Childhood Reimagined in Youth Theatre

Extract

[...] Far from a linear path leading naturally to adulthood, these works stage forms of initiation that give childhood a proper density. In The Ogrelet, initiation is explicitly organized around a series of prohibitions and learning aimed at containing inherited violence. The child must learn to recognize its impulses, master them, and define itself otherwise than by the figure of the ogre-father. Yet, this initiation does not lead to any definitive transformation. The Ogrelet does not cease to be what it is; it only learns to live with this dangerous part of itself. [...]

[...] Youth theatre is thus defined less by its audience than by the nature of the gaze it proposes: a gaze that trusts in the ability of the child, but also of the adult, to confront complex questions through the imagination. By making childhood a posture rather than an age, theatre offers a space for reflection where childhood becomes a privileged point of view for questioning the failings of the adult world. It offers tools for thinking about it, confronting it, and perhaps even transforming it. [...]

[...] We are then confronted with the affective lack felt by Gretel and Hansel, which once nourished family ties have become a simple function to be fulfilled. The abandonment of the children is not a spectacular gesture, it is a disengagement almost banal. In this sense, Mendjisky inscribes childhood as the first victim of an adult world in crisis. This parental failure finds a singular echo in The Ogrelet, Although abandonment takes on a more ambiguous form. The Ogrelet character is not left to himself out of indifference, but is kept apart to be protected, but also and above all to protect others. [...]

[...] This economy of characters allows for a better representation of the unspeakable, by the density of the unspoken, by silences and repetitions. By refusing any spectacularization of monstrosity, Lebeau entrusts the spectator with the responsibility of thinking what is at play. Childhood thus becomes the place of a serious word, which is nothing attenuated or consoling. This gravity is found, in a different form, in Peter Pan, where the marvelous occupies a central place while remaining deeply ambivalent. The Imaginary Land appears as a space of projection of childish desires, but it is traversed by constant signs of menace and finitude. [...]

[...] Childhood is never frozen in an timeless purity; it is haunted by what it seeks to refuse. Forgetting, often associated with lightness, is here a loss. If youth theatre does not aim to protect the child by avoiding confrontation with the problems of adult life, it chooses instead to address them in all their complexity. This choice implies a double address: the works do not exclusively target a young audience, they also solicit the adult gaze and invite it to question its own representations of childhood. [...]