Beyond Innocence by Senior, Adele;

Short description:

This book focuses on works with children who occupy various roles in performance practice that have been shown in UK contexts and festivals over the last two decades. It draws on case studies from theatre, performance, live art and dance that have been developed by a wide range of international artists and companies working within Europe.

Long description:

On a global platform we are witnessing the increased visibility of the people we call children and teenagers as political activists.

Meanwhile, across the contemporary performance landscape, children are participating as performers and collaborators in ways that resonate with this figure of the child activist. Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance proposes that performance has the ability to offer alternatives to hegemonic perceptions of the child as innocent, in need of protection, and apolitical. Through an in-depth analysis of selected performances shown in the UK within the past decade, alongside newly gathered documentation on children’s participation in professional performance in their own words, this book considers how performance might offer more capacious representations of and encounters with children beyond the nostalgic and protective adult gaze elicited within mainstream contexts. Motivated by recent collaborations with children on stage that reimagine the figure of the child, the book offers a new approach to both reading age in performance and also doing research with children rather than on or about them. By redressing the current imbalance between the way that we read children and adults’ bodies in performance and taking seriously children’s cultures and experiences, Beyond Innocence asks what strategies contemporary performance has to offer both children and adults in order to foster shared spaces for social and political change. As such, the book develops an approach to analysing performance that not only recognises children as makers of meaning but also as historically, politically, and culturally situated subjects and bodies with lived experiences that far exceed the familiar narratives of innocence and inexperience that children often have to bear.

Table of Contents:

Part 1 Performing Children  1. The Problem Child of Contemporary Performance  Part 2 Reading Children  2. From Age Transvestism to Trans*-age Performance: On Children Playing Adults  3. The Child as Adult in Five Easy Pieces  4. The Female-Girl-Child-Teenager in The Hamilton Complex  5. From Gender to Age: A New Approach to Reading Age in Performance  Part 3 Experiencing Children  6. Queer(ing) Methodologies  7. The Embodied Child of Blind Cinema  8. Growing Sideways Together: Zina Abaraonye and Sorrel Barnes on Men and Girls Dance and We Are Not Finished  9. The Child as Researcher and Archivist: Documenting News News News