Articles

Eyes and silences

Author

Roberto Frabetti, La Baracca - Testoni Ragazzi


Yet I believe that if there was a little bit of silence, if all of us kept silent for a little while, perhaps we would understand something"

(Federico Fellini, The moon's voice)


Nursery children are those whose age can vary between three months and three years. For adult people, "the inhabitants of the nurseries" are faraway.
When we think about a "little" baby, we rarely manage to "see" a baby of this age, if we do not live together with him or them our everyday life. Let's try.
It is more likely that the little baby we see has a newborn child's face and a four years old one's language. 
A nursery child's face, eyes, words, sounds and movements hide in memory.
There are thirty-six months between zero and three years only, but they are characterised by continuous changes.

Maria Gurioli, who is pedagogue at the Municipality of Bologna, gives some interesting suggestions:

"After six months, there is clear evidence that babies begin to tell the difference between their body and the one of their mothers. Then, after seven or eight months they acquire complete familiarity with her and with what she is, with what gives the sensation of mother, her presence, her taste, her smell, with what has the sound of mother.

(...) The development of perception, memory, language, motion and thought helps the process of separation, as well as the development of the "ego". From ten/twelve months on, when babies learn to walk and acquire, later on, representative intelligence - which culminates with language and symbolic playing - their sense of individuation begins to improve.

Walking and representative intelligence are actually very important organisers of their psychological birth.

During the third year of life a sense of stable entity is reached..."

(Esplorare, Comune di Bologna, 1991)


I do not know whether this is an absolute truth or not, but I know that it is what happens to me.

Maybe this can explain why every time I meet nursery children, I get so astonished. This astonishment makes me feel the strong desire to be in contact with them.

To be in contact with a little baby means, for an actor, to find an equilibrium between "telling" and listening, trying to privilege the latter. We should look for the pleasure to listen inside of us, listen with all our senses and communicate this pleasure to the children.

Listening is complex.

It means paying attention to what is not said, to the hidden, the evoked...

It is the attention to the originality of every sign.

The children's eyes and silences go hand in hand, and sometimes they open doors to hidden worlds. Most of the times we are not able to see them, and we lose a good chance to get astonished.

The act of listening and paying attention to what happens creates an environment of complicity, where it is possible to tell the visible as well as the non-visible, the hidden, the concealed, the mysterious.

Silences, curious and amazed eyes.

I saw those eyes in nursery children so many times.

They are the eyes of Teresa, who, at 13 months, watched the whole performance standing, leaning against the leg of her teacher, in a nursery school in Ferrara.

Teresa and I made immediately eye contact, and with her few, fair hair and her big eyes, she seemed to ask me: what do you want from me? Why are you here? I saw her again two years later, when I went back to that nursery. She was three years old then, but she still had the same talking eyes.

Or, either, Matteo's eyes, who must be now fifteen years old. I looked at those eyes just once, in a nursery school in Bologna, but they have always occupied a special place in my memories.

Matteo was about to be weaned, he was not two years old yet and did not speak. When I finished my performance, he took me by the hand and looked at me. Hand in hand with him and looking at him in the eyes, I packed up my stuff and put it all inside my van.

Then, without saying a word, we said goodbye. Silently.

Nursery children's silences take our breath away.

I always tend to talk too much, especially when I am surrounded by young children, because I am not able to overcome my fear of their silences and of the pauses deriving from a vocabulary that has to be completed.

When I started working with nursery children, more than ever before I felt the public was a companion. After eighteen years the pleasure is still the same, and I think I will not ever get bored.

Perhaps this was possible thanks to the spontaneity of an audience that is there or it is not, that accepts and refuses what is shown them through strong reactions. It has got a particular breathing rhythm, which forces you not to be aggressive, to wait for it, to give it time to understand who you are. Then, gently, you can begin to measure everything and feel at ease. It asks you total respect.

Without that audience, and without that incredible and natural ability to "return", I would have felt almost nothing.

A good reason to go on, trying to understand better what does it mean for an actor to stand in front of an audience. In particular, in front of an audience of children.

A plausible answer, among thousands of possible answers, to the anxious question "What does theatre for children mean?", could be: "It means to dive into a river of emotions"; emotions just like the ones Riccardo, two years old, feels. We called him "the kisser".

At that time, we had just begun working at "Testoni Ragazzi", and we were preparing and programming three performances for nursery children. I was going to perform in all of them.

Riccardo did not reach one metre of height, and he was a great listener. He sat on the carpet in the middle of the front line of children, with attentive and serious eyes, almost glaring at me.

