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Something this crazy year has taught me is how versatile and essential technology is. I want to improve my skills with new technology and become more aware of the possibilities technology has to offer.  By developing this skill, I will be able to work more efficiently and be a better asset to a team.

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I want to create theatre for youth and help youth create and have access to theatre. I believe that participation in theatre helps build self-esteem, build problem-solving skills, and provides and home for long-lasting friendships and memories to develop. One day I would love to be a part of an organization that can assist youth facing various social issues and hopefully make the arts more accessible and an outlet for stress and anxiety.

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I want to create theatre for my community and I want to help my community be more involved and have access to theatre. Theatre can help us see new perspectives, promote social change, and remind us that we’re not alone. There is a human to human connection between an artist and the audience when performing and I want to help create those moments when the audience and the performers feel like one.

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I included this article because it discusses a youth organization and how theatre have positively impacted their community.

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A series that explores youth ensembles in Chicagoland, the communities that encourage them, and how young people create theater for young people.
And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?-Plato, 380 B.C.

Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) has a rich and varied history spanning global traditions rooted in entertainment, education and the fostering of imaginations. Yet TYA in the western world is deeply rooted in the social and cultural acceptance of youth as a group in need of control, protection and didactic cultivation. Centuries of prejudice have resulted in dividing professional and amateur theater on the basis of age-underpinned by images of young people as less than capable beings. When TYA is written off as less than, are we watching the effects of adultism materialize to shield projected innocence? If we are going to allow children to hear just "any tale" as Plato wrote, what better story to hear than one created by their peers?

The TYA branch of theater for, by and with young people offers a rare intersection of authorship, representation and inverted hierarchies. When the lack of youth voices in the creation of theater for youth is accepted as normal, a power structure thrives that creates theater by, with, and pleasing to adults. What happens when youth write, perform, and even produce their own work, causing the usual gatekeepers to take a backseat? Through the exploration of several youth ensembles in the Chicago TYA hub, this series will aim to explore the dynamic relationship between the fearless young people at the helm of these ensembles, and the ways in which the theater community can advocate for the theatrical work of youth.

Young people have been fundamental in Western theater for as long as historical archiving has existed. Youth acted in the commedia tales of travelling storytellers, learned from the sixteenth century Jesuit theater programs and performed in the common theater of circuses, vaudeville, and sideshows of the nineteenth century. The emergence of the "child star" in the following century led to an unprecedented boom in popularity of fairytales and literary adaptations for youth, as record numbers of such shows found critical and financial success in New York.

The sustained growth of urbanization in the twentieth-century brought about shifting societal views of humanitarianism, and children were no longer viewed as property but as innocents in need of safekeeping. The performance space itself followed suit and molded into the formal entity we know today, discouraging youth attendance and instead opening its doors to those able to pass the necessary socio-economic barriers, including age. The role of exposing young audiences to theater had fallen mainly to educators.

Chicago circumvented this phenomenon with the arrival of the settlement movement and Jane Addams' Hull House -a place to meet, socialize and learn for immigrants of different communities in the late nineteenth century. The settlement houses were placed in communities with predominantly immigrant populations, creating a need for theatrical events able to communicate through universal values. Hull House offered many social services-the most visible and influential being theater initiatives tailored toward youth. The programs brought together the multiethnic community of Chicago and spurred a powerful tradition of community engagement and activism through the arts that is still present today. Addams believed in the power of youth theater as "a reconstructing and reorganizing agent of accepted moral truths," guiding Chicago youth to question the present and envision the potential of the future.

Chicago's branch of the Association of Junior Leagues of America, created in 1924, further progressed TYA's stronghold in Chicago. No other league in the US embraced children's theater as enthusiastically as the Chicago League. The organization produced full seasons of plays for young audiences and went on to organize national children's theater conferences, establish manuscript libraries, sponsor professional children's theater companies, and license children's theater productions through much of the twentieth century.

Chicago continues to serve as a haven for groundbreaking, socially motivated TYA work. Youth ensembles write and perform in shows all over Chicago, from the south side to the north and west and everywhere in between. Productions like The Young Fugitives' Cold Summer incited censorship from the Mayor's office while Albany Park Theatre Project's latest, God's Work headed downtown to perform at the Goodman for sold out crowds. When students are able to perform in these professional settings and create from personal experience and belief, they construct and assert their identities at crucial stages of development. And when young audiences see individuals who look and speak like them on stage, the impossible stories they witness seem more possible. As studies continue to prove the benefits of fostering the ideals of encouragement, sympathy and empathy at a young age, it is imperative young people connect to a performance.

