Youth Theatre and Non-Text-Based Dramaturgies. New forms of playwriting

Abstract

Although at the start of the new century a generation of playwrights renewed the Catalan text-based repertoire, twenty years later many emerging companies tend to collectively write their shows instead of staging already existing plays. Theirs is often a hybrid, multidisciplinary writing, established during the research and creation process. This trend has also spread among schools, which welcome the performing arts and contemporary creation in their classrooms.

The objective of this study is to look at the contexts of collective or community ‘co-writing’ that prevail in emerging creation and to check if the text plays a major role or whether the lack of interest in texts that has emerged since 2000 is real.

The methodology has involved conducting questionnaires among youth companies (emerging or not), professionals working in the performing arts in secondary schools, and others who promote youth/emerging creation through residencies. They have been asked about collective creation, Catalan text-based playwriting or multidisciplinarity.

The results show that the need to work makes new graduates form a company and take on all the roles of creation; that the horizontality that defines these companies comes from a crisis of hierarchy but also a specific demand: the desire of the performer to be a creative subject rather than an object; that the incorporation of technology tools is due to the fact that the new creators are digital natives, and that ‘co-writing’ is the most efficient way to introduce secondary students to a process of creation.