A Quiet Kind of Magic: Performance for Young Audiences in the New Millennium

By the early 2000s, Australian theatre for young audiences had begun to break free of categorical and limiting distinctions among youth theatre, theatre-in-education and commercial children’s theatre. Supported by a growing acknowledgement of young people as active cultural participants in their own right, artists working with and for the under-twenty-six-year-olds were forging new performance partnerships and interdisciplinary approaches as a response to the industrial, technological, economic and social shifts of the new millennium. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s “fluid modernity”, this chapter discusses the implications of these new perspectives on young people as artists and audiences, and provides insights into performances that engaged with intergenerationalism, risk and “quiet magic” as touchstones to navigate new contexts of constant and rapid change.