…even though they are so old and wise
A blog by Siân Mitchell MacGregor
This title – which I mean as a serious provocation - was inspired by Katherine Rundell’s tiny but mighty Why you should read children’s books, even though you are so old and wise (2019). The sentiment behind it has been something of a mantra throughout my PhD. I echo Rundell because for decades, much of the best theatre and dance I have ever seen has been ‘for children’. And as she points out, despite some condescension from adults, we disregard things ‘made for children’ at our peril.
Good children’s theatre is often small in several ways – size of stage, length of performance – but huge in others. Big thoughts and stories encapsulated in 45 minutes or less, often using few props and performers, but a huge amount of other meticulous, engaging elements, crafted and tested out. Rundell calls this a “distillation”. And like her books, the best children’s theatre does not teach as such – at least not with overt instructions or concrete facts.
Instead, children’s theatre and dance will show us, engage us, make us think or feel differently from how we did when we walked into the performance space, through multiple senses, imagination and memory.
Stuart Hall theorised about the active audience, and children are arguably the most active: often physically, but most notably in their pre-programmed desire to interact, to absorb, unprejudiced. All adults once had these attributes and as Rundell notes, we “may not even know we have lost” them. Throughout the hours, days, or even years after watching a show, the true power of quality theatre is that it remains with us, percolating, sense-making, emotion-churning – until it is embedded. It promotes an understanding of the world and our own selves. The stories and knowledges in performance do this effortlessly: absorbing, inspiring and transporting.
So, as Rundell asserts with children’s literature, this is what grown-ups can take from children and from children’s theatre, and it is why we should all experience it. Let it remake us from passive to active spectators, shedding our adult-ness and sometimes-jaded outer. Let’s focus in on the small, for it can be powerful.