Into The New Provocation, 16th January 2013

Audiences should be seen and not heard:

tyranny in theatre for the very young

Good afternoon – I’m Ben Fletcher-Watson, and I’m researching performance for
babies and toddlers in Scotland. We’ve heard today about politicising audiences,
but I would like to discuss an audience which can be described as politically mute,
both because they don’t yet have language, and because they are the most
powerless people in our society.

In Scotland, as around the world, theatre for the very young is rooted in
participation. Every performance relies to some extent on audience participation to
engender engagement and enjoyment, from simple eye-contact to complex
processes of exchange; indeed, they are often crafted around a series of
participatory moments.

Such moments can be exciting

communicative exchanges, gifts from
the performer, to be reverently
explored, tasted and savoured; but
sometimes a child will bury their
head in fear or shame in their
parent’s chest. Is this experience one
of tyranny for these audience
members, wishing simply to spectate?
As Grotowski noted in 1973 of his
participatory experiments, “we were
putting the people who came to us in
a false position, it was disloyal of us:
we were prepared for this sort of
encounter, while they were not”i.

In one definitionii, tyranny is “the illegitimate and/or unjust exercise of power”; the
members of society most vulnerable to tyranny must then be those least able to
exert power themselves: the elderly, ill and very young. Of these, the least powerful
are babies, lacking all autonomy - their lives and experiences are routinely

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determined by others, despite evidence for rich communicative abilities from birth.
Babies are denied the most basic choices: what to wear, eat or play with.

When they visit a theatre, they have not chosen the show from the brochure, nor
the location of their seats. Jonathan Levyiii notes that “children in the theatre are a
captive audience. They do not choose to come. They are brought” while Jeanne
Kleiniv describes audiences visiting from school or nursery as “kidnapped”.
Matthew Reasonv calls them “a benevolently coerced audience... taken to the
theatre perhaps in the same way that children are sent to school or taken to the
dentist - because it is good for them".

Parents and teachers can thus be tyrannical, while artists and even architects
conspire to tyrannise: at both the Children’s Theatre in Minneapolis and the Egg in
Bath there is a soundproofed booth within the auditorium, where parents can take
over-excited children, to continue watching without disturbing others (it should be
noted that this is a ‘disturbance’ defined and enforced by adults). Where an adult is
free to leave if the show doesn’t stimulate or excite them, a child is made to remain
‘for their own good’, seen and not heard behind plate glass.

Stephen Klinevi notes: “children’s culture has always been primarily a matter of
culture produced for and urged upon children.” We should remember that the
whole genre, from Baby Theatre to shows aimed at teenagers, falls under the
heading Theatre for Children. In this formulation, that should surely mean that
ownership rests with the childvii. Instead, “powerlessness is manifested in the
preposition for. For children, but by the adult author, artist, director, actor.”viii

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Theatre, like children’s television, “is not produced by children but for them… The
texts which adults produce for children represent adult constructions… of
childhood”ix.

So why are tyrannical adults so keen for children to attend the theatre? Matthew
Reason provides three possible and overlapping answers: good, benefit, and
educationx:

 Theatre is seen as “good for children”. It fulfils a literally paternalistic

instinct, a class-based snobbery, that marks out the performing arts as
inherently more valuable and worthwhile than a TV programme, a video
game or an app. Artists believe, with very little evidence beyond the
anecdotal, that live performance can be inspirational, life-changing,
epiphanic, in a way that other leisure activities such as sport or cinema
cannot.

 Theatre is seen as benefitting children – we as adults see the benefits that

theatre-going has brought to our lives, and we want to pass that on to our
daughters and sons. Furthermore, we believe that there are wider societal
benefits to bringing up a generation of theatre-goers. They are the
audiences of the futurexi, and if we can train or indoctrinate them now, they
will return of their own volition. Again, all the evidence from studies around
the world suggests that this does not happenxii.

