''When Tides Collide'' is an original play devised by teenagers in the Shadow Company of Yes! And…Collaborate Arts, a youth theater program based in Philadelphia. Thirteen teenaged co-authors devised and performed the play for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
The play is more than a creative enterprise. The collaboration that brought it about challenged its young creators to develop adult skills, and leave them better for it.
The young people in the program took their collective interest in mythic and dystopian fiction — including the “Hunger Games” franchise, “The Last of Us” video game, the musical “Hadestown” and the Percy Jackson fantasy novels of Rick Riordan — and folded them into their real-life concerns about climate change and divisive politics.
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Imagine, if you will, a post-apocalyptic world, global disaster, where the survivors
have split themselves into warring tribes to fight for what's left in that world.
It's 30 years after this big disaster called the Reckoning.
The world has flooded, and that's how people are living now, and the mindsets have separated
everyone into these three factions, adaptation, restoration, and ocean dwellers.
It's like when a whole bunch of communities find a way to clash, but in the end, learn
to come together.
This play, called When Tides Collide, was made by these kids.
They are the shadow company of Yes and Collaborative Arts, it's a theater program in Germantown.
Where the tides collide, an island resides.
If you walk the path I fold, you will find the tree of tomorrow.
The program director, Gabriel Preston, said it's one of the very few programs where teenagers
invent their own original play and then perform it for the public.
I am always asking them to reflect in different ways on what kind of story do you want to
tell?
What are the kind of stories that you resonate with?
Because that's going to tell you who you are as an artist, and also who you are as a person
as you move through the world.
So their ability to develop their own stories is integral to our mission of developing them
as collaborators, and also as people, as citizens in the world.
There was definitely a lot of discussions of, we want it to be a cautionary tale, but
they wanted a dark comedy style production in order to tell that cautionary tale.
So it's funny.
It is what 13 teens have agreed is dark comedy.
Making a play from scratch can shape teenagers to become better adults.
It shows them how to collaborate with others, how to receive other ideas and internalize
them, how to make a decision, and then commit to it.
But making a play is a messy process.
I mean, yeah, it's chaos.
It's beautiful chaos.
We just feed off of each other's energy.
All together we're like, okay, I think I want to be doing something else right now.
So we just make jokes constantly until we end up wasting time.
And then we realize we have to get stuff done.
Maybe we should just say whatever in this is a love story now, and then it will make
more sense.
That's an romance subplot that we've been getting at.
Yeah, they've been wanting a romance subplot.
I'm just right at the bottom of the alley.
Hold that thought.
No.
I did it.
I think it's really great for kids just to get that experience of how do you build something
as a collective.
So you have to be taking in other ideas, being willing to change your idea, and see where
that can take you.