The TYA model resists being placed into a singular box. As audiences, creators and critics struggle to define what constitutes TYA, the most intersecting faction of all is theater for young audiences, by young audiences. This series will aim to explore the institutions, ensembles and youth in Chicago exemplifying this theatrical activism. Jane Addams viewed plays "not only as an agent of recreation and education, but as a vehicle of self-expression for the teeming young life all about us." Championing the theatrical work of youth is essential in how we define our theater circles as community, and honor a multigenerational collective experience.

If the theater community sees theater as a living tool to enact change through action, then isn't it about time we stand with the theater makers directly in line to change the world and listen to what they have to say?

Up first: About Face Theatre's Youth Ensemble

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Chicago's Theater By, With, and For Young Audiences

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Looking Back and Moving Forward |Morgan GreeneThe TYA branch of theater for, by and with young people offers a rare intersection of authorship, representation and inverted hierarchies. When the lack of youth voices in the creation of theater for youth is accepted as normal, a power structure thrives that creates theater by, with and pleasing to adults.

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This is an 18-day music festival that brings people together to create a community of music lovers. This festival inspires me because it teaches things like peace, compassion, and love. The community formed during this festival is refreshing and I aspire to create that same sense of home in my craft.

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I want to create art that makes a difference and has a lasting impact on someone’s life. I believe that art can change an individual. The act of creation itself uplifts and inspires our artistic spirit and I believe that emotion is transferred to our audience. I believe we can change the world one person at a time and one play at a time.

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What do I think about it and why it matters?

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What do I think about it and why it matters?

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I believe that collaboration is at the core of theatre-making. Many of us probably do theatre particularly because we love the collaborative aspect. When we tackle ideas together, communicate, listen and create a collective vision, we can create a community that values the power of individualism and the strength of collectivity.

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I want to create a space where collaboration can take place. A space where people can learn to love their voice and want to share their ideas. I want to be flexible and open in how I think and collaborate. As a stage manager, I want to embrace people’s strengths and weaknesses so we can collectively reach our goals as a team of theatre-makers.

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I included this article backseat it does a good job explaining what makes successful collaboration.

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The most rewarding feelings in life are often results of experiences we have to slog through. We climb the mountain because it is, in fact, a challenge. We set out on such quests with thoughts of accomplishment or expansion, knowing they will be difficult but assuming that we're capable of weathering the challenges. We complain and feel stressed, and sometimes we don't succeed. But if we do, the pain feels completely "worth it." We wouldn't feel successful without the degree of difficulty each quest demands.

All of us in the theater love to talk about collaboration. We say we embrace it, or maybe it's why we do what we do. One thing is for certain-we can't make theater without it. Collaboration at Boston Court begins with asking deep questions about a script. With two artistic directors and two literary managers, all of whom think dramaturgically, we have internal investigative discussions in order to sort through our own questions and then come to a playwright with those questions distilled and focused. We know these questions are hard. We know we're asking playwrights to turn back analytically towards something they created emotionally. We recognize-because we are playwrights ourselves-that we're asking writers to objectively see characters that have become people and plots that have become life stories. And we know it's both excruciating and nearly impossible. So when I hear people expound on the joys of collaboration, I know that there is a high degree of difficulty implicit in that joy.

By the time a play gets to our stages, it has usually been through enough development to exhaust the playwright. It's how the system-like it or not-currently works. But it's important to us that the first production (and sometimes the second or third) is seen as part of the development process, rather than the prize that comes at the end. We have expectations that a play will continue to evolve and grow, without having set ideas about what that looks like.

All of us in the theater love to talk about collaboration. We say we embrace it, or maybe it's why we do what we do. One thing is for certain-we can't make theater without it.

