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ART FOR VERY YOUNG PEOPLE IN ITALY - Experiences and actual situation
First of all, I shall present myself and say that I am not italian. I am french and I have been living in Italy for seventeen years.
I took part in the three editions of "Ricochets", the french festival for very young children directed by Anne-Françoise Cabanis.
To prepare the first edition and to have an idea of the situation existing in different european countries, she asked me to inform myself about eventual persons or groups working in that direction, in Italy.
So, in 1992, there were three drama companies which produced shows for very young children, one in Bologna (who started to work for very young children in the late 80’s), another one in Padova and the third one in Torino.
All these companies come from the north of Italy.
Among these, only two are still producing shows for very young children, in Padova and in Bologna, where the company has a big theatre, on the contrary, in Torino, the experience continued in a different way with a pedagogue who is also working in dramaturgy with the educators inside the kindergartens. She is still proposing projects but she does not appeal to professional to present their shows, she is more working on a training level. Nevertheless she has been a point of reference for artists who desired to approach this new research.
I need to say something about Bologna and the entire region called Emilia to understand better why theatrical shows for very young children were first born there..
Bologna one of the major italian town has got the largest number of kindergartens in Europe, at least so it is said, and the development of social and educative services has always been exemplar in Italy. Reggio Emilia too is well-known many studies and research projects about infancy started there. Probably it can explain why the big theatre centre for children was the first to present a show for the very young children inside the kindergarten.
It also organized several meetings on that subject and they are now taking part into a european project with Austria and Belgium. It held a meeting last February. Unfortunately, it seems that there is no wish to have a real confrontation with the other realities working in this field in Italy.
During the next years, other drama companies produced shows including music and dance for very young children, in Ravenna, Torino and Bari, to south of Italy.
All these are roughly individual experiences from groups willing to experiment new relationships with this particular audience, except in Bari where the artist asked the collaboration of Laurent Dupont, one of the first artists to produce art for very young children in Padova. And she started her own research.
Beside the theatrical companies, there are also organizers who began to present shows for very young children, but excepting Ferrara where this experience started 10 years ago and where the director decided to dedicate part of his programme to this audience, the others are more sporadic experiences.
Working in Italy for the promotion of the Tam Teatro Musica shows for children, I happened to know these persons and I realized that most of the time the shows, initially created for under 3, were presented in the nursery school to children older than 3 and, only in very occasions, inside the kindergarten.
So in 2001-2002 I proposed a theatrical organizer from Milan to create a event, in collaboration with Anne-Françoise Cabanis and the new edition of her festival, "1,2,3 Ricochets" and Méli'môme from Reims.
We invited italian and french artists to present their shows inside the kindergartens and in a theatre for the families. We also organized a conference, of more than a hundred participants, with artists, directors of festivals, theatrical companies and associations working in that way in Italy and specialists of children and education.
This event has known a big success with the institutions and the educators working in the kindergartens and the nursery schools. It also created great expectations from them, but unfortunately the collaboration with the Milan organizer failed and I could not continue it in 2003.
So, with a new collaborator, specialized in innovative cultural actions we decided to continue this experience in Milan and to extend it to Roma and Naples with our project "Nidid'arte". Since last November we are sharing the french project for Glitterbird.
In Roma and Naples we are establishing contacts to promote the Glitterbird project and the moment the response seems positive.
Now, I would like to make some considerations about the situation of art for very young children in Italy.
First of all, we can wonder why the experience started 15 years ago in Bologna and did not extend itself like in France, but on the contrary remained a limited experience. More probably because the number of kindergartens outside the region of Emilia- Romagna was not very high at that time. Only in the recent years they really developed. But it is also a fact of culture. In Italy, except in the big cities, the families consider that children should be grown up by the parents or the grand-parents and this way of thinking is still very widespread to south of Italy.
And in the big cities where they require more kindergartens, the concern is more to multiply the number of structures than to introduce new experiences.
But the most important reason is that there is a terrible need for money in culture and of course in art for very young children. It is enough to think that shows for children aged 3, though still very young, are presented in theatres for 300 people and sometimes more.
To favour art for very young children needs to work for 50 or 60 persons. It is impossible if it is not supported by public institutions.
The other point I would like to raise is the aim of the artist when addressing a very young children audience.
It seems that many of them privilege the communication channel with sometimes direct interaction with them during the show. They want to be reassured, showing everyday life moments, starting from the child universe with the repetition of gestures or ritual actions and waiting for an answer from them. Or their intention is to provide the child with a moment of amusement, to continue what he is doing inside the kindergarten, as if there were a fear to bring something new, something different to live e new experience with him.
More rarely they give inputs to stimulate their imaginary.
And we really can wonder if what is presented has something to do with art.
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