Articles

Legacy TIE/TYP Conference held at Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Mold

Excerpt from an address by Naomi Doyle, Actor/Teacher with Theatr Powys 

In my opinion Theatre in Education should assist young people to know themselves better, know others better and in doing so, come to understand the world better. But of course in doing the work we as actor/teachers and theatre practitioners must never stop grappling with the same questions at the same time. We are not simply instructors or teachers transmitting information, we are mediators; mediators between young people and the world around them. I believe we should be working in what Dorothy Heathcote calls ‘the crucible model’. What I mean is we should be stirring things around together as if all the ideas are in a big melting pot and learning from each other in the moment.

In Theatr Powys we fight to retain full day, participatory TIE programmes, but even then cannot spend more than a few hours with children at any one time. So much in modern society happens at such speed that we can begin to lose sense of meaning and purpose. But children need to be given time to think and process and ponder. With time comes the ability to delve deeper into the material. One thing I’ve learnt through working with Theatr Powys is not to be afraid of silences. A moment of silence can be a moment of reflection; time for the children to imagine into, grapple and engage with the material we’re offering them.

For the majority of the past year we have been engaged in a programme of work for infants (and occasionally juniors) called The Giant’s Embrace. When we began our rehearsal period we were in a very good position to really attend to the theory and practice surrounding our work as the story had already been devised, written and performed by Big Brum Theatre in Education Company in Birmingham. We attended to the work of an educator called Keiran Egan and specifically his book entitled An Imaginative Approach to Teaching where he speaks of the classroom as an imaginative classroom. In it he is concerned with the cognitive tools of development that are present in all human beings and which assist learning to take place. These include rhyme rhythm and pattern, jokes and humour, binary opposites, metaphor, mystery, play, gossip, mental imagery and story. We tried to be conscious of these and how we could best use them to enhance the learning experience that The Giant’s Embrace could offer the children.

I’d like to offer a quote from Bruno Bettleheim which I believe should be in the forefront of our minds when creating and producing material content for our productions:

"For a story to truly hold the child’s attention it must entertain him and arouse his curiosity. But to enrich his life it must stimulate his imagination help him to develop his intellect and to clarify his emotions, be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations, give full recognition to his difficulties whist at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him."

In The Giant’s Embrace a storyteller who only has the beginning and middle to her story, contracts in the assistance of the class- who become her storyendermakers. The story, which draws on many elements of classical fairy tales, begins with a little boy called Tom, his mother and baby brother living in a hovel at the edge of a great forest- in which lives a very greedy giant. The giant eats everything and anything and is drinking all the water- and Tom is sent on many journeys into the forest to find food and water for his family. He is met on the journey by three animals, a mouse, an owl and a deer- (one in each cycle of the journey) who are on the verge of death. He helps each one and on two out of the three cycles comes back with sustenance for his family, but on the third and final time the giant awakes, holds Tom tight in his fist- in the giants embrace and decides to eat him. Tom, fearing for his life, asks the giant to spare his life in return for the lives of his mother and baby brother…

And that is where Mrs Storyteller comes to an abrupt end. She is stuck. The children now must make the ending.

I don’t think it is too strong a suggestion to say that the children were myth making each day for themselves in the same way that ancient storytellers were creating myth as a means of understanding and explaining their world for themselves and their people thousands of years back. They were creating endings that almost directly parallel ancient myths. In one of the endings the greedy giant had to be made to cry and then his tears started the rivers flowing and with the rivers came new growth in the forest. This mirrors many creation myths- specifically the story of Viracocha the prehistorical Peruvian universal god, from whose eyes descended rain in the form of tears that refreshed the life of the valleys of the world. There were so many similarities. In another example the children allowed the giant to swallow Tom whole. This caused the giant to become pregnant with Tom. Once he gave birth to Tom, the nurturing instinct kicked in and the giant then became caring and was no longer a threat to the little people and their way of life. This is similar to the story of Gwion Bach in the Mabinogion where Caridwen is chasing Gwion Bach in order to kill him. They both shapeshift during the chase and it finally ends up with Caridwen in the form of a chicken eating Gwion Bach in the form of a grain of corn. She gives birth to him 9 months later and cannot find it in her heart to kill him. I don’t think these similarities exist because the children have heard these ancient myths before. These stories already exist within the children, they have the means to storymake to better understand the world around them, to problem solve and to reflect on the world.

By putting the materials of the story into their hands - for example the owl, the deer, the mouse - they were able to manipulate and physically storymake without the constraints of verbal communication. We work with the idea that “If you put things in people’s hands it makes hands do things”. The children were problem solving together and for themselves they saw that their inputs were as relevant and wanted as anyone else’s- this gives them the courage to continue speaking and debating ideas of their own during the course of their life.

We need to offer young people story that actively engages their imaginations and provide them with the time and space to reflect and make meaning. We need to act as mediators between the fiction and the real world. We need to let them truly manipulate the materials we are offering, both mentally and physically. We need to give them the ability and confidence to question the world around them. I believe this can only work if we give them the time to do it. If we only have a short time with young people all we can do is storytell. If we have sufficient time, we can storymake and through doing so we will be learning from each other how to live in our world, what it is to be human and how we can strive to be more human.