Yvette Hardie is a theatre director, producer, and educator dedicated to advancing theatre for young audiences. She played a pivotal role in establishing ASSITEJ South Africa in 2007 and continues to lead the organisation as its Director, advocating for accessible, high-quality theatre experiences for children and youth. Through her work, she has fostered national and international collaborations, supporting artists and theatre companies in creating impactful, culturally relevant productions.
As Chairperson of STAND (Foundation South Africa), Yvette champions the sustainability and growth of the performing arts sector. Her leadership extends to mentoring emerging artists, shaping arts education policies, and driving initiatives that promote theatre as a tool for social transformation. With a passion for storytelling and inclusivity, she remains a key figure in developing theatre that inspires, educates, and empowers young audiences in South Africa and beyond.
I have loved theatre my entire life (apparently I expressed my desire to be an actor from the age of 4) and I am deeply grateful to the support my parents gave me in gaining access to theatre from an early age, being able to participate in theatre activities, and pursue my passions throughout my growing up. Working as an actor and director, I was very inspired by the responses of young people to the work, and by their engagement and curiosity. I loved the feeling of engaging with young people, and experiencing their inquisitive probing and creative thinking. I was also lucky enough to teach for a number of years at the National School of the Arts, and this experience contributed to my belief in the power of arts to change lives, to provide space for mature engagement with the world and to build bridges across all kinds of potential divides, whether these are cultural, economic, linguistic, gender, age, or attitudinal. When I discovered an organisation (ASSITEJ – the international association of theatre and performing arts for children and young people) that actively sought to bring the highest quality of arts into the lives of children and young people, and was representative of so much diversity across the world, I knew I had found a home for my various passions. I was one of the founders of ASSITEJ South Africa in 2007 and along with many colleagues have had great joy in growing this work since then.
I became involved in the international leadership of the organisation shortly after launching ASSITEJ SA, first as Treasurer of the international ASSITEJ for three years and then as President for ten years. My exposure to and learning around what was happening in theatre for young audiences internationally played a significant role in the development of ASSITEJ SA. It became very easy to participate in international collaboration through the mechanism of ASSITEJ since everyone shares common values and ambitions with relation to theatre and the performing arts – we share a common language and passion, despite cultural and linguistic differences. I met incredible people and saw exceptional theatre that left a lasting impression. It was deeply inspiring to see what was happening in other African countries, often with very few resources, or in parts of the world that shared common challenges with South Africa, such as parts of South America. Equally it was inspiring to see what those countries with long traditions of theatre for young audiences had been able to build over the years. We realised that in many of these countries there was a systemic intervention (usually involving government, corporate and independent parties) which made it possible for young people to access the arts, that was lacking in South Africa. As ASSITEJ SA, we have tried to create these systems through our networks, which support artists to work in theatre for young audiences more easily and effectively. A key learning was that exposure to the arts needs to start at the very youngest age (with birth); the sheer creativity and beauty of theatre for early years was particularly inspiring, as well as seeing the impact that sharing artistic experiences has on parent-child relationships.
We realised that in South Africa the majority of children do not access theatre due to living in places where there either is no formal theatre, or what is available is too expensive or exclusionary, or there is no valuing of theatre as an art form within homes and schools. Equally there is insufficient work which is made from a South African context and perspective, that really investigates or speaks back to the reality of the lives the young audience is living. So our strategy has been multi-pronged.
On the one hand we run campaigns for access such as Take a Child to the Theatre Today (which is a global campaign that I inaugurated as President of ASSITEJ in 2012) which encourages all parties to play a role in bringing the arts to children or children to the arts. We support local and national festivals and touring circuits for local productions. We have created our own festival, Cradle of Creativity, to showcase local and international work and act as an incubator for South African theatre for young audiences (TYA). We support artists to make new and more relevant work for children and young people through training workshops, artist residencies, writing programmes, international collaborations and sometimes commissioning new work. We work directly with schools to ensure that they understand the value of being what we call “arts-rich” and we bring schools and artists together in our programme Theatre4Youth / Arts4Youth which allows artists to connect directly with schools and schools to find out what is available from artists. We value partnerships highly, and work with other organisations such as Nal’ibali to ensure that South African stories are brought to life on our stages. We also try to break down the silos that exist between so called community, independent and mainstream theatre.
During COVID and in its immediate aftermath, STAND Foundation was critical in creating national dialogue around South African theatre and dance, and the extreme challenges being faced by artists. We hosted online and in-person dialogues, and also made significant contributions to policy development, including to the Breathing New Vision into Theatre and Dance policy which has now been adopted by DSAC. We lobbied government for more and better support for artists. We have also played a significant role in building the network of community arts centres in the Western Cape, and launched the now-independent network, CACNET (Community Arts Centres Network) to foster collaboration and development in this space. Through funding from DSAC, we have been able to nurture a number of community arts centres and projects which have provided new energy and impetus for artists within the province. We commissioned ASSITEJ SA to write the six Community Arts toolkits which have been extremely well-received around the country and which have formed the basis of numerous trainings both within the Western Cape and further afield. [Link to Community Arts toolkits: https://www.standfoundation.org.za/community-arts-centre-toolkits/]
At the heart of STAND’s approach is that self-sufficiency is crucial for the theatre and dance sectors. While we need to attract partnerships and sponsorships, we cannot rely on others to nurture the field. We need to be proactively engaged in doing this ourselves, and we need to be innovative and agile in our responses to the shifting challenges we face.
