The summer season, with its lazy afternoons and hot spells that make the outdoors so prohibitive, brings with it a profusion of theatre for children in Mumbai’s air-conditioned performing spaces. The plays take them off their minders’ hands and thrust them into an arena of live performance and live interaction. At their best, they allow snatches of a real world (as opposed to the virtual universe of CGI-enhanced cinema, gizmos and SpongeBob SquarePants ) to be absorbed and experienced by young, impressionable minds. At worst, they are distractions that engage momentarily, but are forgotten soon afterwards, consigned to the ‘memory dump’ so wonderfully evoked in the Pixar film, Inside Out .
The very young — children below the age of four — are often kept out of bounds from these excursions. Advisories that accompany plays clearly demarcate the cut-off year below which admittance is barred. Yet, practitioners in India are now waking up to address this lacuna, realising that even one-year-olds possess the tools of cognition that could allow them to respond whole-heartedly to the right stimuli and take away something significant and long-lasting from the experience, however intangible it may seem to adults. Creating meaningful multi-sensory experiences for toddlers, sometimes derisively termed ‘baby theatre’, is certainly challenging for theatre-makers. “It is something that one can never be sure of and the beauty of this uncertainty is alluring to say the least,” says Subhashim Goswami, whose 2012 production, Bend and Flows , was perhaps the first Indian play (and only, so far) crafted specifically keeping children between 18 months and three years in mind. This is a very special audience that may not have learnt to articulate their responses verbally, but react expressively enough to register approval (or even reproach) in the most heartening ways — which is a reward in itself.
Italian Roberto Frabetti, one of the pioneers of Early Years Theatre, was in Mumbai over the weekend, engaging with a set of ‘interested parties’ in a practical master class on his group’s 30-year work in theatre for early years. The group, La Baracca, have produced 37 shows, with different approaches of mise en scène , resulting in markedly dissimilar plays: some rich in physical imagery, others built around the interplay of light and sound, and still others driven by passionate spoken narration and humour. This is theatre made for children by adults, in which the irresistible notion of the child as the ultimate spectator is sacrosanct. Frabetti respects his audience, its strengths and fragility equally, and approaches his work with complete responsibility, while never allowing the spontaneity of creation to be swamped by an agenda to simply educate or simply entertain. At the end of the workshop at the Shishuvan school in Matunga’s Kings Circle, which was facilitated by the Gillo Repertory, the participants presented a performative piece based on their three days of interaction with Frabetti. In it, different groups physically represented the different elements — earth, fire, water, air — and through the manoeuvring of their own bodies were able to create a canvas of emotional resonances that could perhaps pierce through a child’s defences and sow the seed of imagination that could flower elsewhere.
In Bends and Flows , Goswami’s actors (Samta Shikhar and Shrunga B.V.) utilise 30 kilos of Bengal gram, that become a road and a river on stage. The children watch and look, imitate the sounds, and sometimes jump right in exuberantly. “The material is inherently playful; it spills, scatters, makes incredible sounds on many surfaces and is just fun to be with,” says Goswami. During public rehearsals, he found that younger kids were not necessarily interested in only being fleetingly enraptured, but were able to sit through slower movements and rhythms as attentively. In Italy, Frabetti was advised to never create pieces that were longer than 10 minutes. Yet, he has now, in his repertoire, several longer pieces of 40 minutes or more, that still command the flickering attention spans of his young audience. Goswami has already started work on his next play in Bangalore. Following Frabetti’s stint in the city, perhaps much more work will now be generated in this inchoate new genre in Mumbai as well.
The author is a freelance writer and theatre critic
