Emo Theatre

Over the last week, the media suddenly got wind of a small sub-culture of adolescents known as Emo. This came about after the tragic double suicide of a young 16 year old girl and her friend, who were found in a parkland region of Melbourne.

The Emo culture which has probably been around for at least ten years, is your typical youth angst culture that can probably be most associated with the goths. They have a leaning towards dying their hair black and wearing black clothes.

There was a touching article in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald by Neil McMahon, a writer in Melbourne who not only covered the reaction to the girls deaths but also gave a comprehensive overview of the culture, the school bullying and their communities.

In the piece, McMahon spoke to the Editor of street magazine Drum Media, saying:

An emo, broadly speaking, dresses a certain way, listens to certain music, and is inclined to gloom. "It's become a derogatory term," says Andrew P. Street, associate editor of The Drum Media, an alternative music paper and website. As an insult, it's crudely dismissive: "You're a mopey little teen." What started as a musical genre in the 1980s - an offshoot of hard-core, says Street, noted for "songs with loud guitars and lyrics about girls who didn't like them" - has a far less definable musical core these days. "It's become a culture more than a genre."
The music is no longer exclusively self-pitying, and if it has a common theme it's the inclination to "eschew the political for the personal" - a statement, as Street notes, that could apply to 99 per cent of mainstream pop music.

I have taught a lot of theatre to Emo kids, and they are intuitive students who take the classes seriously and provide intelligent feedback constantly.

Recently I took a class that devised performances based around the influence of technology on young people and the social affects felt by them as individuals and as a collective. To be honest, most of the feedback I received is centred on an absolute disgust of the commercial, advertising driven consumer community that they live in. It is a deep distrust of government, advertisers, big business and flagrant nationalism.

Most of the performance that they devised was extremely humourous - darkly humourous - but what came through all of the performances was a deep concern for their community. One would almost say, too concerning.

It is such a shame that Emo's have a grave intolerance aimed towards them within schools or within their own community. There is a great amount of misunderstanding and it is a tragedy that it took the deaths of two of their sub-culture to bring this understanding and appreciation to the mainstream and for people to start taking notice. They are typically adolescent, but with a touching and (emo)tional outlook on the world that anyone can relate too.

There is a large emo culture in the Campbelltown area of Western Sydney. What will be interesting over the coming years is how these kids start to express themselves in a more defined and creative way.

There is now a huge creative arts complex in its finishing stages with galleries and a small performance space in the Campbelltown area. It would be an extraordinary thing to see this sub-culture flower and take their creativity and insight further through an expression of film, music, writing and art. Whether they can be engaged through the space, however, is another thing entirely.

If they can take it out of the youtube and myspace world it would provide their peers and the people around them with an even more beautiful and opaque window into their ideas, thoughts and share the frustrations common amongst the young people of Sydney. It would lift a cloak on this most misunderstood group and properly portray it before the marketeers and profiteers start to devise their own version of it and they end up becoming a victim of the very thing that they most despise.


Image: from youwantoknowme.blogspot.com and wearmalachai.com