The Time is Now | La Boite's Young Artist Company
The Time Is Now is a new work that seeks to start conversations between teenagers and adults about uprooting the establishment that often seeks to silence young people and supress their rights.
Performed and created by La Boite’s Young Artist Company, the content of this play was very similar to my work Dear Adults, a play which debuted at the Anywhere Festival this past month. Similar to this new work by La Boite’s Young Artist Compant, Dear Adults is a verbatim work made up of letters from young people aged six to eighteen addressed to adults about how they run the world and treat children and their opinions. Our cast consisted of a similar group of 12 young people aged from nine to 17 and explored themes of gender roles, climate change, bullying and how the legal system treats minor. I’d love to know more about the creative process of the work and how the creatives incorporated the young people’s stories into the script. Maybe I’ll call them up for a coffee one day …
Back to the play. The Time Is Now features ten storytellers from different ethnic backgrounds and ages, with the youngest being a ripe old age of twelve (nearly thirteen) and the oldest, eighteen. The work was built around the UN Declaration of a Child’s Rights, with each performer making their own amendment to it. These amendments include each child having freedom of expression, the right to be safe, the right to have ice-cream and the right to be a bad ass Queen.
Image and cover photo: Markus Ravik Photography
From directly addressing the audience, to playing games of musical chairs, to ripping up pages of the UN declaration, the show had it all. I enjoyed its boldness to call out various heavy topics. These topics included domestic violence, sexual assault, racism and climate change. Although some lacked a little in diction and projection, the passion poured from the storytellers’ mouths and crept into the hearts of the audience.
The show also featured an adult, selected prior to the performance, who came on stage at the start and the end, to share their responses to the children’s amendments. I felt like the addition of an adult seemed to defeat the spirit of the show however, with the appointed adult delivering a very appropriate corporate speech that felt like a handbrake to the passion expressed by the youth.
This passion showed in a favourite moment when Sophia shared her anecdote about getting ice-cream with her gran as a coping mechanism to overcome bullying. For me it perfectly balanced the trauma of growing up, with the innocence of childhood. It gave me hope that simple joy can be found in dark times, in lives of both children and adults.
Another highlight was eighteen-year-old Omal’s story about fleeing to Australia and coming to terms with her identity and the colour of her skin. It was such a raw, honest and sincere recoundl the bandaid was fully torn off. You couldn’t but marvel at how much someone at the age of 18 had already gone through in their lifetime, yet contain so much levity and such a bubbly demeanor.
The Time Is Now is a rousing work that with further creative development has the power to change the lives of young people not only in Australia, but all over the world. It has the power to change lives because it’s about breaking rules, it’s about waking adults up and telling them that the time is now to start treating children, their perspectives, and their rights as worth fighting for.
The Time Is Now plays until 5 June at La Boite, Kelvin Grove.
Image: Markus Ravik Photography
