ASSITEJ Magazine 2019

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 2019 2–7 September Kristiansand
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