshow Alley, or more figuratively, dodgy elements of society such as health services, education or the employment market.
• Young people can and do look after each other as best they can when adults fail them.

The play is a four-hander (a play written for only four speaking parts), designed for young performers plus an ensemble, it combines text-led and physical theatre with miniature model building and live feed video as the sights of sideshow alley are constructed around them by the young cast with colourful blocks and Lego figurines. The script requires no physical ‘set’. It is designed for the often under-resourced school or youth theatre production. The ensemble operates a video camera, visible onstage, which feeds live on to a screen, so we see images being made in front of us as they provide a backdrop for the whole performance. The images (made mainly from Lego) could be created live, be pre-prepared, extant or a combination. This arrangement is deliberately and obviously low-tech, and should be created and manipulated by the young cast and crew as much as possible. What’s the point of a play about how self-sufficient young people can be, that defers its technical aspects entirely to adults?

Bear with Me

As well as being a playwright, I’m a performer, and I’ll be finishing the year with a production of Bear with Me, a music-led participatory performance for children and their bears, which this year is celebrating its 10^th anniversary with a short season at Metro Arts in Brisbane’s West End.

Having made quite a few shows for children I created this show as part of my PhD in 2012, exploring how music can lead performance in the mode of Composed Theatre. It premiered at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s Out of the Box Festival of Early Childhood and went on to perform in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. It’s had quite a life.

 

Though it presents as a quirkily simple ‘concert for bears’ based around some original songs and play-based actions, it really aims to celebrate the complex role that “bears” and other transitional objects perform for children and their families. You don’t have to know much about attachment theory to know how important these toys can be,  but I wanted to find out about their significance from the child’s perspective, and I want to explore this anniversary show as a potential platform for a research project that privileges the voices of children, narrating their experience now, as well as looking back on their younger selves, given that the show’s first audiences will now be in their early to mid-teens. Their bears tend not to say too much about their ages. Or much at all. The research we’re building around the show is still in formation, but bear with us.

Incorporating the voices of children in research is always going to present challenges, and reinvention is bound to be required for each new context. My research partner Assoc Prof Maryanne Theobald and I will potentially be gathering data from ‘Bear Experts’ who are actively engaged in making their own meaning in the research, as well as creating raw materials for an art project which could end up being something potentially quite beautiful. And why can’t research be beautiful?

Come and see the 10^th anniversary season of Bear with Me from 7-10 December at Metro Arts in Brisbane’s West End. The 5pm show on Wed 7^th is a fundraiser for the charity Mummy’s Wish. Bookings here.

David Megarrity

Image Credit: Funfare ride 011 by Kapungo