It Takes Artistry to Make Theatre for Young Audiences: New Theatre for Children Festival, Wrocław 2024

Theatre for broadly understood young audiences (0-16 years) is one of the most important cultural practices. It is future-focused and based on human rights, specifically, the right to performance and children’s rights to participate in cultural and artistic activities and have a say in the decision-making process about these activities. Yet, its importance hardly ever is matched by prestige, funding, reviews, and recognition of its artistic value. Fortunately, events like the biannual Przegląd Nowego Teatru dla Dzieci (New Theatre for Children Festival) organized by the Wrocław Puppetry Theatre (Poland) are a reminder of the young audience theatre’s cultural, social, and political potential, its artistic value, experimentation, and artistry and skills it takes to engage young spectators.

The 7th edition of the festival had a motto: WY-GRA-MY W TEATRZE. This literally translates as “We will win in theatre.” The motto also plays on the syllables “wy” (plural you), “gra” (play, enact), and my (we), bringing multiple aspects of interconnections between audiences, theatres, creators, and the world. This was clearly a dramaturgical core in the programming. In seven days, between the 6th and 12th of June, artists from Poland, Germany, Slovakia, Norway, and other countries performed 17 shows in multiple languages, including multilingual works, aimed at spectators as young as a few months and those that are nearly adults. The Wrocław Puppetry Theatre also organized 33 workshops (700 people participated) and multiple post-show discussions. The productions included musicals, puppetry shows, small-form theatres, and immersive works. They focused on themes such as human-nature relations, sickness, climate change, war, gender, migration, divorce, disability, and new media. It was a celebration of young audiences.

The festival opened with the premiere of Sprzedawcy bajek (+7, The Sellers of Fairytales) by the Wrocław Puppetry Theatre directed by its artistic director Jakub Krofta and written by the theatre’s literary director Maria Wojtyszko. It was a perfect opening to the festival and carried a message that stories do not have to be real to change the world. The tension between imagined, constructed, and real was also explored in another production by Wojtyszko-Krofta: Perfekty i Ambaras (+6) from the Pleciuga Theatre (Szczecin, Poland). Telling an engaging story of two conflicted boys, Perfekty and Ambaras, who became brothers as their parents got married, the show staged the difficulties of becoming a “real” family and – through fairytale metaphors – made some (in)direct references to the current humanitarian situation at the Poland-Belarus border. However, its final message was about the ability of words, names, and stories to shape human attitudes and reality around us.

The language theme appeared in multiple productions. We come from far, far away (+10, New International Encounter Theatre, Norway/Czechia/UK) played with various languages, including Polish as (most of) the spectators’ language, to talk about migration, fear, violence against migrants, and what it means to welcome someone. Alex Byrne and Kjell Moberg directed the piece.

Multilingualism also appeared in Dziwna Wiosna (+7, Strange Spring) from the Collegium Nobilium Theatre in Warsaw. Directed by Magdalena Małecka-Wippich, the show staged stories written by Ukrainian Oleg Mychajłow after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Dziwna Wiosna never used the word “war.” Instead, it focused on the war experiences of animals and children who did not know what war was and did not have words for it. The performers (Justyna Fabisiak, Elżbieta Nagel, Piotr Kramer) performed nearly exclusively in Polish. Still, their characters spoke different languages; thus, sometimes two actors speaking Polish performed two characters who could not understand each other. This Brian-Friel-Translations-like mechanism added another layer to the production’s key theme. It also unintentionally invited a very political statement from the children in the audience (mostly around 6-7 years of age). When telling the story of a giraffe born in Berlin’s zoo, the actors asked: “What language do they speak in Germany?” Multiple kids shouted: Russian. It was difficult not to link this to how Poland’s public discourse has repeatedly described Germany’s posture in the war between Russia and Ukraine as overly lenient towards Russia.

