From the Editor

In May 2017, scholars, artists, activists, and educators from around the world gathered for two days in Cape Town, South Africa, to think through intercultural exchange and diversity as part of the International Theatre for Young Audiences Research Network (ITYARN) conference, the international research network of ASSITEJ International. Compelled by interests in the complex histories, theories, literature, pedagogies, aesthetics, and ideologies that shape our field, the assembled group wrestled with exciting and challenging ideas regarding representation, values, identities, and art in the context of a rapidly evolving and more interconnected world. This special issue reflects and responds to these conversations. Without question, intercultural exchange and diversity are both sticky, slippery concepts, bound up by a host of questions regarding economic and cultural domination, imperialism, (post)coloniality, White supremacy and, above all, power. For example, how might equal exchange happen between cultures built upon imperialist rule? How do artists and educators honestly and ethically share ideas, resources, and performance traditions in the face of globalization? Who benefits from discourses of diversity, and how might those conversations evolve in response to ideas and writings about justice, inclusion, and reconciliation? These questions and many others, which I spoke to in Youth Theatre Journal’s thirtieth anniversary timeline (vol. 30.2), reverberate through the work of organizations like ITYARN and ASSITEJ, as well as AATE, and through this special edition. Accordingly, the authors represented here have similarly contextualized their research in this complicated but worthwhile scholarly terrain, drawing out important provocations for continued thought as they rigorously investigate important theatrical works and community programs in our field. The first essay, “Antigone to Antonia: Moving Beyond the Teleological Model of Tragedy for Young Audiences,” by Kristin Hunt, offers a theoretical reframing of tragedy for young people. She advocates for “an ethics of artistry itself rather than an ethics of artistic effects,” whereby adult theatre makers take seriously the aesthetic sensibilities of young people as ends unto themselves, deserving of complex, ambiguous representation in art, particularly of tragic forms. To explicate these ideas, Hunt analyzes several tragedies for young audiences adapted and/or inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone, from Ghanian playwright Kamau Brathwaite’s Odale’s Choice (1962) to the US Latinx playwright José Casas’s 2015 work, Antonia: A Chicana Hip-Hop Antigone. Hunt’s reading of these playtexts focuses on the role of theatrical tragedy in shaping notions of societal good and points to new avenues for thinking through not only what artists present on TYA stages, but how young audiences might interact with those productions as part of complex ethical and aesthetic experiences. Christine Hatton’s “One the Bear: A Postcolonial Radical Hip-Hop Herstory” likewise considers new aesthetic and ideological frames for thinking through TYA. She focuses on the Black Honey Company (blackhoneycompany.com), a production house founded by South African Australian artists and sisters Candy Bowers and Kim Busty Beatz Bowers, which produces “fearless sticky performance,” and their 2017 production of One the Bear. In her role as educational consultant on this new play, Hatton collaborated with Black Honey Company artists to think through the complex work of decolonization via TYA performance. Through her close reading of One the Bear, a “fiercely feminist work that interrogates the intersections of color, race, gendered bodies, and power onstage” Hatton points out Bowers’s commitment to naming and contending with the erasure of female-presenting women of color in the cultural narratives and, central to this analysis, on the stages in Australia. One the Bear YOUTH THEATRE JOURNAL 2018, VOL. 32, NO. 2, 97–99 https://doi.org/10.1080/08929092.2018.1522216