{"id":3080,"date":"2013-11-23T13:44:25","date_gmt":"2013-11-23T13:44:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/?p=1146"},"modified":"2016-09-26T12:54:24","modified_gmt":"2016-09-26T12:54:24","slug":"al-cui-este-teatrul-pentru-copii-si-adolescenti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/2013\/11\/23\/al-cui-este-teatrul-pentru-copii-si-adolescenti\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Does Children\u2019s Theater Belong to?"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Mihaela Michailov<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Two years ago, after a performance I saw at the \u021a\u0103nd\u0103ric\u0103 Theater, a little boy told his mother: \u201cI\u2019ve seen this show before\u201d. His mother asked: \u201cDid granny take you?\u201d. \u201cNo\u201d, said the little boy. \u201cDid the school take you?\u201d \u201cNo\u201d. \u201cThen you couldn\u2019t have seen it\u201d. \u201cBut I did\u201d, the boy insisted. \u201cWho did you see it with?\u201d \u201cWith you\u201d. Slightly confused, his mother said: \u201cYou couldn\u2019t have seen it with me\u201d. \u201cYes, I saw it last week\u201d. \u201cNo, last week we saw something different\u201d. After a couple of seconds, the boy said: \u201cThis was the same show from last week, from two weeks ago and the week before that\u2026\u201d Then the boy stopped.<\/p>\n

Multiplying a type of performance which remains roughly the same, regardless of the main narrative, seals off the child\u2019s imaginary. The child sees what he\/she has already seen before and becomes the prisoner of a construct of confirmation<\/i> of well-known stories, which limits his\/her possibilities of understanding his\/her life experiences. Instead of broadening these experiences, children learn to recognize patterns and types. In Romania, children\u2019s theater privileges heritage stories<\/i>, passed down from generation to generation. Such stories keep childhood inside a closed circuit of narrative figures: Snow White, the prince, the princess, the ogre etc. and protect children\u2019s imagination instead of provoking it. For the most part, children\u2019s theaters recycle fairytales, preserving the authority of the sleeping beauties and enchanted horses. The problem is that in many repertoires, they represent the only narrative path. The child won\u2019t \u201crisk\u201d his\/her imagination for fear of not being able to come up with characters like Little Red Riding Hood, Alice, the wolf, the three little pigs. Recently, during a workshop with children at the Azuga Summer School, a little girl told me: \u201cOnce upon a time there was a piglet. That\u2019s how a real story starts\u201d. This \u201creal\u201d restricts the freedom of fantasy and allows for a limited frame of expression for stories depicting children\u2019s current realities. Children\u2019s theater does not so much belong to the children as it does to the grown-ups. It is not conceptualized with the children\u2019s help, it doesn\u2019t build on their desires, their knowledge, their daily experience.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Responsibility for all audiences<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

There are few theaters which put together their repertoires after knowing their audiences: \u201cAriel Theater in T\u00e2rgu-Mure\u0219\/Marosv\u00e1s\u00e1rhely aims to design and stage performances and cultural projects for young audiences in Romanian and Hungarian. Our position implies a regional cultural responsibility (the counties of Mure\u0219, Harghita, Covasna and Bistri\u021ba) and we consider our audiences not just according to age (grouped 0-3, 4-6, 6-12, 12-16, 16-25 years-old), but also according to cultural, educational, social and medical criteria. The responsibility towards all audiences is the defining mission of the theater, which aims to personalize its relation with each spectator in order to adapt performances and projects to the needs of the community. Ariel Theater belongs to all children and teenagers. It is essential to get to know different kinds of audiences: children with special needs, children from underprivileged environments (lacking a stable family), homeless children etc. For each of these audiences, it is necessary to develop specific projects. As long as each of them can relate to the performances and projects aimed at them, the theater is alive and can legitimately claim to belong to the community. Children relate to it as a place of their own, where their opinion matters, where they can meet others like them and even their own selves.\u201d (Gavril Cadariu, Ariel Theater manager)<\/p>\n

\"Sectorul<\/a>

Sectorul S. Director: Emanoil P\u00e2rvu, 2013.<\/p><\/div>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

A theater without an audience<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Theater for adults emphasizes decent, predictable behavior<\/i>, whereas children\u2019s theater favors immediate reaction<\/i>. Fortunately, children are not a \u201cnice\u201d audience, sitting comfortably in their seats and turning into static viewers. Children interrupt the order of the story and question it: \u201cWhy is Nemo crying? Where\u2019s the whale going?\u201d. From this point of view, children\u2019s theater is a theater without an audience \u2013 that is, without any viewers sitting and waiting for the fiction to engulf them. Children invade the fiction and dismantle it as if it were a mechanism which only existed if questioned. In children\u2019s theater, their relation to fiction is one of direct intervention. Children are among the few living communication coaches<\/i> in contemporary theater, the only ones who provoke the theater to take their actions into account. They never remain outside the story.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Mihaela Michailov Two years ago, after a performance I saw at the \u021a\u0103nd\u0103ric\u0103 Theater, a little boy told his mother: \u201cI\u2019ve seen this show before\u201d. His mother asked: \u201cDid granny take you?\u201d. \u201cNo\u201d, said the little boy. \u201cDid the school take you?\u201d \u201cNo\u201d. \u201cThen you couldn\u2019t have seen it\u201d. \u201cBut I did\u201d, the boy insisted. \u201cWho did you see it with?\u201d \u201cWith you\u201d. Slightly confused, his mother said: \u201cYou couldn\u2019t have seen it with me\u201d. \u201cYes, I saw it last week\u201d. \u201cNo, last week we saw something different\u201d. After a couple of seconds, the boy said: \u201cThis was the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[80],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3080"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3444,"href":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080\/revisions\/3444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artapolitica.ro\/gazetapolitica\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}