·
A simple story
·
Interactive
·
Colourful
·
Has a lesson to be learnt
However although these thoughts are not incorrect we failed
to see that there is more to Theatre for Children than I first thought.
Firstly children are not stupid and so for us to perform
something very childish is patronising to our child audience. Children
understand a great deal more than they are given credit for and so tackling a
more “serious” topic in our performance would definitely be something that the
children will understand.
Secondly not everything has to be bright colours and have a
message, children are very alert and aware and so do not need their attention
captured by a rainbow of colours on stage.
Once we had answered the question we went away in our groups
to read David Harradine of Fevered Sleep’s article from “Total Theatre Magazine”
about making theatre for children and a chapter of David Wood’s “Theatre for
Children: Guide to Writing, Adapting, Directing, and Acting”. Through the task
of reading and annotating this research into Theatre for Children we decided as
a group that we were interested in the idea of our performance being
interactive, allowing the children to become a part of the experience. Another
idea was playing on the imagination of a child and so blurring the lines
between imagination and reality. We discussed the possibility of using minimal
props allowing us to creatively think of ways of using our props.
Our ideas from our first discussion revolved around the idea
of the imagination:
·
Children today have a wide selection of
technology at their fingertips and so are less likely to be immersing themselves
in imaginary worlds. We thought about creating a comparison between children
now and children in the late 90s and how they have fun.
·
Another idea was trying to incorporate
interaction into our piece by giving the audience options, such as “Should we
do this?” This would allow the children to see the impact of their choice and
would mean that the ending would be different each performance.
·
David Wood mentioned the challenges faced with
keeping the children’s attention throughout the performance and so by changing
the pace or having a sudden burst of movement is a “deliberate challenge to the
children” which will help keep hold of their attention. We discussed opening
our performance in darkness with only torches as a source of lighting and then
suddenly the lights will come up to light this stage. This sudden lighting
change will surprise the children and allow them to remain attentive.
As a group we have discussed making our performance fun but
that we want to include more serious tones as well. I particularly like the
idea of “playing for real”, and this will ensure that we as actors believe in
the performance as it will be impossible for the children to believe in it if
we don’t. We’ve considered spending
sometime as a group “playing” to help us get into the mindset of acting in
Theatre for Children.
“Child’s Play”, David Harradine, Total Theatre Magazine,
16/2, 2004
“Theatre for
Children: Guide to Writing, Adapting, Directing, and Acting”, David Wood
