HISTORY OF CHILDRENS’ THEATRE
by Tessa Warburton
Ritual is sometimes identified as an active form of knowledge, being used to teach the young history, sacred religious beliefs and taboos, to influence the world around, to aggrandize, and to give pleasurable entertainment. It uses the same basic tools as theatre; ie. Performers and audience, music, dance, speech, masks, costumes, and playing stage. It involves what is called by some “ primitive, magical-mystical thinking”, which can be seen as parallelling the development of the child. Non-linguistic emotional communication becomes layered with language. “Pre-operational” thought develops from its sensory-motor precursor and is used initially in an egocentric manner. The very young do not distinguish ? the private or personal meaning of their symbols from the socially agreed upon signs- to them they are akin to personal possessions. They serve magic, not reason. Language, when it first appears, is used in the same way, as private symbols. However, language and related forms of symbol use are capable of a curious form of independence from the emotional communicative systems.
As individual development appears to parallel species evolution, the communication of social need is well established in the infant long before he/she begins to talk. This linguistic, symbolic capacity is largely focused on what might be called the intellectual sphere, the emotional sphere being well taken care of by the older and earlier system of communication. This means that “language initially develops as an independent system for understanding the world, a system set apart from the press of immediate need (a)”. This aquisition commits one unknowingly to new laws of thinking which are often in opposition to the pre-verbal magical system. “Language development, like play and fantasy, will occur without directed teaching, reinforcement or adult approval (b)”. “It is precisely because language is free from the imperitives of emotion that it lends itself to thought of an experimental or abstract nature (c)”. “Play and fantasy express emotion and are centered in the social-instinctual areas. Language is suited to the comprehension and communication of complex information that cannot be dealt with by the older system (d)”. Language can thus be seen as a more public mode, dreams being private and unsocialized. Child’s play bridges the gap between the public and the private modes,becoming an experimental stage upon which personal/social conflicting relationships can be examined. Play is not particularily subject to the pressures of social reality, therefore constitutes a very creative activity, with much freedom for example in the exchange of roles. Erickson has defined the purpose of play as being “ to hallucinate ego mastery and yet also to practice it in an intermediate reality between fantasy and actuality.” Again, the bridge between private fantasy and public mastery.
This developmental approach is contingent upon imitation, modelling, and identification : three words frequently heard in the language of theatre. Peter Slade makes a distinction between drama in the wide sense and theatre as understood by adults. He also divides play into two categories: projected play in which primarily the mind and arms are active, the objects played with taking on the life and doing the acting, and, personal play in which the whole self moves, doing the characterizations and role playing. It has also been theorized that child’s play often resembles the ancient forms of drama. Plays for children are often written in the Chinese convention, with flexible stage, frank theatrical appeal, stage crew and orchestra in full view. This appeals to a simple and honest “let’s pretend”.
The dictionary definition of absurd is “out of harmony with reason or propriety, incongruous, illogical”. Ionesco cites absurd as being that which is devoid of purpose...cut off from his metaphysical , religious, and transendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless. It is not a great jump to link the “out of harmony with reason”, the absurd, to the pre-verbal and early verbal magical/mystical world of the young child, before “reason” or “logical” thinking as we know it has manifested. Also related are Camus’s feelings of being exiled, “deprived of memories of a lost homeland”. We essentially have little memory, at least not a rational’reasonable memory, of this early period of our lives, hence can be seen as having been cut off from our roots. It is questionable however as to whether the child considers himself/herself to be devoid of purpose. Purpose perhaps need be found in exactly that pre-verbal magical mode of thinking that characterizes the young. These early stages of development are full of the verbal nonsense (“that metaphysical endeavor”), the spontaneous tenderness and destructiveness, the nonsense rhymes and cliche, and the mythical and dreamlike modes of thought that characterize the theatre of the absurd. It occurs to one that perhaps the persons who cope with “mental illness’’ often use the communication strategies of the young.
