The Impact Of SARS Cov-2 Pandemic On Children’s Behaviour In Society And Their Reintegration Through Drama Classes

The aim of this article is to point out the acute need of artistic classes for children with ages between 5 and 12 years after one year and a half of online activitities imposed by the SARS CoV-2 pandemic. The 2021 school year brought to the parents’ attention the gaps their children have experienced in terms of sociability. The ease they used to have in communicating with the others has almost disappeared along with the joy of interaction. They got so used to the virtual world that they began to see it as routine and to believe that this is the way our lives should be looking like from now on. As a result, the inauguration of this new school year in comparison to other typical school years, except for the pandemic years, has been registered as the year with the highest number of requests for children’s theatre classes. Teachers saw their students regressing and they also observed that it was very difficult for their students to assimilate any kind of new information, a reason why they came up with the idea of participating in such classes. The worst challenge for the students was to start coming back again physically to classes. Their enthusiasm disappeared alongside with their inability to concentrate and their difficulty in paying attention to the teaching process. The masks on their faces represented another disadvantage that they didn’t have to comply with any longer while attending online classes. Anyhow, it was the first year as a freelance theatre teacher in which the demand increased in such a manner that neither I nor my guild colleagues could honor all the requests we received in terms of drama classes for children at this age. The benefits of such classes in the education and in the evolution of its participants have already been demonstrated by many theatre personalities and they are now being amplified with the increased interest coming from the children’s parents who noticed serious disorders in their children’s’ behavior. In the next lines we are going to analyse the outcome results after questioning 60 children with ages between 5 and 12 years old.

Creative activity of Galina Kantor-Molotova in the puppet theatre and not only

В статье раскрываются разнообразные задачи, решаемые Галиной Кантор-Молотовой в области театрального и декоративного искусства, станковой живописи и скульптуры. Достижения работающей в Кишиневе с 1972 года выпускницы Ленинградского института театра, музыки и кинематографии (1971, по специальности «театральная техника и оформление спектакля» со специализацией «художник-скульптор театра кукол») признаны в Молдавии и в других странах. Ее произведения находятся в Театральном музее имени А.А. Бахрушина и Музее Театра Образцова в Москве, в Ташкенте, в частных коллекциях России, Украины, Эстонии, Германии, Франции и других стран. Более 10 персональных выставок этого мастера было организовано в Кишиневе и Париже. Об отдельных гранях творчества художницы написано немало статей, но в целом ее путь не исследовался с достаточной полнотой. В некоторой мере этот пробел восполняет недавно изданный альбом «Galina Cantor-Molotova», презентация которого состоялась в Кишиневе в Национальном музее истории Молдовы на открытии выставки избранных произведений — кукол для детского театра, гобеленов и живописи. Однако местное издание небольшим тиражом увидят лишь немногие любители искусства. Творчество Г. Кантор-Молотовой достойно введения в широкий искусствоведческий оборот, включая не только кукол и эскизы декораций для спектаклей, но и гобелены, скульптуру, живопись. The article reveals the tasks solved by Galina Cantor-Molotova in the field of theatrical and decorative art, easel painting and sculpture. The achievements of this graduate of the Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography in Leningrad (1971), who has been working in Kishinev (Chisinau) since 1972, are recognized in Moldova and in other countries. There were organized more than ten personal exhibitions of this master in Kishinev and in other cities, among them being Paris. A lot of articles have been written about individual facets of the artist's work, but in general, her path in art hasn’t been studied with sufficient completeness. To some extent, this gap is filled by the recently published album “Galina Cantor-Molotova”, the presentation of which took place in Kishinev at the National Museum of History of Moldova, while opening the exhibition of her selected works — puppets for children's theatre, tapestries and paintings. However, only a few art lovers will see the local edition with a small circulation. A subtle lyricist in painting, a muralist in tapestry and sculpture, though we are talking about small forms, Galina Cantor-Molotova gives free rein to her imagination in theatrical works. Her puppets are marked by a special warmth of author's feeling, which is the result of her character, modest and benevolent, sincerely loving her main audience — children. The artist's works are worthy of introduction into a wide range of art criticism.

Children’s Dialogic Aesthetics in the Chronotopes of Drama, Drawing, and Telling

This paper aims to draw on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic aesthetics and chronotope to address the thorny issue of data interpretation regarding using draw-and-tell as a research method in studying children’s lived and arts experiences. We argue that drawing and telling enframe children in different but successive chronotopes in which they are charged with opportunities for engagement in complex dialogues with their previous experiences and others. Two children from the groups of actors and spectators were sampled from a drama lesson to illustrate their becoming aesthetic across a succession of drama and post-performance activities due to the chronotopic factors. A microanalysis of their drawing and telling reveals the possibility of outsideness and complexity of dialogues varied with their participation as spectator or actor in the drama lesson. With all this understanding, I argue for a holistic and integral application of field observation, and drawing and telling to trace the trajectory of children’s becoming dialogic aesthetic. The study could also provide valuable insights into the research methodology of draw-and-tell, its pedagogical implications for children’s theatre participation, as well as drama teaching and learning.

