In 2022, I completed this Honors Thesis in Theatre at Northwestern University. You can read it below, or in the Northwestern Undergraduate Research Journal (where it was published in 2023) here. To watch the performance accompanying this paper, click here.
Abstract
Ask the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance or a passerby in the lobby of Northwestern’s performing arts center, and the qualifications seem consistent: if a teenage girl onstage is a significant character, then she is an ingenue. And if she is an ingenue, she is innocent, simple, a specific kind of “pretty”, and a host of other similar requirements.
What does it mean when this is the theatre’s prescription of what young womanhood looks (or ought to look) like? How does it impact artists and audiences? Can we imagine an engagement with the canon that might embody young womanhood in a truthful, inclusive, and positively impactful way? These questions drove a four-part research process, consisting of investigation of published writing, discussion with an ensemble of my peers (eight fellow young women from Northwestern’s theatre department), exploration with that ensemble via practice and performance of a selection of relevant repertoire, and audience surveys. While this project began out of my own frustrations from “within” the type – often seen for ingenue roles, they felt limiting – my findings underscored the extent to which type expectations often exclude many young women from these roles entirely, with profound consequences. I ultimately found that traditional images of young womanhood (particularly, but not exclusively, older texts) leave much to be desired in their impacts on both actors and audiences. However, a radically different, positive impact seems possible through contemporary texts which reimagine teenage girlhood onstage, and through reinventive interpretation, staging, and/or casting of more traditional works.
Academic and Ethnographic Research: What Is
The “ingénue” falls within the broader framework of “types of actors” (like the leading lady/leading man, villain, etc.). This framework often represented a point of frustration in ensemble and community responses – a frustration shared by Constantin Stanislavski himself. Believing that “to be able to transform one's self physically and spiritually is the first and principle object of acting art” (17-18), Stanislavksi viewed typing as a mistaken custom brought about by the assembly-line, product/profit-driven haste of commercial theatre (a sentiment echoed by my ensemble). While ensemble members and many in the industry recognize certain value in the concept of type, many of our professional mentors encouraged methods of engaging without placing onself as an actor in a restrictive box.
But beyond varying opinions on “type” as a concept, what defines the “type” of the ingenue? The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance defines an ingenue as a young heroine, “a youthful actress who played significant parts”, a “‘female juvenile lead’ [...] Qualities of innocence and simplicity [...] were essential.” When audience members entering our performances were invited to provide their own definition, certain descriptors appeared over and over again, echoing the encyclopedia and those provided by my ensemble: “Naïve”, “innocent”, “soprano”, “beautiful”, “optimistic”, “two-dimensional”, and some version of “centrally, falling in love”. Also popular was simply the definition “young female protagonist”, again associating those previously listed qualities with any significant young woman onstage.
The question of how the ingenue “ought” to sound is one of the most agreed-upon, if most arbitrary, qualities. Scholars, my ensemble, and audience member after audience member reiterated the expectations that if an ingenue sings, she is a soprano: as Alexandra Apolloni points out, she produces a “youthful and flexible, lyrical and high, innocent but flirtatious” sound that makes her liminality audible (145). Despite a frequent modern expectation shift from high, more classical singing to a high belt sound, the lingering expectation of a soprano range for young female leads was one of the most frustrating to my ensemble (especially the altos among them).
As teenage girls are inherently in transition, the ingenue’s liminality was central in academic and communal discussions. Carefully walking a narrow line, she is “a girl on the cusp of womanhood, caught in an unstable, in-between state” (Appoloni 145). Teenage girls are almost simultaneously infantilized and sexualized, expected to be attractive women but also to be pure and innocent girls (even frequently constructed as desirable due to their perceived purity/virginity). While ingenue stagings invite us to watch a girl become a woman, narratives frequently punish the young woman who crosses a line into sexuality (particularly with any degree of agency).
In this liminality we see the centrality of the physical embodiment of teenage girlhood onstage. Appoloni notes how the teen girl’s body – already constructed as deviant in western thought for its femininity – is further marginalized in its incompleteness, while also facing scrutiny as it fails to remain that of a girl and not a woman. Ariane Balizet even proposes that “to be a girl is to be a body”(89). With this microscope on the teen girl’s body comes perhaps the most central finding of this “what is” stage of my research : the expected particular appearance of the young female body onstage, particularly the expectation that the ingenue (aka, most significant young female characters) can only be played by actresses who are skinny and white.