During the performance, he suddenly turned to one of his mates and, without saying a word, he pulled him closer, hugged him, and kissed him. Then, he turned his eyes back to the scene and did not make a move until the end of the performance.

Two weeks later, we performed again in the same nursery, and Riccardo was again sitting in front line of children.

In the middle of the performance, "the kisser" performed once again. He changed his target but all the rest was just the same: hug and Rhett-Butler-style kiss, like in "Gone with the wind".

I do not remember whether the kissed were boys or girls. It did not matter to him: whoever was sitting beside him, was sooner or later bound to share his emotions.

The third time I went there, I impatiently waited for him to perform his kiss again, and he did not frustrate my expectations: hug, kiss and back to his position. I thought that the kiss was his manner to give way to his deep emotion. Maybe it is true and maybe it is not. I'll have to be satisfied with the image of the kisser.

However, there have been more kisses, and more emotions. Nursery school of Monfalcone (North of Italy), May 1991. The title of the performance was "Desires - the wolf and the moon", in which we exploited narration and dance, but during the tour the dancer got chickenpox, so I had to change it, and it turned into pure narration.

"Desires" had had a very long run, and the very last time I performed it, it fell to pieces. Without the dancing performance, it lasted forty-five minutes. It was a passionate and intense story. The scenery was very simple: a puzzle at the back and a wooden wolf-shaped model in my hand.

After ten minutes, a child stood up, came close to me and kissed me. I continued telling the story while I brought him back to his seat. A few moments later, the child stood up again, hugged me and kissed the little wolf I had got in my hand.

I brought him back, but he kept standing up and kissing the wolf, again and again. I did not understand how could such a little child be so fast. I kept an eye on him all the time but it did not seem to work, he was always around.

Then, when I saw two children standing up, coming closer, hugging me, kissing me, and, finally, kissing the wolf, I realised they were two identical twin brothers, playing a very special game, the one after the other. At the end of the performance, the teachers looked really amazed, because, they said, the twins had had problems in socialising with the others, and they had always been very shy in company of unknown adult people.

Children react unpredictably, and, above all, they are uncatchable, and this happens mostly because we cannot use verbal communication with them.

This is the phase during which children absorb billions of pieces of information and systems to process them. They begin to understand what language is, and to understand that it is necessary. I think there is nothing more interesting in a human being than the development of language use. From zero to three years of age, children explore the amazing gift of language, trying to understand how to use it. At the same time, they are trying to understand the surrounding world, to distinguish between right or wrong, to tell what is good and what is bad, true or false.

Ten years ago, at the nursery school "Patini" in Bologna, I met Alessandro, who was two years old. I was building up the set inside the school. Among the scene objects, there was a wheeled dromedary-shaped model. A wheeled dromedary. Alessandro came to me with his little bicycle and pointing at the wheeled model he said: "What's that?"

"You tell me. What's that?"

He thought about it a while, then he told me:

"It's not a horse, it's got wheels".

From an adult person's viewpoint, Alessandro might have answered that it was a dromedary-shaped model, or a toy (sometimes toys have wheels), or he might as well have considered only what it represented. After all, it was a dromedary, not a horse.

However, although Alessandro spoke very well, he was two years old all the same. I just could not want him to answer correctly, so I told him: "It's true, it's not a horse, it's a camel".

It is typical of an adult trying to simplify all information.

Alessandro looked at me, then at the model, and said:

"It's not true, it's not a camel, it's a dromedary because it's got only one hump... it's not a camel, it's a dromedary". And without losing more time, he got back on his bicycle.

I never want to stop getting astonished.

Theatre for nursery children exalts the process of identification in Akela, the old wolf in "The jungle book".

It is the magic of the cliff, of the baby wolves' deep eyes. Akela tells a story, the baby wolves will follow the path of their masters. The lone wolf smells and steals everything he finds on his way. He listens to the sighs, he stirs for the cries, he looks for eyes of the babies, too big for those little muzzles.

Akela speaks but he does not care whether the baby wolves understand or not. He knows what is important for them: his voice and the magic of the cliff. Maybe they do not understand and maybe they do.

How, what and how much do children really "understand" when adults send messages to them, is another extraordinary mystery.

My son's name is Bruno.

He was twenty months old when he experienced a theatrical performance at his nursery school. I felt cross-eyed that day, because an eye would look at all the children, but the other was always looking at him, sitting in his educator's lap. We were in March and the performance dealt with the "Journey of a cloud".

Once at home, Bruno did not say a word about the performance, but, on the other hand, we did not ask him any question. Maybe he had not like it, maybe he had not "understood".

Three months later, during a car trip in Tuscany, under the pouring rain, Bruno began to tell us the whole story of the cloud. Who knows why he had decided it was time to do it and why he had kept all inside of him for three months.

