Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance

On a global platform we are witnessing the increased visibility of the people we call children and teenagers as political activists.

Meanwhile, across the contemporary performance landscape, children are participating as performers and collaborators in ways that resonate with this figure of the child activist. Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance proposes that performance has the ability to offer alternatives to hegemonic perceptions of the child as innocent, in need of protection, and apolitical. Through an in-depth analysis of selected performances shown in the UK within the past decade, alongside newly gathered documentation on children’s participation in professional performance in their own words, this book considers how performance might offer more capacious representations of and encounters with children beyond the nostalgic and protective adult gaze elicited within mainstream contexts. Motivated by recent collaborations with children on stage that reimagine the figure of the child, the book offers a new approach to both reading age in performance and also doing research with children rather than on or about them. By redressing the current imbalance between the way that we read children and adults’ bodies in performance and taking seriously children’s cultures and experiences, Beyond Innocence asks what strategies contemporary performance has to offer both children and adults in order to foster shared spaces for social and political change. As such, the book develops an approach to analysing performance that not only recognises children as makers of meaning but also as historically, politically, and culturally situated subjects and bodies with lived experiences that far exceed the familiar narratives of innocence and inexperience that children often have to bear.

Adele Senior is a Reader in Theatre and Performance at Leeds Beckett University.