Something Inside So Strong

This website is designed to share practice with theatre-makers, educationalists and scholars interested in the insights discovered from creating a new youth musical for young people.

The website will provide some narrative and analysis about the project, as well as links to other sites that are connected to the investigation.

When young people want to be involved in performance, the musical is more often than not their first experience and develops into a passion. Although no statistics can be found for the amount of musicals performed by young people in the UK, it would be fair to say that comparatively large resources are expended on them. This has a great deal of impact affecting how young people view performance, the kinds of training they enter into and the stories that get told.

However, there would appear to be significant pressures to re-produce a relatively small canon of shows. In the USA, where some statistics are available, it is noticeable that Disney and other movies heavily influence programming. In the UK, tastes would seem to differ a bit, with Oliver, Grease and Bugsy Malone appearing to be the most performed.

As a form, the musical has many attractions for young people. Chiefly, it uses an array of popular theatre forms that are compelling for young people of all backgrounds; the same degree of "cultural capital" (Bordieu 1977) is not needed to get involved, as could be said to be the case with, say, Shakespeare. Although there is much to debate about the negative effects of celebrity culture (which may not be as damaging as headlines might indicate), the musical has nevertheless the potential to offer considerable learning for young people. Musicals have often dealt with stories of outsiders from Showboat to Billy Elliott. And yet, for young people involved in productions from the usual canon, content is barely examined. Where there might be rich learning opportunities, for example in staging Oliver, issues such as child labour, domestic violence and racial stereotyping are rarely explored. With other musicals, they are considered (wrongly) almost content-free. It would, for example, be unusual to consider the gender roles in Grease when creating a school production.

Largely, this unexamined programming is due to a "painting by numbers" approach to production. Both schools and youth groups seem to place the marketability of already popular shows as a high priority. Specific interpretations of these musical theatre "classics" are mostly a "given", with, for example, a "correct" version of the choreography and staging. Often, in fact, choreography is replicated from the films.

To explore the state of youth musical, two questionnaires have been compiled. If you're a teacher or group leader, it would hugely benefit the project if you could spend a few minutes answering the relevant questionnaire:

Youth questionnaire.

Schools questionnaire.

This investigation raises the question: what if musicals with young people were more ambitious in terms of their learning?

So, we ask:

• How can young people be more involved with the creation of musicals?
• How can they engage with production processes that really tap into their creativity and learning?
• How can youth musicals promote genuine inclusivity and diversity?