Unga Klara: My True Selves
Unga Klara (Stockholm, Sweden)
Director: Gustav Deinoff
Text by: Erik Uddenberg
Featuring: Ulrika Nilsson and Juan Cruz
My true selves is a critically acclaimed and interactive classroom performance about identity, playing with the idea that we do not only have one core, but many. The play is the starting-point for an in-depth conversation about identity and norm-criticism. It has mainly been played in classrooms, with interaction with the audience intertwined in the play.
The play was originally created in 2010, and since then, has toured Sweden with 150 performances for more than 5,000 students. It has also been staged abroad in France, Russia, Kurdistan, Iraq, South Africa, the United States, China, and Turkey. My true selves is a bold example of how Unga Klara strives to make truly engaging, surprising theatre that is inclusive and not shunning away from complexity nor reducing the young audience.
Performing arts for children and young people is often reduced to education or entertainment. The themes, aesthetics and the execution of the artworks testify of a view on the child that is full of prejudices. Throughout history, man has created and sought art to better understand herself and her world, to ask the most existential questions and to develop, challenge and comfort our minds and souls. Shouldn't art be that for children too?
Theatre for young audiences with a child's perspective is fundamentally revolutionary, because it differs to the norms of the adult world and society's view of children, which often reduces the child to a non-intellectual, independent and artistically uninteresting being. What happens if we create art for children that maintains at least the same high quality and artistic freedom as art for adults? A small – big - social and artistic revolt, we would say.
Photos by Milja Rossi
Director: Gustav Deinoff
Text by: Erik Uddenberg
Featuring: Ulrika Nilsson and Juan Cruz
For children ages 8-12.
Unga Klara (Young Klara), from Stockholm Sweden, was formed in 1975, at the time as a division of Stockholm City Theatre, and has since then led world-renowned explorative activities in the dramatic arts with a focus on the conditions of children and young people. Suzanne Osten founded the company and was its Artistic Director between 1975-2013.Unga Klara has explored what constitutes dramatic art from the approach that a young audience is naturally entitled to the same high level of artistic quality as an adult audience. Based on the conviction that we can best express a positive outlook on life by speaking truthfully about its complexity, Unga Klara has tackled serious topics in a playful form, and has combined the heavy with the light, has explored, examined and developed ideas with test audiences.