Multiple languages also appeared in Ja goryl, ty człowiek (+ 4, Me Gorilla, You Human) from the Opole Puppetry Theatre. Ja goryl, ty człowiek – directed by Czech Marek Zákostelecký and written by Elżbieta Chowaniec – was inspired by Gorilla Koko and her ability to speak American Sign Language. The puppetry production featured realistic bunraku-like puppets of Koko (which changed as she aged). It included Polish Sign Language, both as one of the performance languages and through the presence of an interpreter. The show also had live audio descriptions. The presence of Polish Sign Language and audio descriptions and their importance were explained at the start of the performance and meta-narrated throughout.

Sometimes, multilingualism appeared through the pre-show and post-show discussions. For example, at the start of Gold Diggers, a virtual puppetry piece by the Puppentheater Zwickau theatre (+10 Germany), the spectators and the facilitator negotiated the language in which the piece was going to be performed. The live negotiations enhanced the liveness of the experience: spectators shared the space and time, put on the virtual reality goggles and were asked to play start at the same time. But it was also a pre-recorded work in which one felt simultaneously present – feeling facilitated by the virtual reality and the 360 experience – and absent, as one could not see one’s body in the virtual reality or do anything to impact the action. A lively discussion afterwards engaged with these feelings and what theatre meant in today’s world.

Many productions featured and explored different ideas on fatherhood, speaking to the (finally) changing ideas on masculinity in relation to parenthood. Shows like Tata (+5, Arlekin Theatre, Łódź) and Drapando (+6, Theatre Academy Wrocław) showed caring fathers who (co)parent their children; other productions – like Gdzie jest tata? (Where is Daddy?) evoked discussions about representation of parenthood, and considering young audiences.

In the case of Tomasz Maśląkowski’s Tata from the Arelkin Theatre from Łódź (Poland)– performed with bunraku puppets and adapted from the famous Dutch book Mijn Vader (My Father) by Toon Tellegen – the father was the main caring figure. In Drapando – directed by Zofia Pinkiewicz and based on a play co-written by Szymon Jachimek and Jana Jachimek (father and daughter) about their own experiences – the audience encountered a story of a girl with atopic dermatitis (AD) and her family. Together, they fought the disease with medicine, stories, and journeys to the US (again playing here with language), but finally grew to learn to live with AD. Drapando was, for me, one of the festival’s highlights. Young director Zofia Pinkiewicz – while focusing on the young protagonist – managed to tell stories of all family members and their struggles: mother, father, and the youngest brother. At the same time, the show was light, funny, and engaging for spectators of different ages.

Another theme was the audience and their agency themselves. In some cases, the theme was not directly explored the show, but arouse through discussions after the show. Other theatre works focused on facilitating the agency of the youngest spectator to encounter the world and theatre works in their own way. The great example of that was Púpätko (Doughnut) for kids older than 6 months and younger than 3 years from the Jána Palárika Theatre (Trnava, Slovakia) and directed by Polish Alicja Morawska-Rubczak. Púpätko used theatre as a lens to, together with its spectators, study nature, human-nature relations, but also actor-spectator interactions.

The festival was documented in detail, and the photographer worked hard to catch the most intimate moments of spectators encountering the works. I wondered about the tension between the need to document – for funders, researchers, media – and the children’s right to privacy, to keep their experiences in the moment they occurred without being constantly documented… The contemporary world puts so much pressure on theatres (worldwide) to “evidence their impact”. What are ethical implications of such requirement and using images to tell stories the children have no agency over? I do not have a good answer for that as it clearly needs to be systemic. But the question has stayed with me.

It was also an element we debated with students from the University of Amsterdam and the University of Wrocław. Throughout the festival they worked together, supervised by me and Justyna Kowal. Negotiating across their different languages, situated knowledge, and diverse ideas on theatre and scenic truth, they wrote reviews separately and sometimes together, finding new formats. They worked under the time pressure as they had to deliver the first draft within 24h. The article links some of their reviews that can also be found here. Others can be accessed through the festival’s website.