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Volume
36, Number 4 This issue of Bookbird is dedicated to Dorothy Briley, who will be remembered for her outstanding personal qualities: the courage and daring to stand up for her beliefs, her good judgment, and her respect for and trust in people. Dear
Bookbird Reader, Drama has vast appeal for both young and adult audiences—it engages them in the emotions of the characters and transports them into the world on the stage. Yet, unlike drama for adults, drama for children has not emerged as a viable literary genre. It is seldom included in school curricula or introduced to future teachers in children’s literature courses in colleges and universities. While recent textbooks on children’s literature have begun to include a short chapter on children’s drama, the focus is on literature-extending activities and sparking creativity through performance. Like storytelling, drama for children can be traced back to our remote past, when children were entertained, educated, and socialized through dramatic narrations of stories from folklore, mythology, and heroic sagas. Perhaps, gestures were used to convey action; the teller modulated his/her voice to suit different characters and emotions; dances and songs were inserted; and there was an interaction with the audience through question and answer. These dramatic performances later developed into powerful community rituals ranging from the enactment of religious stories during special festivals to stylized dance dramas and masked dances. However, it was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that a formal children’s theater was established—with the staging of religious and classic stories in Greek schools, with puppet theaters in Argentina, or with Christmas pantomimes in Victorian England. Children have also acted in dramas since ancient times, mainly in religious and liturgical performances. As the article on Greece states, the roles of children in ancient Greek drama were actually performed by children. By the seventeenth century, Greek children were acting in plays written specifically for a juvenile audience, with themes drawn from religion, folklore, and classical works. Gillian Adams’s research indicates that the tenth-century German canoness Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim wrote plays on good behavior for young actors. In Shakespearean London, there were two professional theatrical companies for boys, and several noted playwrights wrote for them.2 The folk theater in medieval India employed boys under the age of fourteen—because they were considered innocent and pure—to play the leading roles of Rama and Sita in the annual thirty-one-day cycle of the Ramlila, a dramatization of the sacred text, Ramayan.3 Today, children throughout the world participate in various dramatic activities such as amateur children’s theater groups, theater workshops and camps, school plays, and domestic performances for family and friends. Drama is a multidisciplinary genre involving speech, song, body movement, role-playing, pantomime, improvisation, costumes, and stage settings. Hulda Daníelsdóttir’s article describes how these creative techniques can be introduced to children at school—to engage the interest of reluctant readers by dramatizing stories, as a spin-off for other creative writing and reading exercises, and as choral readings. Generally, drama for children is used as a means to something else—personality formation, literacy, language development, problem solving, inculcating moral values, and even in therapy to allow children free expression of inner fears and anxieties. Seldom is it an avenue for literary and aesthetic appreciation. Drama has also served as a powerful vehicle for conveying political and social messages to children, whether presented as traditional theater, street theater, or outdoor puppet shows. Ralph Reckley discusses the politically motivated plays of W. E. B. DuBois, which served as instruments of social awareness and racial pride in the African American struggle for equality; Anne Cirella-Urrutia analyzes the impact of absurdist techniques to reveal the human condition; Sanjay Kumar stresses the class/gender/race issues in avant-garde theater in India; Marta ZŠilková discusses the postmodern techniques employed in Slovak radio dramas to subvert social pretensions and condemn political corruption; and Sanjay Sircar discusses an Australian parody of the stereotypical British girls’ school story. What remains to be stressed, however, is that dramatic activities can also enable “children to reenter the world of a book, to consider the characters, events, problems, and themes that are central in good literature. Such engagement brings children joy and zest in learning and living while broadening their understandings of both literature and life.”4 For instance, Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1970; Harper & Row, 1971) can be enjoyed just as much when read silently as when viewed onstage. It is at once hilarious and sad as it depicts the dysfunctional Hunsdorfer household: askew parent-child relationships, inadequacies of the school system, burden of poverty, and broken dreams. Yet, in the midst of all this real-life drama, Tillie discovers the marvel of the atom and the hope of a better tomorrow. What is the future of drama for children? Despite its recognized importance, there are relatively few plays that are specifically written for children; there are very few countries—such as Greece—that are committed to introducing drama in the school curriculum for aesthetic reasons. The reality is that television, rather than books or the stage, has become the medium for introducing drama to children. With an increasing number of television adaptations of plays and classic stories, Peter Hollindale is right in concluding that drama is “the most important children’s art form of all, the one they are sure to live with, through the media of film and television, all their lives” (219). 1.
Anthony L. Manna, Introduction, Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly 9, No. 3 (Fall 1984): 102. Letters To the Point: drama and theater for children Absurdist
Trends in Children’s Theater: The Case of Mary Melwood’s
The Tingalary Bird Australian
Popular Culture, Genre-Parody, and Cross-Over The
First Children’s Playwright?: Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim
The
Circle of Greek Children’s Theater Out
of the Trunks of Immigrants: The Art of Puppetry in Argentina Other
Voices Regular Features Focus
IBBY Author
Spotlight: Tone PavcŠek International Children’s Books of Note Professional Literature Dorothy
Briley: In Memoriam News and Announcements Calendar |
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