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“ART, QUALITY AND CHILDREN” - Lecture held at the opening seminar i Oslo 25th of June 2004
Since fifteen years, spectacles for children have appeared. In the beginning they were objects of suspicion, of rejection, of anger and of fear, but today the spectacles are welcomed in most of the places were the children live they lives (kindergartens, day nurseries etc.).
The real spectacles are where the artistes (comedians, dancers, musicians, story-tellers) give the best of themselves in order to look for new ways of communication with babies - how to reach the essential; the senses of a small child, in a great moment of sharing.
There can be a text, there can be no text; everything is done in order to open up towards their imaginary and to lead them to the time of laziness and dreams.
At the spectacle, the little child is not present to learn, but to catch all what is given, all what is offered.
Of course, the little child, comfortably sitting on his accompanying adult’s knee, on his four legs, in his deckchair, or on his little bench, does not “play” to speak properly.
It is the artist that plays, moves, uproars or makes the music. Then, where is the play for the small child? The looks of the spectator forms the spectacle by itself.
And if you look closely at the word spect-actor(French: spect-acteur), you easily understand that the one person looking and not talking (adult or child), creates and participates to the existence of the spectacle, just as much as the one who acts.
To make a spectacle, an artiste and at least one spectator is needed. It is also by developing art and the pleasure of being a spectator that the small child participates, taking part of the creation.
All the comedians, the musicians, the puppet artists and dancers who “play” for the infancy say that the majesty of breath that they hear, the intensity of the gaze that turns on them, is the “extra-ordinary” artistic demand that this public requires. They also express how much these spectators push them to give the best of themselves and how the sharing of these moments are precious and intense. This little child spectator is brought into the dream, to the listening, to the looks....to the shores of other worlds, to find traces, prints, reflections of his or her own world, to what he or she is being offered.
Sometimes there are words, other times it is the silence that surround the spectacle. However, you can not doubt it. The child “plays”, makes his, all what he is offered by the prints, artistes and adults inhabited with the desire to “play” together with the poetry, the dreams, and the happiness to be in this world. Through demanding artistic approaches, misleading stereotypes and ideas all made for the baby, what he likes or should like, and the artistes “robbing” from the children and leading them to a way of freedom...
The imaginary opens onto a possible future.
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