 Lastly, theatre is seen as a tool for learning, despite considerable evidence

that “plays more likely affirm and reinforce conceptual ideas already learned
than “teach” youngsters any “new” information that they don’t already know
and recognize”xiii. Why should theatre be educational? Adult audiences do
not always expect to learn something; they visit for pleasure.

 There are of course other answers to the question “why do adults take
children to the theatre?” – because it’s something that gets you and your
kids out of the house; because the school or nursery has a budget for it;
because it gives parents a break for an hour; because it’s something new to
expose your child to; because they might enjoy themselves. I’ve been
interviewing theatre-makers for the past four months, and I’ve heard all of

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 these answers. I’ve been a father for the past four years, and I’ll admit that
I’ve used some of them myself. But the answer that you hear very rarely
indeed is, because they want to go.

The aim, surely, for all of us who work in and around theatre is to find something
so infectious that our audiences clamour for more, as children clamour for
chocolate or CBeebies. We want to get under their skin, into their very blood and
marrow.

What we want is the same thing as malaria: to infect our host, preferably at a young
age, with something that will live inside them and burst out years later. Instead,
what plays so often do is inoculate children against theatre for life. Like an
immunisation, they are forcibly exposed to dead theatre just enough to encourage a
reaction which turns them against it forever.

So how can we infect them with theatre rather than inoculating them against it?
What would a child-centred, democratic theatre for Early Years look like?

Commercial theatre, with its stadium-sized tours of Peppa Pig and Bob The Builder
Live, would seem to be appealing – children should thrill to the sight of their
heroes live in front of them. Yet children’s tastes tend to be formed by the
reactions of those around them – seeing a parent dozing in their seat while Dora
the Explorer dances thirty rows away is unlikely to fill a child with wonder.

In addition, the content of these shows tends towards the didactic, drawn from TiE
practice or the legacy of the Children’s Television Workshop by well-intentioned
producers, with repetition of nursery rhymes or counting games. Length is often
extended for the most crudely commercial reasons – the director of The Snowman,
Bill Alexander, recently said “I was certain we needed a full-length show of two
halves. Plus the board kept saying: ‘We need an interval. That’s where we make
most of our money – ice creams and gin and tonics!’”xiv. This show is aimed at 2-
year-olds. Merchandising takes precedence over aesthetics. Visitors to In The Night
Garden… Live can choose from a wide range of branded goodies, including a
balloon for £8, windmills for £12 and the opportunity to meet their favourite
character after the show for £15.

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I propose that three key elements of practice within Theatre for Early Years could
point the way towards developing a life-long love of theatre on the child’s own
terms: security, agency and a theatricalisation of the everyday.

 Firstly, productions should be framed as shared experiences for the child

and the parent, neither taking precedence over the other. Theatre should
facilitate enjoyment for both equally, creating a secure and safe
environment. This does not mean pandering to children on the one hand
with saccharine cutesy action while amusing adults on the other with in-
jokes, but instead a mutual engagement, where each spectator observes the
other’s enjoyment. This might involve moments of communicative
exchange, a child sharing an object, a speech act or simply a glance with
their chaperone. It could centre on the ability to come and go freely
throughout the experience. It requires a delicate and skilled balancing act
by the performers to monitor engagement constantly, seeing and hearing
the audience’s reactions at close quarters.

 Secondly, theatre experiences should be rooted in play, the natural

behaviour of even the youngest child. Almost every artist I have interviewed
has talked about ‘playing’ in the rehearsal room when creating a
performance – that privileging of play should permeate the live experience
for the audience too. It is a bold act to grant a child agency, opening up
your carefully crafted aesthetic to the unexpected, but trends in adult
theatre towards participation, interactivity and immersion from companies
like Punchdrunk, Blast Theory, Coney and You Me Bum Bum Train point
towards a democratic rather than tyrannical theatre.

