Center Stage Youth Theatre

I recently finished reading At Play – Teaching Teenagers Theatre by actor, composer, writer and director  Elizabeth Swados.   Ms. Swados’ techniques for guiding young people in creating performance pieces based on their life experiences is inspiring and I hope to utilize many of her exercises and her theories in my work with my Glenforest students.

Ms. Swados has had a wonderfully varied career and has worked all over the world.  Through her travels she has had opportunities to experience many different theatre traditions that helped shape ideas for the new form of theatre she has  created.  She says:

The American landscape is full of diverse, conflicting “tribes”, and when i returned home from my travels, I decided to devote my work to a kind of street theatre, a political storytelling theatre that could speak to the young people in the village of the United States.

The book goes on to describe and explain how she worked with a group of troubled young people and created a performance piece about their lives they called Runaways.  The show was a completely original innovation adapted from the work the kids created in the workshops, and actually went on to run on Broadway.

Imagine!

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