From Audience Member to Citizen: TYA Scripts, Ideology, and Communitas

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Notes

This article is a distillation of one chapter from my dissertation. My complete study explored the concept of “colonizing the imaginary,” an “ideological process in which adults write their own culturally bound values, beliefs, and ideas onto narrative structures and performances intended for children's consumption” (Chappell 2008, 18). I explored this concept in a number of sites, one of which was theatre for young audiences scripts. This study was intended to build theory around these issues using the scripts as exemplars of such colonizing activity. It is my hope that the theory explored in this study will lead to further inquiry, whether ethnographic, empirical, or in other forms.