Knowing Yourself
Youth Theatre
In 2014, the oldest child in the center is over 8 years old and they are about to graduate from the center's 3-8 years old kid’s course. These children have all entered junior high school today. At that time, they and their parents expressed their hope that they could continue to grow up with Drama Rainbow, so the Youth Theater Project came into being.
The Centre hopes to create an environment that is different from previous curricula, allowing these more mature teenagers to participate in a wider society while retaining the virtual learning methods of playing and drama. As a result, a youth theatre project influenced by the tradition of drama in Education emerged. Unlike traditional theater performances in the traditional sense, Drama Rainbow’s youth theater pays more attention to the process of exploration. The drama provides important and rich tools to help children have the whole story, then, all members (not just the teachers) participated in the play. In the process of making a play, children have to participate in many theater processes such as rehearsal, director, screenwriter, dancer, publicity, planning, finance, time management and so on. These important experiences have been able to be brought together into one hour of performance, while the whole year of experience was for the purpose of learning. After the performance, members of the troupe will also participate in social practices related to the theme, and an exhibition of the repertoire will be held at the end of the semester. Our teachers, like drama in education courses, also help children build up their learning files for the school year. This all-round learning practice is an extraordinary process. For children 8-12 years old, the theater provides a warm, protective, purposeful and meaningful mechanism. Supporting groups of parents and children are immersed in an environment without academic pressure, and we believe there is no better way to learn. Like the children, the parents of the Youth Theatre are in a small and tightly-connected community. Together, they support their children's projects with actions. In addition to taking charge of the field work such as photography, video, ordering meals, and transportation necessary for the performance day, parents also spontaneously organized their own "theatrical troupe" to meet at Drama Rainbow every Saturday, putting down their social identities and just enjoying the spirit of theatre. From the perspective of children, parents can now focus on the present, tolerate differences, and with their children to embrace more opportunities.
Preparation of play in the Youth Theatre
Drama Rainbow Youth Theater was founded on March 1, 2014, and is a theater company formed by a group of children from 7 to 10 years old. They inspect stories, explore objects, create scenes, design posters, make props, and raise funds for performances, and make their voices heard through Drama Rainbow Theater Center.
The youth theater gives each child a space to discover and develop her/himself independently. They play different group roles, learn to take responsibility, listen to others, make collective decisions, and resolve conflicts. The youth theater encourages children to become a group of people who think positively, have the courage to reflect, love communication, have empathy, and have social responsibility.
It may take many decades to evaluate a pedagogy or teaching system. The children of the youth theatre have grown up with Drama in Education and the ten years of the Drama Rainbow community. Although just a small footnote in their lives, we can still see from them that dramas are influencing the “what kind of people” these children are, “what kind of people” these people constitute, and the society and culture they are gradually forming.
Any child who enters the Theatre Center is gradually aware of her/himself and the relationship with the world in the ever-changing society and culture. This is why we pay so much attention to their reflection on themselves through drama (virtual) and social practice (real). This is why it is a center, and its members are active members of the community, and they are not just students.
"Social change" is the most repeated phrase in the global academic literature in 2018. It also means that the topic of education for families and schools will become more complex, extreme and full of unknowns. How can we prepare the society, culture, environment, and politics that children and young people will face in the future? So, we need an undisputed foundation of all education methods and ideas, and that is modern education should be future-oriented. However, is our education culture facing the future? The courage, perseverance, curiosity, creativity and imagination, collaboration and most importantly, human nature, are the purpose of education? And how will children and young people themselves find their own compass in this unknown game?
The Youth Theatre hopes to give an open space to the above propositions. It also hopes that young people themselves can have the right to speak about the future in an era when the faces of the human being are unknown, and can comment and influence the topics of "Who are we? What should I learn? And How to learn?". In any case, it is they who are really facing the future, and as we prepare them for this long journey, we are learning from them.
