Discovering that you are a person who matters: isn’t that a precious gift that theatre can offer their young audiences to help them cope with the world? The Call of Duty 20 Towards the Unknown – Confronting the Present Theatre des Zy gomars, La question du devoir. Illustration by Gilles Abel.
GILLES ABEL IS A PHILOSOPHER FOR CHILDREN. FOR OVER 15 YEARS, HE HAS BEEN INVOLVED IN THE FIELD OF TYA IN BELGIUM, FRANCE, AND QUEBEC, WORKING AS A FACILITATOR, TRAINER, AND DRAMATURGY CONSULTANT ON ARTISTIC PROJECTS. Some questions have been – and still are – germane to theatre for young audiences and its creators: What is a child? Who is this strange audience to whom I’m speaking? What topics, stories, and issues do we deem worthy of bringing to the stage for them? At least two characteristics of our times make these questions especially crucial: the powerful jolts shaking our world and the escalating pace of our daily lives. Creating a show for a young audience in this context requires us to determine what position we want to adopt in order to face this “zone of turbulence” that constitutes the contemporary world, and to question what it means to be a child in this context. What functions can a show fulfil? At the risk of sounding cliché, we can offer the following: a desire to create a bond, to generate identification, emotion, and reflection. Often, too, there is a desire to prompt dissonance, jostling, even a reaction. Based on these statements – in the form of hypotheses – how could/should we accomplish this? How might we deploy content and forms that we think – or hope – will reach our audiences (whose levels of intransigence, potential for inertia and risks of conditioning and restraint are not negligible)? How might we appeal to them through their intelligence, their curiosity, their taste for vulnerability, uncertainty, and complexity? In January 2015, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, two comedians, Yannick Duret and Emilie Plazolles, and myself, a philosopher for children, animated by these multiple questions, set out to create a show of invisible theatre that includes a philosophical dialogue. This experience, performed in schools, took the form of a break-in, the purpose of which was to shake up the audience by surreptitiously prompting it to think about the theme of commitment. The three artists all held a strong conviction: that theatre could be a space of dispute and reflection, and that it should address intelligent young people, capable of embracing the complexity and profusion of questions that agitate the real world, with all that it contains, from violence to beauty. This experience, entitled La question du devoir produced by Théâtre des Zygomars, was written and conceived during several weeks of residencies within secondary schools, in order to confront young people with the pieces of this theatrical and philosophical jigsaw puzzle in the making. At the end of this process, the resulting performance hit the road and, since September 2017, has been performed for nearly a hundred classes of secondary school students. Several salient and somewhat crude observations, summed up below, emerged from this tour. They emphasize complex and crucial issues. Should some of these statements sound surprising or counterintuitive, let us take that as a sure sign that they deserve our attention 1. Young people like to be removed from their comfort zones and landmarks during their identity construction. Even if it involves discomfort, insecurity, and confusion, they like the places, patterns, and spaces they encounter on a daily basis to be shaken up and disturbed. 2. They like their convictions, which they too often take for facts, to be questioned. They like to debate, to reflect, and to discover that their field of interrogations is infinite. 3. They like to be addressed as intelligent people. This helps them discover a powerful dissonance: all these things they like – this desire to be defamiliarized from their surroundings, unsettled in their convictions, and to be addressed as intelligent people capable of independent and critical thinking – are at the same time areas that school and family still don’t address enough, confining them too often to passivity, inertia, and infantilization. In this context, taking part in an experiment that shows how theatre can help them metabolize reality and find their place in it, in ways that are both demanding and exhilarating, triggers in them a peculiar feeling: that of being a person whose thoughts, life and concerns are valuable. Discovering that you are a person who matters: isn’t that a precious gift that theatre can offer their young audiences to help them cope with the world? Assitej Artistic Gathering <strong>2019</strong> 2–7 September Kristiansand 21