Education

Theatre for young people should help children in their indi-vidual development and also prepare new intelligent and open theatrical audiences for the future. This is very im-portant in our world endangered by unification and cyberna-tion of human beings. These goals demand a new form of theatre for children – modern, creative and fun. The text pre-sents one conception based on interactive theatre perfor-mances and illustrated by 3 different examples. This form of theatre is based on children’s counting games and other forms of play, on metaphor and symbol, on traditional and ritual theatre. The action may be created, not by logical situ-ations, but by associations with a free structure. Creative participation depends on drawing the audience into co-creating the action by engaging their intellectual faculties and sensitivity on activating children’s imagination and on the interactive nature of this process. However, this theatre must be variable, because children change quickly, develop and their requirements change too. The digital revolution affects every aspect of our lives, changing them very quickly and efficiently. This process also concerns our fundamental values, which take on an ambiva-lent character (good-charity, truth-manipulation, beauty-ugliness or love-sex). This is a new challenge for art and education and for theatre for children, seen as a form of non-formal education. Modern society has forged a deep chasm between childhood and adulthood (Van den Berg, 1988) which continues to grow. 1 From the very beginning, art for children has been created by adult artists, 2 from their life-perspective and experiences. How can these art-ists communicate with a new, young audience if their languages and their ways of per-1 Today a difference resulting from a different attitude to digital reality is coming to the fore. Marc Prensky expresses this difference in terms of digital skills: Digital Natives – young people who are all “native speak