The Errant Method as a ‘Children’s Art Theatre’

Abstract

The article is focused on the most recent developments of the artistic research that Chiara Guidi has cultivated since the nineties with the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, conceiving original forms of theatre for and with children.

Guidi’s works, inspired by childhood, are preparatory processes for a radical experience of theatre, shaped around a direct relation between actors and children, midway between the origins of the creative act and an educational intent, ruling out any kind of mystification or cultural mediation.

This long-standing research, which began with the Experimental School of Childhood Theatre (1995-1998) and grew over the years with performances conceived around the ties between childhood and the voice, along the lines of fables, culminated in the Errant Method, on which the article focuses.

Guidi, in a dialogue with the theatre critic Cristina Ventrucci, tells how the Errant Method brings into play both sides of representation, action and reception, including as part of the scene both the children’s gaze and their tendency to spontaneously take the initiative. The starting point is to build a relation between actors, educators and children within the field of the performing arts, in order to invert, erring, a dynamic of teaching that goes from the known to the unknown. In this way, theatre adheres to the kind of inventive and pragmatic knowledge exercised by children, rejecting stereotypes of infantile imagination and taking up the primitive procedure of a tactile gaze.

Art invites us to rethink reality and nourishes itself with specific questions in today’s context of widespread entropy and degradation of the image. The fable’s underlying compositional principles transform us and redirect our gaze, altering it and calling on us to find a different awareness of our thought; calling for an oblique and maieutic gaze that becomes concrete within a relation.

Notes

1 Hamlet, the Vehement Exteriority of the Death of a Mollusc, a performance staged in 1992 by the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, directed by Romeo Castellucci, dramatic rhythm supervised by Chiara Guidi.

2 The company has been based at the Teatro Comandini since 1991. The classrooms of this former school have been turned into two halls with rows of seats, an atrium, two offices and a kitchen/ sewing area. A space used for the company's productions, the Comandini, is opened to the public for debuts and for projects by Chiara Guidi: Osservatorio Màntica (a festival with theatre, music, dance, cinema, philosophical and academic research), Puerilia (children's theatre festival dedicated to children and those who are close to them), Essere Primitivo (dedicated to the works of a company of young people who matured within Chiara Guidi's workshops comprising adolescents from the city's high schools and young university students) and – by Claudia Castellucci – Mòra (School of Rhythmic Movement), Cònia (School of Representational Technique) and Catalysi (international contest for artists interested in producing a play to be staged for didactic purposes).