After spending two weeks getting introduced to the Magnet Theatre methodology and the materials that form the basis of the Early Years plays—wood, sand, plastic, water, stones and clay—I start to believe that my co-creators and I have begun to create something that might become a play. We have moments of interaction between us, a song has crept into the space, and the clay that we work with every day has given us some surprising soundscapes. When Barbara and Anna Sophia come in from Helios Theatre, I am experiencing the beginnings of confidence about making this work, about the work being something that children might like to watch.
We begin the second phase with a circle: everybody sits down and we touch base about the progress we’ve made, our individual feelings about the work, the challenges were grappling with. After two weeks I realise that for me, the overarching theme of this phase is about trusting the theatre making process. The sounds and the images and the interactions need to come together in a thread that feels organic and satisfying for the audience. As demanding as that task is, there is no room to sit down and plan how the thread will come together, how the journey from the start of the play to its end will unfold. We must continue to play, to listen to the clay until there is a clear coming together of the elements we have generated so far. We must trust the process. Yuck, speaking English in Portuguese, says we must not premediate the outcome of our devising process. Premeditation will alienate the children, he says passionately when we reach a block and cannot see a way forward.
While we get our hands and hair and clothes and faces and feet covered in clay, Barbara and Anna Sophia observe quietly, offering gentle nudges to remind us to listen, to pay attention to the consequences of our interaction with the clay. Do not ignore the dust that rises from the dried clay on your hands. Children will see it, will be delighted by it and confused by why you do not notice it. We start again, at the beginning. We try to thread the short phrases that we’ve built. But we are thinking like adults who are performers and directors. We are thinking too much. Jennie comes around, she reminds us to listen, and to respond. We start again.
For two weeks, we work on finding a structure to the bits and pieces of imagery and sound that we have. We get stuck; our new song does not satisfy us. I have been ill and have missed a day and a half of work; we must now find a way to reintegrate me into the performance. There are gaps; the rhythm feels monotonous, the clay will not hold the tree that we plant; I am very short and Amade is very tall, so we must work on creating different levels to keep the eye engaged. The more difficult this phase feels, the more it seems to me that Early Years work is comparable to tight rope walking and splitting atoms. And so a personal challenge is to jump out of this feeling of being stuck, so that my energy does not drag the rest of the group down. We start again.
At the end of the second week we show the work for the first time to children at a nearby crèche. Our group has the widest age range; there is a baby, about seven 3 year olds, and other toddlers up to five years of age. The performance begins, and I can see wide eyes, open mouths, moving bodies. The children are engaged. And then Yuck creates a character with a clay nose, and three children start to cry. All the while there is one who is about three years old, who keeps crawling onto the performance pace. She loves it. She wants to come closer. Then there are two other children inching their way onto the stage. There are moments that all the children love, and they move about or laugh. We must wait for them before we continue to perform. Some of the clay dries up and releases dust. The children are not impressed with the dust, and they say so. This is a balancing act; we must be calm and present as we perform, but we must also be aware of the children’s reactions, and we must manage the way we handle the clay, but we must also listen to one another and be alert for any unforeseen happening. Second lesson: Early Years work requires humility and absolute
focus. Always.
We return to the theatre and the feedback is robust, as always. The end of the second week of the creation phase marks a critical shift in my own thinking as a theatre maker, educator, director and performer. Third lesson: Early Years work is about communicating with children in an active, purposeful manner that is radically different from ‘normal’ ways of communicating with children. I find that these past four weeks of work have dislodged in us a default patronising approach to anything child related. Fourth lesson: The starting point, which in our case was the body and the material, is always there. When the process has jammed for whatever reason, one can always go back to the starting point and recalibrate, find their way again through the creative journey.