“The Child Respondent Method: A Play Development Praxis for Theatre for Young Audiences”
Kristin Leahey
Wooly Mammoth Theatre
In 1931, children’s theatre playwright and artistic director of Chicago’s Children’s Theatre Charlotte Chorpenning began incorporating child audiences’ feedback into the development of her work. She listened to audiences’ responses (e.g., laughing, wiggling, and in-awe stillness) throughout performances and interviewed children during intermissions to improve her plays and the productions. Employing these methods, she doubled the canon of children’s theatre plays within twenty years. Regrettably, only Chorpenning’s plays remain but not her empirical data on audience reception or her notes on how she revised her work as a result of this research. In addition, although Chorpenning was an artist and educator who published extensive treatises on the definition of children’s theatre and playwriting pedagogy, very little of her praxis on the development of her own work exists for today’s scholars and practitioners to study.
To develop new work intended for young audiences, contemporary educators, playwrights and dramaturgs practice a technique akin to Chorpenning’s, which I term the Child Respondent Method. Based upon specific questions regarding the play’s development, artistic collaborators design and facilitate a creative drama workshop with the intention of eliciting answers and additional feedback from its child participants. I’m interested in investigating how play with the target audience/spectators is employed to create plays. The Child Respondent Method exemplifies a reciprocal relationship between theory and practice (play). To demonstrate this concept, I will examine how the Child Respondent Method and play illustrate Susan Bennett’s reception theories and Sonja Kuftinec’s work on community-based theatre, while acknowledging how it was practiced and documented in the creation of the two new theatre for young audience plays: Muddy Boots and Katrina: The Girl Who Wanted Her Name.
Filed under Playful Destination, Working Sessions 1. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