Pinocchio of the Red Decade: On Stage and on Screen

Walt Disney’s studio created second full-length film Pinocchio in 1940. Its plot and interpretation of the characters were significantly different from the Carlo Collodi’s novel. Disney wrote enthusiastic letter to playwright and director Yasha Frank, who staged Pinocchio as theatre extravaganza in 1937. This production has become a landmark of the Children’s Theatre Project in the framework of Federal Theatre Project, being visually picturesque, inventive and up-to-date according to its social message. It was a story about the complexity of the emergence of a new human, which was especially significant in the context of the ideas of revising the structure of society. There is a reason to see in the Pinocchio script an attempt to substitute theatre dramaturgy by circus language, so essential for the Soviet theater of 1910–20s. The plot was split into numbers performed by professional variety and circus performers, and was reassembled: gags were an organic part of this new plot. However, Frank may not have escaped the influence of animation as well. The article is based on Yasha Frank’s working script, photos and reviews. It examines circus and cinema elements that were used for the theatre’s Pinocchio by Yasha Frank, and its influence to famous Walt Disney’ studio cartoon.

Positionality and Performance: Staging Antony and Cleopatra for South African schools in the context of decolonisation imperatives

Since the start of the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall campaigns in 2015–16, decolonisation has been a prominent topic in the South African academy. Yet practical guidance as to how one might start to apply decolonisation and transformation strategies tangibly, both in education and pedagogy – and, more precisely for the purposes of this article, in theatre and performance spaces – has been in short supply. By adopting a dialogic approach which prioritises the voices of her collaborators, the author contextualises and critiques some of the key creative, philosophical and pedagogical strategies employed while rehearsing and performing a school’s touring production of Antony and Cleopatra for the National Children’s Theatre in 2018. Shakespeare is a symbol of colonial and imperial legacies, and the relevance of his work in both English and Performance Studies curricula merits scrutiny, as does the way in which we discuss, teach, perform and value it. Through an unfolding acknowledgement of the author’s own positionality in relation to the text and its performance in a contemporary South African context, this article exemplifies some of the contradictions and productive discoveries of the Antony and Cleopatra process, in the hopes of contributing to a more action-based approach to decolonisation and social justice in practising the arts and in arts education.

Close Encounters: Staging Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra in contemporary South Africa

Is there room, as Natasha Distiller asked in 2012, for a “close encounter” with Shakespeare in post-apartheid South Africa? This question has become increasingly pertinent. Following the Fallist movements which were ignited at universities across the country in 2015, calls for the decolonisation of curricula and cultural institutions have been coupled with growing resistance against pervading socio-economic inequalities. Amongst other things, the student protests represented a rejection of “old ways of reading” characterised in both ideological and material terms by exclusion, lack of access and disempowerment. This article suggests that Distiller’s question may be engaged with reference to stage adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in educational and/or academic settings which took place before, during and after the student movements of 2015–16. These are two productions by the National Children’s Theatre aimed at secondary school students – Coriolanus (2016) and Antony and Cleopatra (2018) – and two university productions: The Julius Caesar Project (2013) at the University of the Witwatersrand, and DCoriolanus (2017) at the University of Pretoria. Through close consideration of the strategies and decisions employed in staging these productions, the paper argues that the medium of theatre, and the ways in which it has been used by South African performers and theatre-makers, is key to understanding how both subversive and productive “close encounters” with Shakespeare might be enacted

Jack Yeats’s Scrapbooks

A one-time commercial illustrator, a playwright and a fiction writer, Jack Yeats spent much of his early adult life in in Devon, where he lived before he moved to Greystones, County Wicklow, in 1910. He loved to swim and to sail, and the characteristic he valued most was a wildness that he associated with a natural freedom, a liberty that drew him to paint travellers, fishermen, and circus performers. Wildness for Yeats was a freedom from self-consciousness and a capacity to act gaily, a characteristic he drew with vigor in his sketches of jockeys, boxers, and pirates for his children’s theatre. This last represented a freedom of the port and sea that was anchored in a much older culture of oceanic trade and discovery and the portals of this maritime world were a threshold between the diverse cultures that Yeats inhabited, which this chapter reads through his scrapbook collection.