Given the specific ways in which COVID-19 has transformed communities, it is perhaps unfortunately timely that this special issue of Youth Theatre Journal would have as its focus intergenerational performance. Over the last year, the world as many of us know it has changed drastically. As we write this, resurgences of COVID-19 infections are sweeping again over parts of the world. In some European countries the total number of known active infections totals more than when there were government-mandated lockdowns and quarantines in the spring. Indeed, some countries are reinstating lockdowns. The United States is experiencing a so-called third wave of infections as residents tire of restrictions and mixed messages from a troubled government. And even in those countries where COVID-19 has been relatively contained, the performance of daily life now includes the ubiquity of mask wearing, hand sanitizer, and the choreography of social distancing.
As we have seen, COVID-19 does not treat all individuals it infects the same way - far from it, in fact. Some may be completely asymptomatic, while for others the virus and its ensuant complications may be debilitating or deadly. At the time of writing, the hospitalization rate in the United States is approximately four times higher for Black, Latino and Latina, and Native American people, reflecting a centuries-old pattern of inequality in environment and health care. Furthermore, according to the World Health Organization, while individuals from every age group can both catch and transmit COVID-19, individuals aged 60 or greater are at a higher risk of developing a much more serious and dangerous form of the illness. This differential effect has led to something of a generational divide: family gatherings have been curtailed, care homes for older persons have restricted or eliminated visitations, some older teachers have faced the difficulty of deciding to retire or risk their health by returning to the classroom, and the work of specialists in creative aging, intergenerational performance practices, and other such arts-based initiatives designed to create and facilitate community development across boundaries of age has been greatly hindered.
Youth Theatre Journal has long been a source of multiple kinds of scholarship, publishing important and pivotal contributions to the fields of theatre history, youth and child studies, education. Any given issue might include works of dramaturgy, historiography, qualitative research, thick description, and critical practitioner reflection between its covers. We see the breadth of approaches and commitment to epistemological inquiry through inclusivity as a major source of the success of YTJ. Furthermore, we are encouraged at the ways in which the journal’s parent organisation, the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, has recently begun to examine the structures that perpetuate racism and white supremacy in theatre education and youth performance. In this vein, the special issue on intergenerational performance includes a range of practitioner reflections from community-based artists that detail arts-based practices for engagement taking place on three continents. However, a number of the authors featured here were working on ongoing projects that were impacted by the spread of COVID-19 around the globe. Essays originally conceptualised as measured case studies were forced to transform into reflections on the ways in which the authors’ modes of practice adapted to this new variable. Sadly, some projects were halted altogether - and more than one proposal selected for inclusion in this special issue was forced to withdraw, because of the impact of the pandemic on either the project itself or the author.
While the ramifications of COVID-19 on artists and scholars has been significant, it is worth pausing to acknowledge that the pandemic has had a consequential impact on artists and scholars who identify as women, particularly those with caretaking responsibilities. Multiple studies and articles published since the start of the pandemic have underscored the lived experiences of many of our contributors and readers. The lockdowns and accompanying school closures in spring of 2020 forced working parents into untenable situations with the increased workload at home falling disproportionately to mothers. In the U.S. women have been leaving the workforce in record numbers since the pandemic began, but even outside of the U.S. context, outlets such as Inside Higher Ed and Nature have reported a precipitous drop in the number of scholarly papers submitted by scholars who identify as women, suggesting that the impact of the pandemic may have significant long term ramifications for tenure and promotion and on the academy as a whole.
This has been an exceptionally difficult time for those working in theatre and performance, with many theatres in the Anglophone world remaining closed or operating at extremely limited capacities owing to social distancing. The commensurate impact on work in aging and theatre has meant that intergenerational performance projects and initiatives have been particularly hard-hit. It is a testament to the incredible drive and passion of the authors featured in this volume that they have been able to document the ways in which the pandemic has affected their work, and the subsequent discoveries they have made along the way.
The issue opens with three essays from the western United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore that examine intergenerational performance in health-related contexts. Each of the projects discussed was directly impacted by COVID-19, but the authors all note the ways in which the pandemic highlighted problems relating to ageism, power, and inequality that were present long before the virus. The next three essays, from scholars located in the eastern United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain, reflect on the ways in which intergenerational performance initiatives provide powerful sites for the transmission of cultural knowledge between one generation and the next. The final piece in this volume tells the history of a series of intergenerational plays written and performed in England in the 1930s, and in doing so it serves to situate contemporary intergenerational performance practices within a long and important lineage.
