Andrew Kushnir (’98): A Different Kind of Listening
As we celebrate 30 years of investing in high-potential young Canadians, we have asked members of our community to reflect on meaningful risks and what constitutes #RisksForGood. Andrew Kushnir (Loran Scholar ’98), a theatremaker and Artistic Director of Project: Humanity, submitted the following reflection as part of the series.
Verbatim plays are something that I’ve been working at for the past twelve years: dramas composed from ‘real words,’ as originally spoken by interview subjects and performed live by actors on stage. I sometimes call them ‘live documentaries’. The actor in a verbatim or documentary play serves as a kind of proxy for the original interview subject and the effect is distinct. Playwright David Hare says, “In a way, all documentary plays are essentially saying the same thing, which is that the world is much more interesting than you think it is, people are much stranger than you think they are, the world is much more various, the way people look at the world is much wilder and much more unexpected.” My theory is that these plays overtly activate one’s social conscience alongside the imagination, they invite us to listen to the world in a different way. I’d argue it’s a fine alternative to the endless news cycle and a way to explore contemporary social issues on a human-to-human scale, in public.
This work is also ethically treacherous. Legitimate issues of paternalism, appropriation of voice, and misrepresentation have to be contended with. The creator’s bias (no matter how unintended or even resisted) comes into play. In an effort to include a multiplicity of perspectives on something, you certainly can and do miss angles and nuances. My favourite verbatim plays eschew the binary, they grapple with irreconcilable questions of justice. These plays are not about talking heads, they activate multi-faceted theatrical metaphors which are open to interpretation, to a kind of personalization, to debate. The audience does not arrive at a uniform conclusion.
For all of its liabilities, I recognize how Verbatim Theatre is worth the risk. I think this work activates what my friend and colleague Dr. Kathleen Gallagher calls “a thesis of care”. What sort of caring and ethical relationships are required to create this kind of experience for audiences? And how might the labour of forging new connections (and often connecting across difference) draw us into a more compassionate way of being with others? By privileging people’s own words in these scripts, I hope I’m underlining how any given person is the expert of their own lives, and that they have something to teach the world. By extension, how might we listen differently to one another and be changed by that listening?
My latest verbatim play was called Towards Youth: a play on radical hope. It premiered last February in Toronto. The script’s ‘real words’ were first voiced by some 250 young people (aged 11–23) I met in drama classrooms all over the world: England, Greece, Taiwan, India and Canada. What could drama kids teach us about the times (and thinning democracies) we’re living in? This commission came from Dr. Gallagher, who is based at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her vision was to embed an artist in her international, multi-year ethnographic research project titled “Radical Hope”. She wondered if revelations about young people in the drama classroom could be made appreciable through drama itself and she came to me with the ask. Could I create a theatrical portrait of young people today, as they express themselves in our current times of global unrest?
Over the course of several years of development, the play honed its argument: the drama classroom is a space wherein you can creatively explore your own story and in doing so, often encounter the systems of power of which you are a part. The drama classroom can then become a place to rehearse the world you want (as opposed to the world you’re inheriting). As a former “drama kid” recently told me: “That class helps young people decide what kind of people they’re going to be.”
This space, when its pedagogy is rigorous, can be a wellspring for youth citizenship and the young activist voice. As posited and analyzed by Dr. Gallagher, it can be a workshop for hope. Think Parkland. Think youth for climate justice.
Towards Youth has distinct demands as a play. A cast of nine adult actors is to depict 36 students and 12 educators of varying ethnic and racial backgrounds. The cultural contexts of the play require moments of linguistic virtuosity: Cantonese, Greek and Hindi language, a Midlands English dialect, the particular sound of a ‘last resort’ school in downtown Toronto. If that wasn’t enough, the script requires an ensemble of actors — ours ranging from 23–45 years of age — to play characters significantly younger than them. This was not an attempt at cheekiness — the script works hard to avoid any “kids say the darndest things” moments.
The entire gesture of the play is to invite the so-called ‘adult world’ to genuinely turn towards youth and see what happens. What happens when an audience member risks letting go of their own story of something or someone — even momentarily — to carefully and caringly do what documentary theatremaker Anna Deavere Smith calls “take a walk in another person’s words”? In the case of Towards Youth, I was trying to extend to an audience my own ongoing practice: an effort to genuinely let go of my prevailing narratives about being young, and engage with the lived realities of youth today. The actors in our company undertook this practice, the audience bore witness to its effect (possibly, hopefully undergoing their own version of it). It was delicate intercultural and intergenerational work, all in an attempt to do justice to the dignity of young people Kathleen and I spoke with.
I never took drama in high school. It was in fact the scholarship I received called the Loran Award that emboldened me to pursue theatre at the university level — to the initial dismay of some high school teachers and family. The award was a game-changer: venturing into the arts without the anxiety of student loan debt. Moreover, it impacted my paradigm, to have an entity affirm my values-in-motion regardless of which direction I took them in. I think that did a lot for my self-esteem.
At national interviews, I was asked about future careers of interest (perhaps I had written them down in my application, too). I believe I said “lawyer, teacher, actor” — in that descending order. I recall feeling some nervousness about including “actor”and if it would be perceived as a pursuit ‘worthy’ of Loran’s support. Would listing “lawyer” and “teacher” give me more substance, and temper that third, wilder, (truer) option? In retrospect, I see how one’s pursuit was not the thing that was being vetted. It was likely most significant that, in those interviews, I gave voice to a passion and dream.
How do we create spaces where young people feel able to tell their own stories? How are we all enriched when those stories reach the broader world? In Towards Youth, so much of this came down to the pedagogical space, the classroom, as a wellspring for this kind of youth agency and citizenship. With that, I’d like to conclude with a pivot (though perhaps this will read clearly as an extension) into some reflections about the research and this particular verbatim play. It may not come as a surprise that some of the things that consistently activate and support the voices of young people became powerful guides in my theatremaking process. But I believe there are resonances and applications well beyond that.
