I was hanging out with my 8 year old niece the other day. We were driving along (I was driving, I don't let her drive, I am a responsible adult). I was trying to explain my job to her and her dad asked what her most favourite bit of theatre was. She didn't say Matilda which I know that she loved and she didn't say Billy Elliot which she also enjoyed, although she was disappointed the bad lady (Maggie Thatcher) never appeared and she did, at one point, ask why Barry was so upset ('You mean Billy? The main character?').
No, she didn't say any musicals in fact, she said, 'Watching my dad dance.'
I will admit that this may have been a little tongue in cheek, she has firmly inherited her father's grasp of the wind up and I think she knew this might get a laugh. However I was amazed at her grasp at a concept of theatre which is both complex and unnervingly simple. It was written in Peter Brook's undergraduate bible The Empty Space, "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across an empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged."
This understanding of everyday performance is possibly more innate in children than adults. In Bruce Mcconnachie's Theatre and Mind, he talks about the role of performance in our development from childhood. We learn how to be through roleplay. We play act relationships and see how they fit. It is a safe place, but also a risky place, a place to do where we can't in life. I remember my childhood friend Naomi and I repeatedly playing out a story about a child who keeps waking up her parents and running back to her bed and pretending to be asleep. The bit that we both liked the most was when we were able to enthusiastically wake the parent up normally by hitting them on the head, shaking them or jumping on top of them as hard as we possibly could. Through the enacting of this story we were both able to unleash our frustrations on the other, exchanging the role of annoyer and annoyee.
My niece's absolute favourite thing is games. I left her with a piece of chalk and a blackboard the on the same day and told her to draw anything she wanted. When I came back she had drawn two games for us to play; some sort of bullseye with points and something called splat book that involved throwing wet clumps of tissue at a freshly chalked square. She also loves computer games and like all digital natives is highly digitally literate. She will no doubt soon leave the world of painted games and imaginary role-play towards Snap chat and Instagram sooner than not. However, she ain't ever grow out of watching her dad dance.
No, she didn't say any musicals in fact, she said, 'Watching my dad dance.'
I will admit that this may have been a little tongue in cheek, she has firmly inherited her father's grasp of the wind up and I think she knew this might get a laugh. However I was amazed at her grasp at a concept of theatre which is both complex and unnervingly simple. It was written in Peter Brook's undergraduate bible The Empty Space, "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across an empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged."
This understanding of everyday performance is possibly more innate in children than adults. In Bruce Mcconnachie's Theatre and Mind, he talks about the role of performance in our development from childhood. We learn how to be through roleplay. We play act relationships and see how they fit. It is a safe place, but also a risky place, a place to do where we can't in life. I remember my childhood friend Naomi and I repeatedly playing out a story about a child who keeps waking up her parents and running back to her bed and pretending to be asleep. The bit that we both liked the most was when we were able to enthusiastically wake the parent up normally by hitting them on the head, shaking them or jumping on top of them as hard as we possibly could. Through the enacting of this story we were both able to unleash our frustrations on the other, exchanging the role of annoyer and annoyee.
My niece's absolute favourite thing is games. I left her with a piece of chalk and a blackboard the on the same day and told her to draw anything she wanted. When I came back she had drawn two games for us to play; some sort of bullseye with points and something called splat book that involved throwing wet clumps of tissue at a freshly chalked square. She also loves computer games and like all digital natives is highly digitally literate. She will no doubt soon leave the world of painted games and imaginary role-play towards Snap chat and Instagram sooner than not. However, she ain't ever grow out of watching her dad dance.
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