At Assitej, the 16th World Congress and Performing Arts Festival for Young People taking place in Adelaide, visiting companies include the Makhampon Theatre Group from Thailand, which is happy to hear itself described as a form of family, community, university and even food centre. They are performing a Buddhist tale about perseverance. Australian group Zeal Theatre, is collaborating with the South African performers Ellis and Bheki to create a comic show about nationalism and sport.
From Israel, “this crazy country”, as director Norman Issa calls it, comes the Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa, which, as its name suggests, is determined to defy that country’s political divide.
“We’re not the Christian-Jewish theatre company, or the Muslim-Jewish,” Issa says. “We deal in languages, not religions. We’re a very new idea and the only theatre working like this in Israel, and while we don’t have many sponsors, and are very small, people love this place. We have many friends.”
Issa’s Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa has brought a two-hander called Ach Ach Boom Traach to Adelaide for the Assitej festival. He co-wrote the hour-long piece with Yoav Barlev and both men perform in it. The fact that he is Jewish and Barlev a Muslim, Issa says, is not the issue (although that’s one of the first things he says about the play). The issue is how any two people, whose languages distance them from each other, can find common ground.
The production is pitched at children as young as three, but it’s also suitable for people in their late teens, the top-end of the age spectrum covered in Assitej’s broad program. Issa reckons it’s for everyone. “This play is very simple, and very difficult,” he says. “Everyone finds their own level within this play.”
Its premise is that the two actors represent brothers who play together, quarrel, then make up, and quarrel again. “The balance of power swings back and forth.”
As their history unfolds in scenes spoken in what sounds to the audience like jibberish (Issa says it’s the “language of Jesus”, Aramaic), one thing remains constant: a prettily coloured box that dangles enticingly above their heads. This appears to be the prize they constantly fight over, as their bitter feuding becomes ever more violent and hurtful. Finally, when they have “settled down to an uneasy truce, the box opens up by itself”. Ach Ach Boom Traach poses the question to the audience: “What are the brothers fighting for?”
Issa is unapologetic when he calls his theatre political, even though he has his critics because of that. “Most people here (in Israel) don’t like political stories, they look, maybe make a noise about the political situation, and then nothing happens. Most people here, they look, and do nothing.”
That’s why he believes children are the hope for the future and theatre for children is his way of turning this hope into action.
“I love children,” he says. “If we can change children, maybe we can reach out for peace. These children in the Jewish community, many years on they will become soldiers and maybe they will be different people because of what they’ve seen. I believe in that. This is my fighting, here in this crazy country.”
The company is in its 12th year, and Ach Ach Boom Traach has been in development for several years, already touring to a long list of countries, including Uzbekistan, Armenia, South Korea and Japan. “It’s very interesting,” Issa says, “that children all over the world react at the same moments during the play. It’s amazing. The inner child is a child wherever you go.”
The key to touching that inner child is to make the experience live, and Issa is animated in his denunciation of the kind of education children are receiving by way of television.
“It has to be live,” he says. “The theatre is life itself, and you can smell it, the actors, the props. It’s not in a box, in your salon (lounge room). In the theatre, the magic is that you see the story happening now, right before you, not edited so you only see the best takes.”
He describes what happens to people who lose touch with the theatre, those who sit in front of the TV screen with a beer and a sandwich as a process of “becoming heavy”, physically and mentally. Issa’s Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa uses a minimalist set, lots of brightly coloured props, and the energies of its two actors to capture the attention and imagination of its audiences.
According to a growing number of specialists in theatre for children, there is no reason to draw the line there: performances can be directed effectively to babes in arms.
In the Assitej festival, the highly respected Adelaide company, Windmill, has two shows, Cat and Green Sheep, both directed by Cate Fowler, which are pitched to audience members as young as one, but according to Suzanne Oster, theatre can be effective for even younger babies.
Oster is the artistic director of Unga Klara, a division within the Stockholm City Theatre created in 1975 to cater for children and young people. She is attending the Assitej congress, with the support of PlayWriting Australia, to talk about just how young an audience theatre can, and should, target.
The ideal audience, she says, is, in fact, a baby: “Present. Here and now. Not concerned with what it’s having for dinner, doing tomorrow or said yesterday. Free from conventions. Hasn’t read the reviews. Receptive without bias or prejudice.”
Oster’s showcase production, which is not part of the festival but which she will be discussing with delegates at the congress, is Babydrama, designed to present to children as young as six months.
It tells the story of the journey from conception to birth, through to the moment of “meeting their parents and their own will”.
“As far as we know,” Oster says, “text-based performances of this calibre have not been done for such young audiences,” although a Norwegian project has been evaluating the success of dance, mime and puppet theatre for babies from birth to three years old.
That evaluation was so positive, Oster says, there is now a project called Glitterbird, involving the collaboration of several European countries, developing theatre for the newly born. “The more elaborate the productions were, the more alert, concentrated and carefree the child seemed to be.”
Unga Klara works with test audiences, and documents the reactions on film, in order to build knowledge about what works best.
“The fact that one cannot speak,” Oster says, “does not mean that one cannot understand what is said. Experience has shown that the capacity for understanding and assessing situations is present at a very early age. Creating full-scale theatre to the youngest children with all our know-how and passion is a cultural policy statement.
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