The first essay explores the parallels between the values underpinning theatre for youth and those driving work in creative aging. “Who Dis … New Phone: Considering Engaged Intergenerational Storytelling: Partnership, Participation and Pandemic,” by Benedicta Akley-Quarshie, Jamal Brooks-Hawkins, Stephani Etheridge Woodson, and Angela Pinholster, offers a powerful reflection of the development of a non-memory based storytelling project that was designed for elders living with dementia and memory issues in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, USA. The project was drastically impacted by COVID-19, but the authors face the ways in which the pandemic served to reveal “failures in the structures of engagement themselves.” This brave essay evidences the ways in which an artist’s responsibility to negotiating issues of power is only heightened during times of crisis.
The discussion of storytelling as a form of intergenerational performance work with individuals with dementia is continued in the next essay, which reflects on a project in National Health Service hospitals in London, England, United Kingdom. “Intergenerational Process Drama: Practitioner Reflection on Creative Adventures in an acute hospital context,” by Nicola Abraham, Jo James, and Elizabeth McGeorge, illustrates the ways in which both children and the elderly benefited from participating in a series of Process Dramas. The team notes that their adoption of digital technologies early in the process has meant they were able to continue some of this work even during the pandemic. They argue that COVID-19 has exposed ageist practices in public attitudes toward health care, and has amplified the critical need for such intergenerational exchanges in hospital and medical settings.
The next essay, Natalie Lazaroo’s “There’s Something in the Air: An intergenerational community performance exploring issues of health and inequality in Singapore,” looks at the impact of not only differences in age, but also class, with regards to varied perspectives on health and how to cope with illness when it may present a financial burden. Traversing these differences, this project created community and built “kampong spirit” through gathering, communal eating, and story sharing. Unfortunately, because of COVID-19 the performance was postponed by the hospital at which it was supposed to premiere – just two weeks before it was to have opened in February 2020 – and the older participants all felt they needed to leave the project because of concerns about health. However, as one participant noted, the key aim of the project was not so much about staging a performance, but rather the fostering of interpersonal connection, which was achieved despite the pandemic.
“Intergenerational and Interdisciplinary, Service through Oral History in Appalachia: History, Community and Place,” by Kelly Bremner, describes the methodology and process for the creation of an intergenerational performance in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, USA, that served to dismantle barriers of not only age-based divides, but also negative stereotypes about the cultural identity of a region. Bremner reflects upon the ways in which the theatre making process served as an intervention against the perpetuation of stereotypes and the appreciation of the cultural legacy of the region.
Gill Foster’s “Mind the Gap! A Transatlantic, Intergenerational Theatre Project,” reflects on the process of bringing an established program by the Manhattan-based New York Theatre Workshop across the pond to London, England. The collaboration brought university students and older actors together for a series of performances at the off West End Southwark Playhouse. Foster asks important questions about the parity of experiences, and challenges the extent to which theatremakers should assume that all participants are receiving equal benefit from such exchanges.
“The Magic Space: Once upon a time Intergenerational Storytelling and Mr. Neoliberalism,” by Esther Uria Iriarte and Emilio Méndez Martínez, is an experimental essay written as a story told by a grandmother to her young grandson. It is fantastical and far-reaching, using the magic of story to forge connections between time and space. In so doing, it inverts neoliberal assumptions of epistemological transmission, and (re)claims space within an academic context for the craft of telling stories.
The final essay in this issue, “Before Ballet Shoes: Noel Streatfeild’s The Children’s Matinée,” by Sally Stokes, offers an historical study of the early performance work of English author Noel Streatfeild, who wrote a number of scripts in the 1930s that were designed as deliberately intergenerational interventions. Streatfeild advocated for adults and young people to share space onstage as well as in the audience. In examining these scripts through an “intergenerational lens,” Stokes convincingly argues that Streatfeild’s work can be seen as a “touchstone in the history of intergenerational theatre.”
Taken together, these essays examine the ways in which intergenerational performance is significantly informed by, and at turns deeply rooted within, Theatre for Youth practices. Furthermore, each of the performance projects discussed herein served to create space for intergenerational connections that, very likely, would have otherwise never happened. Once the COVID-19 pandemic begins to wane, future generations will be tasked with tearing down the proverbial and physical walls dividing youth and older persons that have been erected in the face of the pandemic. It is our hope that the examinations of intergenerational performance initiatives in this volume will serve as models for the future.