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Drama

Experimental child drama successful

L. Jonassen

There are a few people, pardon, a great deal, who insist on categorising everything, We are all listed somewhere under some sub heading?but life needn't be so cold.

Few people see things with such clarity and colour as do children. "Innocent children", I know, is a cliche, remembering your dear brothers and sisters you will probably not agree with me. As we get older, we gel more cunning (the preferred word is wiser). Perhaps its just that we learn the tricks, social graces, and how to run in the general mad race—called "socialisation", by the text-book

The world of children is a world apart from ours; time can pass slowly and Christmas can be years off, then it sneakes past when it shouldn't. It is in this unique world that Child Drama finds a place. The word "drama" suggests something like a stage play once performed, then forgotten. Child Drama or creativity is something vastly different. This "thing" drama, creativty, or whatever, is an exploration in the child's self, using his five senses to reach the depths of his personality.

Children can be anything and anyone from a piece of chewing-gum to a pink (or blue) angel. They create for themselves, they discover the world and the people in it by actual experience (the text-books say "role-playing"). This exploration may be through poetry, art, miming, or any other desirous form.

Perhaps Robert Druce, in his book The Eye Of Innocence, explains the content of Child Drama best:

"What do children have to offer towards a definition? Their wit, their exurberance, and their excitement; certainly images that linger in the mind. Their poetry is about anything or everything. It results from the impact upon them of an image or an emotion or an idea. Their thoughts are about being alive and not being dead, about, wonder and joy, hate and despair and loneliness."

If we are to still insist on categorising everything surely Masterton's recent production of Earth And Sky incorporates many aspects of Child Drama.