The Circle
The drama classroom is one of the few spaces in a school where young people sit on the ground with their teacher, facing one another (as opposed to a blackboard, or more often than not, the back of someone else’s head). In my work in schools and in the youth shelter system, the vulnerability-inducing circle can be a quick way to bring up the ‘mask of cool’. But I think it’s one of the quickest ways to dissolve it, too.
Kathleen and I found ourselves sitting in a circle on June 25, 2016 in Coventry, England. The day after the Brexit result. In the circle were the young participants of Canley Youth Theatre — our research site in the UK — who were taking this opportunity to share their shock and dismay.
One boy, Max, expressed deep concern about his father’s job security and the likelihood of having to move away should his father’s employer relocate their headquarters. In the ensuing silence, another student, as if to unburden herself, said “I voted Leave.” Ophelia had not in fact voted Leave, she was too young to vote. But what she went on to explain is that her class did a mock-vote and because her parents and extended family were voting Leave, she did as well.
It wasn’t necessary for her to admit to having done this, but she did. Max didn’t have to unflappably reassure her that she was still part of the group, but he did. What the adults in the room witnessed was young people arriving at a resolution that privileged care over changing someone’s mind or punishing them for their ‘outside’ view (I sensed that Ophelia regretted her ‘vote’ once her peers’ position was more clear). We witnessed an alternative to polarization — something that was in stark relief to the manipulative political campaigns we had witnessed prior to the referendum. This was not young people imitating the world around them, it was young people creating the world they wanted.
The circle interrupts hierarchies and what leadership looks and feels like. In the circle, you’re more likely to be heard by everyone in the room and, in turn, to listen better to others (even those you may not agree with). In the circle, you have to show up. You are accountable to the group, and they, to you. With Towards Youth, the circle meant building a network of relationships that could best take responsibility for ‘real words’, where those words were coming from and how to most effectively convey them to uninitiated publics. Actors can often feel apart from a project’s typical ‘concept-makers’ (directors and writers). In our process, I’d like to believe that we disrupted notions of “us” and “them”, a movement away from binaries towards the stuff of a true ensemble.
The Power of Acknowledgement
In the well-functioning drama classroom, just as in well-functioning theatre — everyone is consequential. Unlike other classrooms, where a student may keep to their lane, the drama classroom is predicated on collaboration, on the cohesion of the group, and on working towards that shared goal. An absent student (or a student who absents themselves through disengagement) can completely shift the alchemy of the room. When Kathleen makes connections between the unfolding work of the drama classroom and the concept of citizenship, the implications are powerful.
In Kathleen’s practice as an ethnographer, she has always upheld that young people know their own lives. Her research has exposed a key finding: young people often do not think of themselves as the group we (the broader world) think them to be. So embracing young people as the key informants of their narratives is a way to disrupt stereotypes and generalizations. It points up the ways in which larger systems have failed the individual needs of a young person and flags opportunities for reform.
In many drama classrooms, the life of any given student becomes the curriculum. By this I mean, drama and embodied storytelling often depends on a young person telling their own story. It behooved us, as artists, to model this reality in our own theatrical offering. Towards Youth opened with the actors taking the stage as themselves — prior to adopting any characterization — and making themselves known to the audience as adult artists who would be playing young people from all around the world. One could say that this is ‘telling’ before ‘showing’, but in fact, what was being articulated was a kind of contract of care and responsibility that couldn’t simply be inferred, it had to be expressed. The actors, in this way, told their own story before undertaking another’s.
How do we do better to acknowledge that everyone is coming into a room with their own paradigm and that these paradigms need to co-exist if we have any hope of genuinely democratizing the space? In my work with youth, as an ice-breaker, I often have everyone go around the circle and share their name and their nickname. Moreso than our given names, a nickname often comes with a story replete with characters, relationships, events, and feelings. The collective work of the drama classroom, the theatre, or any other sincere collaboration, needs to mobilize the idea that everyone is coming from somewhere and that this has a bearing on how they see the world. As Kathleen has put it to me: “becoming a group is an achievement” that involves more than a shared space and shared activity.
Imagination and Care
In my travels I have witnessed inspired “border crossing” in the drama classroom. Young people, in the wake of Brexit, embodied superheroes that highlighted an aspect of their most-caring selves. In a suburb of Athens, students envisioned the realities of a refugee based on the contents of a suitcase. In India, the girls of Prerna Girl School debated child marriage through various adult voices and roles (one girl portrayed her belligerent neighbour, another depicted a female Prime Minister).
Were it not for the language of imagination, we wouldn’t be able to sit in a theatre and be moved by a 40 year old woman delivering the words of a 13 year old boy, speaking about the government cuts threatening his youth program. Through actor Zorana Sadiq, a boy named Bruce asks us, “Where will I try things that I’ve never before dreamed of doing?” The reaching that we witness — such disparate identities coming together through drama — works our empathetic muscles. I believe that exercise — particularly when done in a social way — is deeply needed in our times.
The language of imagination is key to the leaps of compassion that happen in the theatre, for artists and audiences alike. I’d argue that it makes for new understandings. It opens doors. It has to be done carefully, in relationship and dialogue with the marginalized communities it aims to serve. The concept of care has been central to the relationship that Kathleen and I have forged in our research and artmaking. And it seems to me that the richer and more sustained the relationships are with a community of people, the more complex and far-reaching the empathetic exploration can be. It certainly was the case for Towards Youth, but I know these young people have an even further reach.
Young people and the drama classroom give us our cues and show us a way to transcend our perceived limits, if only we listen.
