BBYT: Thinking Through Theatre
This year Big Brum Youth Theatre adopted the concept of the ‘Storm’, arising out of Big Brum’s work on The Tempest, as the focus of its work.
Between 16 and 22 July, BBYT travelled to Budapest in Hungary to work on a project with a Hungarian youth theatre. The project was called ‘Braving the Storm’. Twenty-four young people were approached by a ‘new UN Commission’ (three members of Big Brum in role) to create an exhibition that would assist them to develop the rights and well-being of young people internationally.
The groups were informed that their task was to present the state of being of young people from Britain and Hungary. The exhibition would then be moved on to other countries where similar groups of young people would add their own sections. They were given five days to complete the task before the Commission travelled from the UN Headquarters in New York to see their work.
The week was led by BBYT directors, Ceri and Richard, and Adam Bethlenfalvy, a fellow TIE worker from Round Table in Budapest. Each morning we met to structure the work of the group in response to their progress. The UN had charged us with training the group in new forms, and so movement and fine art specialists were brought in to give the young people new experiences and skills. These were then folded into the exhibition process. Translation doubled the time needed for each session, and the heat of the Hungarian sun slowed us up even further, but still everyone battled to explain concepts and to understand each others ideas, ensuring steady progress throughout the week.
A small adult audience accompanied the Commission on its inspection of the exhibition on the last evening. It was called Braving the Storm: Young People in the C21st. The exhibits were quite extraordinary in both the content and variety of their forms: an abstract, interactive installation looking much like a giant spider’s web, each thread representing a border or barrier encountered by young people in their everyday lives. The adults were pressed to enter, to experience how, in order to negotiate a way through, young people have to change their shape, their stance, even their minds, sometimes into uncomfortable positions, in order to move on. The web was littered with images of young people trapped in the web and others struggling to find a way through. At the exit they were confronted by a sign reading “Young people break borders in order to learn”.
A short film explored the complex process of choice of a young man faced with enormous life-shaping decisions: a face reflected in a bathroom mirror, searching itself, looking for its self, accompanied by a myriad of voices echoing advice and opinion inside his head. The reflection shifts to the water in the sink, fracturing and reforming and fracturing again on the rippling surface. Back in the mirror the reflection is all but lost beneath condensation, steamed over by conditions in the bathroom. But the young man takes his hand and wipes the mirror: his eyes are clear, he sees himself, and he leaves.
Other exhibits included: a theatrical presentation exploring the pressures of success and expectation on young people; a stylised dramatisation of a young person battling against the darkness with whom he converses in letters; and a giant interactive snakes and ladders game in which young people progress in small steps or sudden sweeps, or fall back to the beginning, according to luck and the dice rolled by adults: the sense of frustration at not being in control of your life and having to dance to someone else’s tune was palpable.
Perhaps the exhibit which encoded most succinctly the experience of the week was a huge, life-size ‘painting’, dramatically lit, entitled The Young Storm Mappers (in the style of Munkacsy) – which the group created after a visit to the National Gallery where they experienced the fascinating works of one of Hungary’s leading artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ‘painting’ portrayed twenty-four young people crowded around a long table, poring over maps and charts, pointing and frowning, discussing and analysing, bent on plotting their course through some stormy terrain, some in bright illumination, others in deep shade.
The week’s work was hard but hugely worthwhile: it required that the young people look at themselves, individually and as a whole, and really examine their own state of being. They explored and explained through the vehicle of the exhibition, and often with the profoundest clarity, the stormy experience of being young and the strategies needed to brave a way through it. But even when the exhibition was over, and the work was done, the young people continued to reflect objectively on themselves, on what they’re doing with their lives, what other choices they might make and how they might shape the future.
Back in Birmingham BBYT members met again to prepare advice, borne of their own experience, for the group of young people working on the next section of the exhibition. This included: "be honest"; "keep testing your ideas"; "listen to each other"; "find a system of working together that includes everybody"; "don’t give up when you come up against problems"; and "overall, open your mind".
The experience of the youth theatre this year has, for the first time, distilled itself into a clear raison d’etre, articulated and adopted by the young people in it. The present members of BBYT belong to it because: “we want to think, to think about the world and things we don’t get the chance to think about anywhere else, and to think about them deeply. And we want to think through theatre.”
