The 2023 National TYA/USA Award Recipients: Julia Flood, Brave Little Company, and Caitlyn McCain.
NEW YORK CITY: Theatre for Young Audiences/USA (TYA/USA) will current the 2023 National TYA/USA Awards in three classes: Julia Flood will obtain the Harold Oaks Award for Sustained Excellence in TYA; Brave Little Company (Troy Scheid, creative director) will obtain the TYA Artistic Innovation Award; and Caitlyn McCain will obtain the TYA Community Impact Award.
“We are thrilled to celebrate and honor exemplary work in TYA with our TYA/USA awards for the first time since 2019,” stated TYA/USA govt director Sara Morgulis in a press release. “At a time when theatre is needed more than ever in our communities, these individuals and companies have showed resilience, creativity, and adaptability in the face of challenging circumstances. We look to them as leaders in our field and models of future creative work.”
The awards might be offered on May 12 as a part of the 2023 TYA/USA National Festival & Conference. More than 200 artists, educators and directors will convene at this 12 months’s occasion, held at Childsplay and the Tempe Center for the Arts in Arizona, to expertise theatre from across the nation, change present follow, and focus on the way forward for the TYA trade.
The National TYA/USA Awards honor excellence within the subject of Theatre for Young Audiences and recipients are chosen by a committee of friends from nominations made by TYA/USA members.
The Harold Oaks Award for Sustained Excellence in TYA honors the achievements of particular person leaders and corporations which have made a major and lasting influence on the sphere of TYA. Julia Flood has spent 45 years working within the skilled theatre, 25 of these devoted completely to Theatre for Young Audiences. In her position because the creative director of Metro Theater Company in St. Louis, Mo., Flood has continued to push TYA ahead as an artwork type and as a group, championing fairness and anti-racism all through her profession and recognizing the necessity to make sure that all younger folks really feel mirrored onstage and all artists have a spot in TYA.
Recent work consists of Spells of the Sea by Guinevere Govea with Anna Pickett, developed from the unique podcast in collaboration with Megan Ann Rasmussen Productions, UT Austin, and Pegasus PlayLab at UCF, and produced this February, as a part of MTC’s fiftieth Anniversary Season, The Girl Who Swallowed a Cactus by Eric Coble, developed as a part of New Visions/New Voices 2018 on the Kennedy Center and toured in 2019, in addition to Idris Goodwin’s Ghost, from the e-book by Jason Reynolds, co-commissioned with Nashville Children’s Theatre, produced by MTC in February/March 2020.
The TYA Artistic Innovation Award honors a person or firm that has demonstrated innovation—i.e., experimentation in content material or in type—in latest creative work in TYA. Brave Little Company’s work embodies their mission of theatre for everybody. From collaborating with 100 members of Houston’s refugee and immigrant communities in THE BIG “US” PROJECT, to combining Vietnamese and Asian folklore, immigrant experiences, and festive ghost tales in Paper Offerings, to their multi-state collaborative interactive video collection initiative, Missing From the Museum, BLC is working with their communities in Houston to create related, partaking dual- and multi-language creative follow that displays the range of their audiences. BLC strives to create and produce work about, with, and for all of Houston’s youngsters and their grown-ups.
The TYA Community Impact Award honors a person or firm that has demonstrated group influence via a challenge or initiative associated to TYA. Awardees make the most of the facility of TYA to considerably enrich an underserved group in artistic and significant methods. Caitlyn McCain is an NYC-based actor, educator, voice skilled, and utilized theatre practitioner who has labored with a variety of Ok-12 scholar and educator populations to interact them in social-emotional and social justice-based schooling {and professional} growth via theatre applications and workshops. Over the previous three years, Caitlyn has supported the event of a number of on-line academic sources for New York City Children’s Theatre, together with “Creative Clubhouse” and an progressive digital schooling useful resource for adults and kids named Start the Conversation, designed to offer grownups the instruments to speak with younger folks about massive matters. Videos cowl matters akin to race and racism, gender, immigration, emergency drills, and extra. She can be the co-creator and co-host of The Trauma-Informed Toolkit for Educators. Thousands of households and educators have considered these applications nationally.
Theatre for Young Audiences/USA (TYA/USA) is s a nationwide service group whose mission is to advertise the facility {of professional} theatre for younger audiences via excellence, collaboration, and innovation throughout cultural and worldwide boundaries. The group offers advocacy and sources with the intention to strengthen and diversify the sphere of theatre for younger audiences.