Acting for children
by Vincent Ciccarello
“Never work with children or animals,” WC Fields warned budding actors, if only because they tend to steal the limelight.
It seems he didn’t have much advice, though, for actors performing for children.
Professional actors may be trained to deliver soliloquies – but how do they react to a child standing at their feet, arms raised, wanting to be picked up?
This is where UniSA’s Professor of Early Childhood Education, Wendy Schiller helped actors in Windmill Performing Arts’ new production for one-to three-year-olds, Cat.
"People who come from formal drama training have no background in this at all," she said. "It is totally foreign to them and can be very threatening."
Prof Schiller has already undertaken a major longitudinal study into children’s responses to live theatre with Windmill under a five-year Memorandum of Understanding.
Flowing from that relationship, she provided advice to actors in Windmill’s hugely successful The Green Sheep, based on a book by Mem Fox.
"Windmill’s artistic director Cate Fowler asked me to give the actors some insight into what they might expect of an audience of very young children," she said.
"For example, young children call out, and they don’t sit still, so making eye contact, whole body movement, using body language and nonsense rhymes are all important when interacting with preschoolers."
The Green Sheep audience was mostly four to five year-olds; Cat takes the same principles but applies them to an even younger group.
"There’s a big increase in language from the younger to the older group," Prof Schiller said. "That’s why the focus of Cat is on music and movement, and the rhythm and rhyme of words.
"For most of the children, Cat will be their first experience of live performance. And so it has been designed in such a way that the concepts are very clear.
"The children are accompanied by an adult but they must be able to see and the show must be in a form that they can understand and communicate ideas that they can take away with them."
While Cat has an obvious literacy connection by exposing children to words and setting, Prof Schiller said it is not deliberately designed as an educational intervention.
"It is performance and it’s giving very young children’s drama the same kind of expertise that we would put into quality adult drama," she said. "From our point of view, this is really important for early literacy, because language experience leads to an interest in books and an interest in reading."
Lecturer in the School of Education Jeff Meiners, who also advised on the movement for Green Sheep, said the movement he created for Cat focused on the interactions between parents, carers and young children.
"Cat models to parents and carers playful ways of interacting with their kids," Meiners said.
"We undertook a two-week research and creative development period at Margaret Ives Children Centre working in the babies’ room, the toddlers’ room and in the kindy room with parents and actors. Part of my role was to set tasks that related to the book, dealing with the concepts that we wanted to get across.
"I drew on my movement analysis background of working with early child development to help the performers understand how young children develop physically and also the emotional connections between movement and feelings."
Education students, who from time to time have worked on Windmill productions on a voluntary basis, also contributed in the development of resource materials for parents and child centre workers to take away with them.
"Where we can, we link students so that they get experiences in community settings as well. It’s really valuable for them as teachers," Prof Schiller said.
"It’s a superb opportunity for us as educators to be involved in ventures such as this. It brings child development to life and arts into everyday experiences.
"And it’s terrific for the actors, as well, as this is the hardest audience in the world to play to."
Prof Schiller is the first to admit, though, that even she can’t anticipate how every child reacts to live performance. The day after she took her neighbour’s three-year-old child to see Green Sheep, he painted the family dog blue!