Highlighting the impact of the expectation of whiteness, Appoloni notes that while “white girls [...] may try to reject an ingénue image, for young women of color working to embody the ingénue ideal may be a necessary means of constructing a respectable image and
attaining the social mobility that that image brings" (147).Even the ingenue’s balletic movement style (established by Agnes DeMille in works like Oklahoma! and Carousel) has contributed: “Ballet helped ensure that Oklahoma! was old-fashioned and white” (Cook). The acceptable body type of a young woman onstage would also frequently emerge as significant. Aspects of the ingenue like being in love take on a different significance when appearance-based expectations completely bar many from embodying the experience at all: "My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved” (West 6). Ryan Donavon proposes that “the actor’s body becomes a commodity in the theatrical marketplace [...] this mythos provides cover for the operation of ideologies espousing bodily conformity (e.g., the plethora of articles about “Broadway Bodies” on Playbill.com)(13). This denial of the full perspective of young womanhood, even a “tendency to view fat people as somehow less-than”, is reflected in Broadway’s stunningly consistent refusal to cast fat performers in lead roles (especially ingenues) -- even those with no inherent requirement of a specific body type: “to do so would be to concede that fat women can play and experience the full range of representation readily available to thin people.”(Donovan 4).
Expectations around how young womanhood can be embodied onstage significantly impact the artist’s experience: in the strikingly different processes of embodying classic and stereotypical versus truthful imaginings, and of course on the very practical level of casting and employment. Ensemble members recounted the complicated experience of carrying gendered expectations into audition rooms, and one described the sense that choosing the self-tape take where she looked the best, rather than performed the best, would best serve her chances of booking. Many artists in my audience reported their own frustrations with the restrictions of type, either wishing to break out of a type they feel boxed into, or watching themselves and their friends feel shut out from certain roles because of lack of alignment with the “type” placed on those characters (noting how the ingenue’s “innocence” can sometimes mean “a very specific type – physically, racially”). The effects of appearance-based employment go deep: one artist in my audience reported “how I’ve been cast impacts how I perceive myself as pretty vs. hot, and how desirable I understand myself to be”; another described how as an Asian woman the “ideal to be white girl gorgeous [...] is suffocating and often makes me feel unworthy of love”.
While I expected the greatest impact of ingenue limitations to land upon the performer, these type-driven perceptions of self and others are propagated even more broadly, if to a less profound degree, in the witnessing of these embodied stories, whether audience members be teenage girls themselves or others taught by these representations how to think about young womanhood. As ethnographer D. Soyini Madison highlights, “representation has consequences: how people are represented is how they are treated” (4). Echoing Donovan’s article, one ensemble member highlighted the broadly damaging impact of appearance-driven casting, and the way it can say “you don’t look like the kind of person who can have a romantic partner – you are here to make jokes about how you look and then leave”. Ensemble members reported growing up with a variety of relationships to these images of ingenue-ity they witnessed onstage. Several described a wish to be the ingenue, because those were the pretty ones, the main characters with pretty music to sing and a happy romantic ending. Others, who felt that expectations of skinny whiteness made any hope of playing an ingenue a lost cause, had responded by looking at ingenue characters with disdain for their apparent powerlessness and dependence on men. While the ingenue’s body can be a locus of appearance-based exclusion, there is also hopeful narrative power to be found in the ingenue’s body in motion in performance. The significance of the ingenue’s expected physical life was highlighted in ensemble discussion, whether considering a dance context or simply how archetype is navigated by the way characters move through the world/take up space. Stacey Wolf takes this significance a step further, proposing a potential space between the way a character is written (e.g. the textual level of power, strength, etc. a character is supposed to have), and the inherent physical power of a woman singing or dancing onstage. Wolf notes how ‘in many cases, through music and dance and staging and scenography, what happens in the performance contradicts what happens in the dramatic text” (239), as in the “single girl musicals” of the 60s, in which the female protagonist is punished for her sexuality/independence/actions, BUT the choreography/blocking “allows the female actor powerful performance opportunities”, ultimately celebrating her (55). Taking as an example the title character of Sweet Charity, she notes how “the exuberant action – the “doing” – performatively brings feminist possibilities into being.” (63). Similarly, though the text of Carousel feels hardly feminist – Louise is literally taught that sometimes domestic violence can “feel like a kiss” – there is incredible strength in the performative action of this single young woman devouring the stage with virtuosic, athletic movement. This duality between text and performance, the feminist possibilities to be found in the “doing”, is why my thesis project had to perform. It would inspire the major question driving our rehearsal/workshop process: can teenage girlhood/ the roles we get to play be embodied onstage with that strength, intelligence, complexity, and depth that represent a truthful and positively impactful performance, even if the character might not initially appear so based on the words on the page or traditional interpretations?
