Meddling with ‘drama class’, muddling ‘urban’: imagining aspects of the urban feminine self through an experimental theatre process with youth

Abstract

This paper addresses how the urban is imagined and troubled through performances of youth engaged in a devised theatre project. These youth, situated next to a particular and storied urban place, reshaped the discourses of ‘The Downtown Eastside’ (DTES) in a classroom-based performance project. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Ellsworth, who argues for the pedagogical power of considering the student who is in motion and performing in relation to an outside world, we describe how the youth in this study accessed their lived experiences to reconfigure common representations of young women in the DTES. Through devised theatre methods, the youth explored and created more complex and proximal representations of lives and circumstances otherwise steeped in taboo and stereotype. The theatre process used in this school-based project evolved from the meeting of contemporary devising practices with more traditional drama education expectations. This paper describes the circumstances and process of this work and focuses on the analysis of one scene from a final performance of the work.