When collaboration goes right it comes out of a respect for the work combined with a happy coincidence of chemistry. Michael Elyanow, Jessica Kubzansky, and I worked well together for several reasons. First, we honored the script above all else. Easier said than done sometimes, particularly for the playwright who has to separate from his work and weed out personal attachments. (I use "his" specifically in speaking about this experience with Michael.) I don't mean to imply that he should abdicate ownership or not fight for His Play as he sees it. But the playwright has the task of stepping out from behind his words, his illusion, and showing us how the magic works. No one likes revealing the trick. It makes our work naked and flat. And from the other side, the director and the dramaturg have to resist ownership. We have ideas and projections and perhaps even an unconscious agenda that we must shunt in order to be sure we understand a script from the playwright's point of view. We must all agree to start from the same place. To state the obvious, we theater makers are full of ego. So to look at a script without the "I" attached, no matter what role we play, requires effort, diplomacy, and compromise.

When Jessica and I had the dinner with Michael in which we investigated the role of the shape-shifting sheriff, we were delighted to understand Michael's intention. We were also able to communicate to him that because this character responded to different rules than the other characters, we would have audience members who might be confused or dissatisfied. But we three agreed to the logic of it, committed to the truth of it, and interpreted it for designers, actors, and audience. And indeed, we did hear from some people who expressed confusion, much as we also heard from people who were moved and transported. But we understood and presented the play from the same place, and so our blueprint for the production could stand firm.

The Children at Pillsbury House Theatre

Our collaboration felt easy mostly because we made the effort and removed the ego. It doesn't always work that way. Different personalities bounce off each project in a variety of surprising ways. And this is not to say that this collaboration-or any other-was necessarily easy. It was only because we were willing to ask the difficult questions, do the deep thinking, and parse the complex answers that we could find the joy within the challenge of it. The collaboration involved in moving a script onto the stage demands asking the most difficult questions in a language everyone can understand.

Many moons ago, when I trekked mountains in Nepal, I remember that I was given the advice to never ask yes or no questions when asking for directions. The people living in the small mountain villages felt it was impolite to say "no," so if you said, "Is this the right path?" they would always say "yes," even if it wasn't. Instead, through whatever gesticulations necessary to bridge the language gap, you learned to ask "How do I get to..." or "Where is..." or simply "I'm lost. Can you help me?" Hard questions to ask when you're used to knowing your own directions in your own language, but necessary if you're going to find your way to the peak and back down again.

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The most rewarding feelings in life are often results of experiences we have to slog through. We climb the mountain because it is, in fact, a challenge. We set out on such quests with thoughts of accomplishment or expansion, knowing they will be difficult but assuming that we're capable of weathering the challenges.

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I included this image because it shows the different aspects of collaboration.

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I will practice and create better communication skills and practices in my life. Before the pandemic, I was quite proud of my communication skills, but since being quarantine for so long, I have lost part of that ability and the self-confidence I used to have in this skill. I believe I can fix this, but it will take time and practice once I’m around people again.

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Music, in general, is always my biggest inspiration for a project, but music like Elton John and Lady Gagas inspires me to love myself for who am. They give me the confidence I need when collaborating with others on projects. I’m inspired by their humble beginnings and growth as artists. I always turn to their music when I’m feeling self-doubt or lost.

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I included this video because it talks about how community theatre and positively impact the community and the individuals involved.

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Community Theatre: How the Weird & Wonderful Make Communities Better | Dan Chesnicka | TEDxLakeland

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I want to help create a creative and dynamic environment that celebrates individual differences. I understand that everyone brings with them a unique set of perspectives, experiences, and cultural differences. These differences hold so much power in what can be created and understood when we embrace diversity. I will treat everyone with respect, dignity, kindness, and compassion. I want to create a space where everyone feels welcome to be their true self.

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I included this song because it’s the Kerrville Folk Festival anthem and I believe in its message.

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I included this quote because I believe it’s statement and meaning.

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I included this website because it have resources and classes I can take to learn more about the no logical tools.

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LinkedIn Learning with Lynda: Online Training Courses for Creative, Technology, Business Skills

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LinkedIn Learning with Lynda: Online Training Courses for Creative, Technology, Business Skills

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Learn business, creative, and technology skills to achieve your personal and professional goals. Join LinkedIn Learning today to get access to thousands of courses. Lynda is now LinkedIn Learning.

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I decided to include this quote because I believe in its statement and meaning.

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I included this song because it’s one of my go-to’s when I want to feel confident.

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I included this website because it has steps and tools for improving communication skills. It’s written like a master class.