Give children their theatre

Till the late '70s it was difficult to find any such avenue for children barring one or two pioneering theatre groups for kids. It is a great feeling to see parents now understand the importance of theatre for the growth of their children.

Of course, in many a case it is also a means of getting the little ones off their backs for some time during the long vacations. But whatever the reason, children are the ones who enjoy themselves while they learn.

It is not just parents who have realised the importance of theatre for children, but also the education establishment. Lately NCERT, under the leadership of the eminent educationist Krishna Kumar, has decided to include theatre as a part of the school curriculum. Hectic activity is on to finalise the syllabus and curriculum so that it can be introduced at the earliest.

Probably, very soon, children will not only have the opportunity to learn their lessons through drama but will also have theatre as an optional subject at the higher secondary level.

So there will be the whole gamut that theatre has to offer "" theatre games, improvisations, storytelling, enacting the otherwise tedious lessons, role-playing and learning to express themselves, along with co-actors on stage, with confidence.

Teachers too would have the advantage of using theatre techniques for teaching and making their classes more useful and exciting. On the whole, it seems a very exciting prospect considering the advantages of theatre in a child's life. And hopefully it should work out well considering the planning put in by experts who are working at it.

But "" and this is a very big but "" we know that anything the children have in their syllabus starts becoming a burden on them. Partly because it becomes "study", and partly because it is taught so unimaginatively, due to the various constraints of the system. I remember my childhood when the art teacher fired me for painting mountains purple! "How stupid," she fumed, "Don't you know they are brown?"

I wonder if that teacher would have approved of my daughter imagining her dream fairy to be dressed in fluorescent green. And yet, if we do not allow this free play of imagination, aren't we restricting the child's imagination from the word go?

Theatre is all about imagination where an ordinary run-down stool on stage can become a throne, a carriage, a mountain, a tree etcetera, etcetera. A subject like theatre, which has the potential of transforming even the most mundane topic into an exciting and real encounter, needs to be handled by people who themselves enjoy this exercise in imagination.

Here the sense of sharing is important but our habit of talking down to children can ruin even the most exciting theatre game or improvisation. And then the prospect of being examined on it is likely to kill whatever little excitement children are likely to feel about the subject. It would, indeed, be sad if children start to dislike something they inherently enjoy.

There is a need to tread carefully and slowly. Since this method needs constant innovation, the biggest task would be to induct/select teachers who are creative and interested in this area, train them into this specific methodology, and exercise constant supervision in the initial stages.

A difficult task is to ensure quality, given the thousands of schools all over the country where this may become a part of the curriculum. One would strongly advocate that the plan be implemented in stages and in some schools as a pilot project, and the problems, as they arise, be solved before its induction all over the country.