Early childhood is a faraway place and theatre can be one of the many ways to try and reach it, because it is a "human" language. It forces human beings to meet each other face-to-face, showing all kind of diversities.

Theatre often represents what should happen in human relationships. That is to say, grow up together and keep on learning. Individuals who meet and influence each other, sharing experiences, memories, projects, with no defence of power or privilege.

It should be so for an educational relationship, as well as for a theatrical one.

I believe that, maybe, an actor playing for children should consider his role, his "job" as a continual chance to meet children and influence himself.

Every single day I spent with nursery children was characterised by great influences and returns, by new emotions and discoveries.

In my opinion, theatre for nursery children is a beautiful experience for the adults involved. These eighteen years of "contacts" make me think that nursery children do like a theatrical relationship; I am not sure, however.

On the contrary, I am sure that it is a unique experience for adults, because you must be at the children's disposal, you must be prompt to continually change shape in order to establish deeper contacts.

I experienced this myself, and I noticed that it is true for the adults involved, as well.

You must be able to "tell" and listen, all at the same time.

"Telling" and listening: these are two aspects of our "living together". If you work with children you must not forget the rules implied by "living together" and "mutual influence". People can dream about being real, nothing is impossible. They can try to be what they dream, and they can dream about being visible.

They can dream about having the right to experience direct and bilateral relationships, without getting lost within a group, considering social life like a web of such relationships.

Me and you. You and me. In front of each other. Now.

Nursery children cry out for the need of this with a lot of energy.

If the need is urgent, the others do not matter.

The others are there to experience and live, but the baby cries out: Hey! Look at me! I'm here!

When they want to say this, they sometimes cry.

Babies are like tiny, vulnerable monkeys.

Evolution deprived them of the ability to cling.

Humans are not able to cling, not anymore, and because of this, they cry. And then, adults can listen to the children's pain, which cannot be considered little just because they are little.

Pain can neither be measured nor defined.

I have heard the children laughing and I have seen their eyes shining bright while exploring the surrounding world.

The babies' desire to learn is not little just because they are little. They look around and soak everything up like sponges.

I have often been told that it is necessary to make them participate actively, in order to keep their attention alive.

Maybe it is true, but at the same time I think that the contrary is also true.

Nursery children and perhaps babies, most of all, are a very good audience, which means a group of subjects interacting through a visual, acoustic and postural listening.

They do give credit to what happens around them and to those who willingly or by chance address them.

When interaction is voluntary, adults are given great responsibility. Children are always ready to listen promptly in order to pick up all they can. They really long for situations or emotions that might be useful to get to know more.

I think nursery schools might be very helpful.

Plenty of people maintain that at their age, nursery children do not need any relationship but the one they establish with their parents and family. From this point of view, nursery schools are considered as a mere source of epidemics.

Epidemics, however, are not the only risk nursery children have to cope with, for they are experiencing the separation from their mothers and, at the same time, they are trying to build up their relationship with time and space, that is to say, with the world.

It is a crucial moment. Either they become harmonic molecules, or they are bound to become invisible.

They are about to begin their long journey in the space where the "others" live and move, and they need to feel their "visibility" grow.

To do this, without being brought to hidden dimensions, they need the adults they live with at school and the school itself, to be visible subjects, not ghosts. In nursery schools I met lots of this kind of people, who are still able to hear that continual cry: listen to me and tell me, tell me you see me like I am, with my silences and my unsteady movements. Such adults try to consider a group of children as a whole made of several different subjects to be guided through their process of identification, trying to find an equilibrium between individual and collective situations.

It could be an interesting model to follow, even in other scholastic institutions.

I dream of a school where children live together, sharing the same experiences, following simple rules in order to balance all sort of relationship, but most of all, a school where everyone, pupils and adults, can be important for what they are.

When I met older children, I heard their cry fade away and become a whisper.

Unfortunately, harmony is hard to get, and the lack of it causes either social explosions or social implosions; either due to the desperate need of what they do not feel, or to its annihilation.

Me and you. You and me. Here. Now.

I'm going to tell you a story and I would be pleased if you listened to me.

You are a very good storyteller, with your silences and your pauses.

Nursery children's pauses take our breath away.

They are long pauses, pauses that make you consider time from a different point of view. In our everyday life, time is our enemy; in this particular case, instead, it should be a companion.

A companion able to highlight the importance of such moments, like little poems that build an experience. Their value cannot be estimated according to adult aesthetic parameters.

The children's silences belong to another culture and their richness derives from the fact of being just silences: it is a kind of "simple" poetry.

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