Performance as Research: What Can Be
Out of this research and discussion came the development of the performance portion of this project. First, I aimed to share with audiences an expression of the research and discoveries accomplished so far by myself and my ensemble: an exploration of what teenage girlhood looks like onstage and what stories it can tell, from blueprints to exciting contemporary breaks from precedent. Audience surveys would also open up this conversation to the Northwestern community beyond my ensemble.
Next, and most importantly, this performance component would serve as a final step in my research into the power of performance and artistic process, investigating whether a more truthful, empowered version of unsatisfying roles could be created via performance: interpretation (especially by artists of different perspectives and experiences), staging, and casting. I aimed to highlight the ways in which existing trends and messages can be questioned and complicated in a hopeful and powerful way, both in performance of classic roles and via innovative new work. Throughout the show, character descriptions of each role (drawn from real audition postings) introduced each piece, highlighting significant qualities for audience members to track, providing context, and keeping the practical experience of casting present.
Some of the first explicitly teenage characters I landed upon in my research were Liesl of The Sound of Music and Louise of Carousel. Struck by their similarity as dance-driven Rodgers and Hammerstein characters, I conceived what would be the opening of the “Blueprints” chapter of my performance – a section devoted to those especially archetypal images that set precedents of teenage girlhood onstage, aiming both to highlight said precedents and to explore whether hopeful innovation could be found for these characters in embodied performance. As Stacey Wolf notes, “the compositional, theatrical, and performance conventions that Rodgers and Hammerstein and their colleagues developed in the 1940s, ‘50s, and early ‘60s remain the touchstones against which book musicals are measured”. Among those conventions was the blueprint for the musical theatre ingenue: her sound, behavior, and perhaps most significantly, her physical life, via iconic dance sequences. In what I would informally call my “R&H Dancing Ingenue Medley”, I explored the strikingly consistent trends in the stories of Liesl, Louise, and that original dancing ingenue, Laurey of Oklahoma. Each of their songs/ballets/stories (solidly situated in the balletic vocabulary established by Agnes DeMille) not only revolves around relationship with a male love interest, but leads eventually to some abandonment by/loss of said love interest, shown devastate the ingenue (Rolf becomes a Nazi, the Carnival Boy discards Louise for being too young, and in Laurey’s nightmare her Curley is replaced and then killed by Jud). I highlighted this via inclusion of “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” (a fitting opener with its explicit discussion of so many archetypal ingenue qualities), a romantic Laurey/Curley pas de deux excerpt from Oklahoma’s “Dream Ballet”, and a slightly condensed version of Carousel’s “Louise Ballet”. During the “Carnival Boy”/Louise pas de deux, Liesl and Rolf and Laurey and Curley re-entered to perform identical waltzes in parallel, and when the Carnival boy abandoned Louise, audiences watched the abandonment of Liesl and Laurey as well.
Including young women of Wiliam Shakespeare, whose writings have carried a unique degree of cultural authority from high school classrooms to massive stages for centuries, was essential to this chapter. While his tragic heroines like Juliet and Ophelia have long been considered emblematic of girlhood broadly (Balizet 26-27), ensemble members reported a stronger interest in characters like Rosalind and Viola (who survive the play, and -- disguised as a man -- are allowed a unique level of power, action, and voice). To incorporate both a classic ingenue and one of his many “young women dressed as a man”, I paired two monologues speaking to very different experiences of romance: Juliet’s “Gallop apace you fiery-footed steeds” speech, and Viola’s “Aye, but I know/too well what love women to men may owe”. Cutting between Juliet’s hopeful, impatient anticipations of love consummated (expressed in the privacy of her room), and Viola’s defense of a woman’s capacity for love (delivered in the guise of a boy to the man she loves) illuminated the differing actions and expressions allowed under different presentations of gender, while also highlighting shared core experiences. The similarly iconic ingenue blueprint Nina of Checkov’s The Seagull was also investigated, and a traditionally specific image complicated, via the sharing of her final “I am the seagull” monologue among three different performers.