The common response when one starts to speak about the importance of the arts for children and young people in South Africa, is a kind of glazing over, where you can feel that listeners are thinking about the many other areas of support that children and young people might need; the arts seem to be of minor concern next to issues such as malnutrition, poor education, violence and abuse, and the myriad of challenges faced by our youth. However, it is also true that without access to the arts and to the power of the imagination, we are significantly hamstrung to deal with any of these challenges. Poverty of the imagination is as much as danger as other forms of poverty, and in championing the arts, we are fighting for our children and young people to understand the possibilities they have in their lives, and to realise their capacity for choices and for making meaning out of whatever circumstances they may be facing. One of the ways that we are trying to address this advocacy challenge is to do more research around the benefits of arts access for children and young people from a local perspective. There is considerable evidence internationally of the benefits of arts education to a quality education more generally, and to children’s well-being (particularly for those who are impoverished in other ways); we have been working to improve our monitoring and evaluation across the board in order to be able to demonstrate the longer-term impacts of access to the arts, so as to convince partners and funders of the value of their investment.
Artists, particularly actors, who think that they can expect opportunities for work, without actively making these opportunities possible. You need to find ways (and places) to network, to get yourself seen and known, and ideally to create your own work. We are lucky in South Africa in a sense, in that the unregulated nature of the industry means that it is possible to apply for festivals or independent performances, with very little experience. Drive, self-motivation and a level of chutzpah, are crucial for artists to get themselves out there and to begin to build a CV. Learning the business side of producing and touring work is essential for artists. Understanding contracts and budgets is as important as knowing how to analyse a role. Unfortunately there are still many artists (including older, more experienced people) who do not take these aspects seriously and who find themselves in difficult situations as a result. Organisations like STAND and ASSITEJ SA put a lot of emphasis on providing skills development in areas of arts administration and business which can assist artists to be more sustainable.
Being an artist means embarking on a lifetime of learning. I get frustrated by people who say that they are “tired of being developed”; while I understand that this response is linked to feelings of being patronised or under-valued, the flipside is that we are ALL in need of development all the time. We are all under construction, and having a lifelong commitment to learning new skills, discovering new aspects of the world, and new artistic approaches, can only enhance our capacity to be better artists. Finding the right mentor at the right time and exploring new skills are ways that we make ourselves more sustainable. Theatre arts are all about collaboration, so developing relationships and seeking out mentors, assists you to find opportunities within the industry. (And mentors do not always need to be more experienced – ASSITEJ SA has developed ways of working with children, where the children are the experts and mentor the adults in what they most need to be doing…) In all the work I have done, whether professional theatre work, teaching work, ASSITEJ work or STAND related activities, I have looked for ways to build in mentorship and skills development as a matter of course. When directing a play, I believe there is always a level of skills development that needs to be embarked on. ASSITEJ SA and STAND are both organisations that build community and provide a myriad of opportunities for learning, if you choose to engage. The learning is also not one-way; in ASSITEJ SA, we learn as much from our members as they do from us, and it is that active engagement which fuels ongoing development on all sides.
We want to see a South Africa where every child and young person has access to experience and participate in quality arts wherever they happen to live. We believe that the education space has to be a massive vehicle for the realisation of this vision, and for this reason we have developed the concept of “Arts-rich schools” with the Department of Basic Education, which brings together the learning from multiple programmes to champion arts in schools (from pre-schools to tertiary spaces) and to support those spaces where the arts need to be embedded. We are looking to gather sponsors and partners around this programme, in order to ensure that it becomes a reality for every child, not just those who can afford it.
We also want to see a great deal more work being made for very young children. This is something we have pursued since around 2010, but there is still so much work to be done in this area. We do not have enough viable work, in all languages of South Africa, touring, and there are not enough parents or caregivers who recognise the value of this work for very young children. Given that there are always gatekeepers to the experience of children accessing the arts, it is these people who we need most to convince. This means finding innovative ways of bringing theatre into spaces where it is not expected and can be experienced for free or at very low cost – think libraries, clinics, shopping centres etc.
We have developed a number of systems within ASSITEJ SA which support these ideas, but they require more backing from a network of active partners and stakeholders to start to function optimally. Building these partnerships is a massive part of what ASSITEJ SA engages in ongoingly.
AfriArtsConnect has the potential to draw together what has been historically a fractured arts community within South Africa, by providing information, channels for collaboration and opportunities for growth, in one dynamic online space. The platform will be as effective as the degree to which artists and audiences engage with it. We need everyone who believes in the future of South African theatre and performing arts to find their place within it and to reach out to others, to share what they know and to learn from one another. We have one of the most dynamic performing arts industries in the world, despite the challenges. We hope that AfriArtsConnect will become a one-stop meeting place for all organisations and individuals to come together to benefit from one another’s wealth of talent and experience.
I have long lost interest in performing arts that is merely there for purposes of entertainment, but I am passionately interested in anything which expands my understanding of the world around me and of the complex challenges we face today, and which provides me with inspiration, the soul-food and the tools to navigate this world better. As a young artist, your voice matters. Your perspective on the world is one we need to hear. Make art because you have something unique you wish to communicate and make it at the highest level possible, regardless of the resources available to you. Ultimately the greatest resources you have are your body, your voice, your inner life, your experiences, your capacity to relate to others – these things are endlessly rich if you keep seeking ways in which to employ them that are innovative, meaningful and relevant. Be single-minded in pursuing what you want to communicate, and we will listen!