 Lastly, productions should inspire wonder. It is not clear, developmentally

speaking, when children are able fully to separate fantasy and reality; most
authors settle on about six-years-oldxv. If that is true, then I argue that
theatre-makers have an opportunity to extend the theatre experience
beyond the auditorium when staging shows for the very young – to make
their day-to-day lives magical. Oily Cart pioneered the use of ‘airlocks’ –
spaces between foyer and theatre where themes, sounds, smells, textures
and sights are all gently introduced to lay a trail into the world of the
dramaxvi. Similarly, many companies employ farewells that extend the

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 experience, perhaps offering food or inviting the children to explore the
setxvii. In the last year, I’ve nibbled seeds, walnuts and carrots, scribbled
shapes on a huge piece of paper and watched my one-year-old join in an
improvised dance. In all these cases, the intimacy that comes from being
part of a small audience where each spectator can be seen, heard and even
touched by the actors bred a kind of wonder among us. Close-up, theatre
has a power to infect utterly unlike the experience of sitting thirty rows away
from a Victorian proscenium arch.

Obviously, a child will need to be taken to the theatre for the first time, before they
know what theatre is and therefore before they can want to go – but a new genre
known as Baby Theatre bridges play session and theatre experience for newborn
spectators. Sometimes dispensing entirely with script, performer and action, Baby
Theatre isn’t intended to educate; much more powerfully, it exists to bring together
baby and carer in a common space free from domestic distractions to focus on each
otherxviii. Every action is welcomed, every reaction allowed, seeing and hearing one
another on equal terms. Maybe this is where a democratic theatre begins.

Article 31 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees the right
“to participate freely in cultural life and the arts” from birthxix; can participation
ever truly be free in arts for the very young without a desire to participate?

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i
Grotowski, J. & Taborski, B., 1973. Holiday. The Drama Review, 17(2), 113–135.
ii
Cooke, B. & Kothari, U., 2001. Participation: The new tyranny?, London: Zed Books.
iii
Levy, J., 1990. ‘Theatre for Children in an Age of Film’. In A Theatre of the Imagination:
reflections on children and the theatre, Charlottesville, VA: New Plays Inc., 10-17.
iv
Klein, J., 2005. From children's perspectives: A model of aesthetic processing in theatre.
The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 39(4), 40-57.
v
Reason, M., 2010. The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children's Experiences
of Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.
vi
Kline, S., 1993. Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing.
London and New York: Verso.
vii
See 4.
viii
See 5.
ix
Buckingham, D., 1995. ‘On the impossibility of children’s television: The case of Timmy
Mallett’. In In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences. Cary
Bazalgette and David Buckingham, eds. London: British Film Institute, 47-61.
x
See 5.
xi
Schonmann, S., 2002. ‘Fictional worlds and the real world in early childhood drama
education’. In The Arts in Children’s Lives. Liora Bresler and C.M. Thompson, eds. Dordrecht:
Springer, 139-152.
xii
Elsley, S., & McMellon, C. (2010). Starting young?: links between childhood and adult
participation in culture and science: a literature review. Edinburgh: Scottish Government.
xiii
See 4.
xiv
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/dec/17/howard-blake-bill-alexander-snowman
xv
Wheeler, S., 1995. Drama and relationship play in early years of education. The Journal of
National Drama 4(1), 5-7.
xvi
Brown, M. (ed.), 2012. Oily Cart: all sorts of theatre for all sorts of kids, Stoke-on-Trent,
Trentham Books.
xvii
Schneider, W. (ed.), 2009. Theatre for Early Years: Research in Performing Arts for
Children from Birth to Three, Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
xviii
Fletcher-Watson, B., Fletcher-Watson, S., Birch, A., & McNaughton, M.J., 2013. From
cradle to stage: how Early Years performing arts experiences are tailored to the
developmental capabilities of babies and toddlers. Youth Theatre Journal (in review).
xix
United Nations, 1989. UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Available at:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/UN_Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child

Images:

1) Babydrama (Unga Klara). Actress Malin Cederbladh, director Suzanne Osten, text by
Ann-Sofie Bárány, mask by My Walther. Image courtesy Suzanne Osten.
2) Interior of the Egg at Theatre Royal, Bath. Image courtesy guide2bath.com.
3) BabyChill (Starcatchers). Director Sacha Kyle. Image courtesy Starcatchers.