Staying the Course and ‘Here to Question’: Envisioning Education at Tarragon Theatre as an Integral Goal and a Reciprocal Practice

Abstract

This chapter analyses a long-standing relationship between Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre and local schools, colleges and universities and in particular, the University of Toronto. Contextualizing this relationship in the larger historical landscape of cultural and educational policy and global migration, we chart the change in focus from simply offering plays to young people, to developing youth skills to enable them to become full artistic participants in the life of the theatre.

In describing our different histories with Tarragon we, as authors, bring to this chapter recent experiences and those that go back 20 years. To offer a present-day youth perspective, we introduce a case study of a young playwright (and former University of Toronto student) who has been an active participant in recent educational programming at Tarragon. She suggests that Tarragon’s engagement of youth through intensive playwriting programming is important but that she did not, as a young artist, feel fully integrated into the artistic work of the theatre. We conclude by recognizing the scale of this theatre and its potential for youth programming, which is moving slowly and steadily towards becoming more vital to the ambitions of the theatre in spite of the constraints of available funding.