Chapter Two of the performance, “Variations on a Theme”, explored a variety of images of young womanhood built upon those blueprints, innovating or deviating but not completely reinventing the trope. The “Chava Ballet Sequence” from Fiddler on the Roof represented the “dancing ingenues” of the next generation of leading theatre makers (figures like Jerome Robbins, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick), and explored the journey of growing up key to so many teen girl stories. Although the sequence is nominally a reflection on Chava, I was struck by the centrality of her love interest to Robbin’s original choreography for the film, particularly the emphasis on this figure carrying her away from the joyful childhood the text of the song describes. In my interpretation, I aimed to reclaim the ballet as Chava’s story, and to emphasize her agency in the choice to leave behind her past for the man she loves. Next was one of the most oft-cited examples by my ensemble of narrative punishment of an ingénue who crosses a line into sexuality: Wendla of Spring Awakening, presented in a quartet arrangement of her solo “Whispering”. A very different manifestation of requirements for ingenue purity was presented in a speech from Abigail Williams of The Crucible, a frequent piece of high school required reading and a theatrical image of teenage girlhood granted cultural capital/authority perhaps second only to Shakespeare. Even posted character descriptions for this role specify Abigail as everything a teenage ingenue is not supposed to be: strong-willed, passionate, keenly aware of her own power, ruthless in her pursuit of getting what she wants, with a fiery temper and most importantly an unapologetic, present sexuality. These character descriptions also explicitly label her as the antagonist. Of course, certain action she takes (deceptions that lead to the deaths of several members of her community) might merit the title, but a message worth flagging is sent when one of the only culturally authoritative theatrical teenage girls to deviate radically from ingenue expectations of pleasing passivity and innocence is also very explicitly the villain. As suggested by my ensemble, many of our theatrical representations of teenage years come in musicals following the high school experience, represented in this performance with “One Perfect Moment” from Bring It On. Because most of the characters in this genre are teenagers, “type” here is expanded only to a broader cast of still-archetypical characters (like the “mean girl” and her posse, the quirky best friend, and the still ingenue-esque protagonist like Bring It On’s Campbell).
Chapter 2 concluded with a medley of the young female characters of musical theatre giant Stephen Sondheim. Although perhaps more known for his mature female characters, each young woman Sondheim did write exists in interesting dialogue with the trope of the ingenue. A Little Night Music offers three distinct images of young womanhood: Frederika, barely into her teens and eager be taught about the world and womanhood by the older women in her life, Petra, the young maid who rejects ingenue expectations of purity and propriety in her belief that “there are mouths to be kissed before mouths to be fed”, and Anne, the eighteen-year-old trophy wife and almost-parody of the virginal (soprano) ingenue -- she cannot bring herself to sleep with her new (much older) husband. Though bearing that stereotypical marker of the trope, “It is not that she is so chaste and pure, but that the relationship, as are most of the others in the play, is inappropriate” (Hanson 18) – she can only call this love “disgusting” and “insane”, “a humiliating business”. Cinderella of Into the Woods, also at first glance an archetypal soprano ingenue, deviates from the classic ingenue wish for “nothing more than to fall in love, get married and live happily ever after” (Hanson 26) – throughout act one, she is not sure that a rich, handsome Prince is what she really wants (Hanson 26), and by act two she has left behind that dream in pursuit of a life in “somewhere in between” the binaries of the ingenue story. Her frequent scene partner, vaguely teenage Little Red, is allowed a journey in which loss of ingenue innocence is not punished, but rewarded with strength and insight found. Sweeney Todd’s Johanna, on the other hand, was brought forward by my ensemble as the classic ingenue: a pure, innocent, explicitly blonde soprano locked in a cage in need of saving. Sondheim’s innovation in Sweeney Todd comes in the broader world and story in which Johanna lives, a dark one in which her archetypal ingenuity is far from condoned as ideal young womanhood (and which requires from her exceptional strength and resilience). The dilemmas and philosophies of these young women are posed and shared in medley until the peak archetype-ality of their unison chorus of Johanna’s “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” can be stood no longer, and with a group arrangement of “Everything Else” from Next to Normal we break into Chapter 3: Reimaginings. In discussion of theatrical teenage girls who did feel truthful, Natalie of Next to Normal was an ensemble favorite, whose striking contrast to traditional ingenue Johanna is evident from her first lyrics: “Mozart was crazy/flat fucking crazy/batshit, I hear” would never be acceptable conversational content for “if I cannot fly, let me sing” Johanna. Perhaps even more radical in the teen-girl repertoire is Fun Home’s Medium Allison, whose “Changing My Major” breaks precedents in its unapologetic, joyous celebration of not only sexuality but queerness, also bringing the unfortunately rare perspective of a female composer. Included next were excerpts from “Everlasting” and the “Story of Winnie Foster Ballet” from Tuck Everlasting. While a contemporary iteration of the traditional ingenue dream ballet trope, this piece represents a significant shift: it is truly focused on Winnie and her journey, and celebrates her growth from young ingenuity to adulthood on her own terms. Adult Winnie ends the ballet confidently and joyfully onstage with only her younger self, reflecting on her journey. I aimed to give the R&H ingenues the hopeful ending they had been denied by bringing them back to share with Winnie in this concluding moment of supported, independent, confident hope.
The performance ended with an excerpt from the play that inspired the entire thesis: Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves. With the exception of a briefly-appearing “Soccer Mom”, every character in the play is a 16- or 17-year-old girl, and there is not a typical “ingenue” among them. Instead each is beautifully complicated, in-process, and real, evident even from the brief character descriptions DeLappe provides: “Brainy, morbid, budding elitist, thoughtful”, “Intense performance anxiety, perfectionist, high achiever”(DeLappe 2). Perhaps most striking is the physical life this play inherently highlights. Requirements of poised prettiness are tossed out the window: clad in soccer uniforms, ponytails, and minimal makeup, appearance is the least of these girls’ concerns. Technical ballet vocabulary is replaced with soccer drills. In a small excerpt capturing the chaos, conflict, and joy of the team, the casual, energized, overlapping chatter of my ensemble on rehearsal breaks was strikingly mirrored onstage.
The performance concluded with an experiment in audience engagement. Upon entering the theatre, audience members were asked to provide their definition of an ingenue, written on a sticky note and placed in a small, glittering box that lived on the edge of the stage throughout the show. On the way offstage from their final scene, one ensemble member grabbed the box, and we returned to the stage together to open it. A handful of definitions were read aloud, inviting (hopefully) newly poignant reflection after the performances of the last hour, and placed on a dry erase board where the question “what is an ingenue” had been inhabiting a corner of the set. Next, the dry erase board was flipped to reveal the question “What are we?”, and my ensemble adorned it with qualities of themselves that they valued (many absent from those ingenue definitions) with a joy and chaos reminiscent of the last scene they performed. The communal gathering orchestrated by the performance allowed the collection of audience experiences with type (reflected in research discussions above) along with post-performance reflections, including realizations of the prevalence of ingenue tropes and excitement around roles that deviated from it, discovery of greater depth and new perspectives on certain characters, and “thinking about who we are rather than what we should be”.
Finally, a post-performance ensemble discussion allowed further reflection on artist experience and the power of performance. Several ensemble members noted the evolution of their experience – even on a physical level – over the course of the performance itself, reporting decreased performativity in the way they inhabited their bodies as they moved from balletic sopranos to soccer-playing teens. Riley Glick (Winnie and others) was struck by the transformation of agency over the course of the show: from a young woman sitting in a chair being informed of her deeply stereotypical ingenue qualities in “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”, to the earnest self-discovery and truth of “Changing My Major”, to the chorus of voices in The Wolves. While Ruby Gibson (Medium Allison and others) anticipated the joyful honesty in the experience of singing “Changing My Major”, she was surprised to find in the journey of the performance the presence of some of those truthful qualities in earlier roles as well, reflecting the history that led to such roles as Medium Allison.
