A Note From the Artistic Director​

It didn't strike me until we actually got into the theatre and started running the show in dress and tech just how ambitious of a production Kids These Days was.  I forget sometimes that our dancers are only teenagers; the work that they produce, the conversations that they hold, the maturity they bring to the table is so far beyond their years. If it wasn't, I don't know that I could have even conceived this idea in the first place, let alone given it any sort of legitimacy enough to move forward with it and bring it to the dancers.  Most dancers never have the opportunity to perform an evening-length work in their entire careers, let alone as youth performing artists. I will forever stand behind the phrase that young people can absolutely be full fledged artists, and these dancers are most certainly proof of that.

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The exploration that would eventually become Kids These Days all began with the 'dress code dance' (whose actual title is "Neither Distract, Nor Disrupt", language that we took directly from my school's dress code policy) in the late spring of 2021. This wasn't initially a dance that we had on our docket, but it was interesting (and concerning) to me how the same conversations kept coming up around the dancers' bodies, almost all of which connected back to experiences they had with their school's dress code. More specifically, they connected to how people enforced the dress code. This dance alone, frankly, is gut-wrenching, but as the performance came and passed and these sorts of conversations continued to crop up over and over and over again, it was clear that things weren't over for this piece. Indeed, it was starting to feel like more and more of a microcosm of something larger as the discourse we had in passing during rehearsals and classes became more nuanced.

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Really and truly, the idea to create Kids These Days came from our youth pre-professional dancers and I simply working together, as well as from my work with middle-school age dancers in JCPS. The privilege that both of these positions has offered is longitudinal observation; where most teachers primarily work with students for a single year, my students work with me for three. As such, I've watched over the years as bright-eyed 6th graders excited to learn started to focus their attention on their bodies, driven by an increasing barrage of comments from their teachers in enforcement of the dress code. I've watched as students had their worlds flipped upside down and inside out from bullying, both in person and digitally, neither world offering an escape. I've watched as students who once loved the joy and process of learning shift their focus increasingly toward their scores and performance on standardized tests. I've watched as students discover their identities and experience the cognitive dissonance of simultaneous liberation in themselves contrasted against a landscape of challenges: will their family, peers, and teachers accept them as they are, or will they need to continue to straddle the line between being in and out of the metaphorical closet?  And I've watched young people struggle with their mental health through all of these things and more, often putting their own well-being on the back burner in favor of upholding various obligations, while also carrying the weight of people all around them labeling them as lazy, entitled, superficial, disloyal to work spaces, and and so many other things. Those three years that I get with my students continuously gives me a unique inside glimpse into teenage coming of age where students learn how to carry all these mixed messages and pressures, and if one thing has been crystal clear, it is that modern teenhood is certainly not easy, nor better than it was "before". It just has different challenges, challenges that can often be easily dismissed or denied altogether because they don't always exist in the physical world, or aren't straightforward.

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Several people have asked me what the call to action is for this show. Simply put, there isn't one. At the end of the day, I know that not everyone is going to agree on the legitimacy of the experiences presented in Kids These Days. I don't know that this show was, at its core, necessarily built for the audience to experience viewing, so much as it was built for our young people to have a place to share and feel a sense of legitimacy in their voice. A space for their truth to exist. They are, after all, the experts on their own experiences; my teenhood was only a decade ago, and even I must admit that I am now too removed to be able to claim any sort of authority or true personal understanding of the subject matter of this show. Alas, right before my eyes (and without my permission), the world changed, and, with it, so did my understanding of, and connection to, the coming of age experience. The viewing of this work, therefore, becomes the privilege and responsibility of us, the viewers. So, ultimately, while there is no call to action to be found here, what I do hope is that people walk away with an enriched sense of empathy. 

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Yours truly, 

Amberly M. Simpson

Artistic Director

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