Truth or Story: Looking and Listening for "Truth"

• In Event: 28.090 - MTCC Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: 28.090-4 - Truth, Trust, and Story: Practice, Pedagogy, and Power in the Lives of Youth

Abstract

PURPOSE:
This paper investigates the paradox inherent in storytelling, truth and representation. Two diverse groups of youth in Coventry and Toronto, separated by country and institution, grappled with the complexities implicit in truth and fiction as they questioned what was “real”. Devising performance through oral history processes, each participant reckoned with the responsibility of power and politics as they chose what and how to “tell”. In harnessing iconic narratives as phenomena and method, we question why/how both youth ensembles evoked fragments of myth/fable/allegory to embody ideas of “truth” in their creative process and how the care these young theatre-makers privileged toward each other’s truth impacted both creation and performance.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
As students grappled with the complications of writing, telling and creating their own (or another’s) personal stories/fables, this paper focuses on how their choices made meaning that ultimately reached beyond the anecdotal and illustrated how they were able to sensitively integrate a coherent “encounter with the ‘imaginal’ based on the real” (Wright, 2008, p.94). We use Wright’s “interlocking notions of autopoiesis and mythopoiesis” that “illuminate the embodied experience, the reflective consciousness and the construction of cultural knowledge forms or stories” (p. 93) to demonstrate the success of their attempts to make meaning of their local/ global lives. This grounded aesthetic is what Willis (1998, p. 170) describes as a trilogy of “symbolic work, symbolic creativity and symbolic extension”. We witnessed these youth fight to “make the human story the center of [their] understanding of the world” (Adichie, 2018, para. 11).

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:
Our analysis is based on date from Coventry (England) and Toronto (Canada), that used oral history as a form of theatre-making in 2015/2016. We spent ten days with the Canley Youth Theatre Group (6 boys, 3 girls aged 12-17) as they devised, rehearsed and performed their play “The Museum of Living Stories”. We spent twenty-three days with a grade 11 drama class in Toronto (17 girls, 10 boys aged 15-16) as they created a similar project. Our analysis is based on video footage (290 hours) of rehearsal, staging and performance, as well as textual analysis of the scripts the youth produced and 25 individual interviews and six focus groups with 29 students.

RESULTS:
Youth are continually engaged in acts of telling stories and in wrestling with the puzzle of truth and representation. Their “mythopoetic” impulses create social and cultural knowledge that impact the world, not just their world. Simultaneously, they develop their “autopoetic” selves and these acts of “self-creation” have a deeply relational capacity that speaks to an ethics of care (Maturana & Varela, 1980).

SCHOLARLY SIGNIFICANCE:
In an increasingly instrumental classroom, students can become clients or consumers rather than participants. Our research focuses on how we listen and learn from youth as they instinctively develop their personal, public, and civic voices. Beyond a broken trust, this research proposes a “willingness to imagine and a desire to reflect upon and track the means, methods and dynamics of that imagining” as researchers and teachers (Wright, 2008, p. 106).

Authors

• Nancy Cardwell, University of Toronto

• Sherry Bie, University of Toronto