Ensemble members reported an evolution in their conceptions of more traditionally archetypal characters. The significance of physical life in hopeful remounting of such roles was highlighted, both by those to perform the roles and those to witness them: as staging and performance brought each one to life individually and placed them in conversation with each other, Ruby felt prompted to take the golden-age era characters more seriously as women with things to say (not just women to whom things happened). Even within perceived confines of ballet vocabulary or choreography, Ruby and Riley noted the power of dance as an escape, a way for characters to come off the page and gain depth, a language for them to express themselves clearly regardless of text. In the physical experience of dancing Louise, Elyse Yun found multiple aspects of the ingenue experience manifested: the loss of independence as she literally gave more and more of her weight to her dance partner over the course of their pas de deux, but also the empowering hope for growth over the course of Louise’s journey, finally found in an expansive physical gesture and moment to confidently stand and be seen in her re-entrance at the end of the Winnie Foster ballet. She shared that it was this anticipation of an ultimate story of growth, joy, and independence that allowed her to play Louise’s moments of abandonment and despondence without feeling that she was doing the character a disservice. Emily Zhang was one of many to describe a powerful journey of learning not to judge the archetypal characters she portrayed: playing Juliet, she reported a process of recognizing that even those traditionally “ingenue”, “weak” traits associated with the character can simply be the real feelings of a teenage girl, and that a character need not be anti-feminine to be strong.
The impact of connection and community on interpretation and experience of this performance was raised as influential by several ensemble members. The experience of friends watching friends perform roles they might generally dismiss as stereotypical afforded a new perspective: a deeper awareness of the multifaceted humanity of the actor playing the role encouraged a recognition of the multifaced humanity of the character as well, and an understanding of any dreaminess or enchantment experienced in the moment as not character- defining. Such necessary bringing of ones’ full self to such roles, combined with knowledge of the thought and conversation going into the performance, allowed ensemble members like Ruby and Emily Z to more guiltlessly enjoy such performances while carrying recognition of imperfections in the material.
The importance of intentionality in both performance and casting of such traditional roles was underscored. Emily Z suggested that perhaps we have had enough of the same kind of skinny, blonde, straight, white Juliet (or Cosette, or Nina, etc.), and that exciting, revolutionary revival of such blueprint characters might come in the placing of “non-traditional” bodies (BIPOC, disabled, fat, etc.) in such roles. Echoing the value of such casting, Morgan Frost (Campbell, others) recounted that she found it invigorating and fulfilling to embody these roles that, as a bigger person, she’s felt she’d never be allowed to play. But despite the hope to be found in reinventive performance and casting of more traditional ingenue roles, the greatest excitement universally centered around those contemporary works that reimagined teenage girlhood onstage beginning at the textual level. The uniqueness and specificity of contemporary characters was appreciated, “Changing My Major” was a favorite for its joy and truth, the explicit agency and growth afforded in “Everlasting” was highlighted, and the sense of power in numbers harnessed by The Wolves was widely celebrated: its characters could be messy, good and bad, kind and unkind, and even reflect those aspects of stereotype that can be a part of the real teenage experience, because as an ensemble, they could reflect the full real range of the experience of teenage girlhood.
Conclusion
What does – and what might -- teenage girlhood look like onstage? And why does it matter? Over the last year, I’ve found answers to these questions in study of published work, ethnographic research, and exploration through practice and performance. Each method of investigating the status quo yielded similar results: traditional expectations largely ask any significant young woman onstage to fit into the “ingenue” box, with its narrow and exclusionary expectations of behavior and appearance potentially damaging for both artists and audiences. However, as suggested by published writings and supported by actor and audience experiences in performance, there is hope: pieces like Next to Normal, Fun Home, and The Wolves that present a reimagined, nuanced, realistic image of teenage girlhood can transform artist experiences and communicate powerful, positive messages, and even many traditional texts carry potential in embodied performance via intentional and re-inventive casting and interpretation. In writing The Wolves, Sarah DeLappe shares that she “was interested in creating a world where teenage girls could define themselves” (Amina). The very nature of theatre allows a unique kind of definition, as identities are constructed and characters are defined by the speaking, singing, moving bodies we watch onstage. So why shouldn’t this medium allow the fullness of young womanhood to be defined and expressed truthfully? When any body is allowed to be seen and celebrated onstage in its full humanity -- sweet, loving, anxious, imperfect and also driven, powerful, funny, creative, and so much more – the experience of artists and audiences can be transformed as we tell new stories of inclusion and empowerment.
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