Facilitator: Nelly van der Geest (Utrecht School for the Arts)
Speakers: Anthony Heidweiller (Yo! Opera), Saskia van der Ree (Yo! Opera), Jeroen Kriek (Growing Up), Ingvild Molenaar (Growing Up)
The projects
(1) Yo! Opera has established creative partnerships with two schools in Utrecht, the Rietendak primary school and the Utrecht Zuid College, a secondary vocational school. Both schools are located in relatively low-income neighbourhoods (Ondiep and Kanaleneiland, respectively) and attract many children of non-Dutch backgrounds. Yo! involved these children in aspects of the creation of Kuil [Pit], a mini opera and visual art/new media installation about extinguished animal species. The goal of this partnership is twofold: (1) the personal development of the children and (2) artistic innovation through partnership with the children.
(2) Growing Up: once a year, director Jeroen Kriek makes a performance with students from the Rietveld secondary school in Utrecht. Participants are selected through audition. The goal of this creative partnership is both to attempt to change the students through theatre and to change Jeroen Kriek as an artist through the partnership with these young people.
The partnerships
Yo! Opera’s artists work directly with the children themselves, but also prepare material that the school teachers can use to prepare the children for the interaction with the artists. After their first project with the Rietendakschool, Water in 2005, Yo! decided to hire an education officer, Debora Patty, who has become indispensable in these creative partnerships, which also include work in the neighbourhoods surrounding the schools, and involving parents. As the following response of the school’s director and the liaising teacher indicate, projects such as Pit can also put stress on the regular school activities, however.
Like other Utrecht-based arts organizations, Growing Up in Public ‘adopted’ a high school a few years ago. Once a year they make a performance with youngsters attending Rietveld College, a high school located on the edge of Overvecht. Their latest production made in collaboration with the school was Exit, a multimedia theatrical collage about male-female and intercultural interactions among the students there. These kinds of projects allow the company to infiltrate at every layer of the school. The shows also enthuse new students to participate in future productions, which, taken together, form an informal collective history of the school.
The processes
Yo!’s Pit is a performance about a man who is looking for the last surviving animal on earth. The Rietendakschool children all adopted an own animal of their own, for whom they wrote a poem, created a clay footprint, and a sound. The process lasted two months, with the artists meeting the children once or twice a week. Separately, teenagers at vocational technical college Utrecht Zuid, carved the names of extinct animals on woodblocks, which served as pedestals for the footprints in the sound and visual art installation that served as set for a ten-minute opera. This opera was created separately from the school processes, something which Anthony Heidweiller, Yo’s artistic director, somewhat regrets in retrospect. Likewise, the children and vocational college students could perhaps have been involved more in the digital processing of the soundscape, which the Polish composer now created in isolation.
Growing Up’s Jeroen Kriek treats the high school students he works with the same way as professional actors. They rehearse in the Growing Up studio after school hours, thus providing a neutral space away from school power structures. Jeroen’s exercises are physically quite strenuous, but he also builds in Buddhist-type meditations to increase the students’ concentration levels. Through this work, he establishes positive group dynamics and trust that allow him to embark on long, open-ended improvisations that form the basis of the resulting script. The attitude of the students changes substantially through the process. As the following video illustrates, they appreciate being taken seriously, being treated as professional artists, and being given responsibility for the show.
