Co-edited with Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, Assistant Professor of Arts and Cultural Management at MacEwan University, contributing writers to the issue were also UBC Theatre Studies doctoral student Matthew Tomkinson and Theatre Studies PhD alumna Julia Henderson.
This special issue examines the advocacy for and significance of discussing performance for/by/with young people in Canada. It asks how thinking about young people as audience members, creators, and co-creators can expose ideas about who they are, what they want, and what adults believe is good for them. The nineteen writers who contributed full-length articles and forum essays to this special issue demonstrate how attentive consideration to young people complicates creation ethics, aesthetic choices, affective impacts, content decisions, approaches to training, working conditions, and ideas about risk in connection to the performing arts. As the authors discuss how young people imagine, witness, train, and perform, they are simultaneously advocating for the young people they write about, for the specific issues that concern them, and for these perspectives to expand and invigorate broad conversations about Canadian performance for all ages. https://utpjournals.press/doi/10.3138/tric.41.2.01.en
Sandra Chamberlain-Snider
Sandra Chamberlain-Snider, MA Theatre Studies (2013) UBC, is a doctoral candidate in Theatre History at the University of Victoria. Her doctoral research investigates the historical and contemporary presence of theatre training in the lives of young people in English Canada. Traversing across theatre history, Canadian theatre, and Canadian cultural studies, her research considers what the art of theatre may reveal about Canadian youth as they imagine, construct, and challenge themselves in Canadian society. Along with Claire Carolan, Sandra co-founded the Tri-University Colloquium in 2015 as a space for West Coast graduate students’ scholarship in theatre and performance, a successful endeavour that continues. Recent collaborative work is published in Canadian Theatre Review (Spring 2018, vol. 174) and a chapter in Web of Performance: An Ensemble Workbook (U of Victoria, 2018). Sandra actively volunteers in the Vancouver theatre community as a board member of Boca del Lupo and a past chair of the Theatre for Young Audiences category of the Jessie Awards.
