As a relative newcomer to SoF, I was moved and excited by Don Cupitt’s talk, reported in the November 2006 issue of Sofia, in which he concludes that ‘we should give up grandiose cosmologies’ and ‘come back to this world, to the present moment, to ordinary language and everyday life.’ (It’s what I’ve always believed!) However, there is much about life that is frightening and inexplicable for children and young people, as indeed it is for all of us, and we will always need art, stories and myths to help us understand the powerful emotions that drive the human race.
In England today, we are passing through a time when Government measures seem to have put a constraint on teachers who must, perforce, follow curriculum guidelines and teach only those subject areas deemed necessary to reach targets and achieve statistics. This leaves little time for the exploration of subjects such as poetry, music, art, theatre, and, to a lesser extent sport, all of which are, I believe, essential for the healthy development of any child, and which appear to have been sidelined in favour of other, more pressing matters.
If this is a rather gloomy assessment of the current situation, then it’s all the more heartening to discover that there are several interesting and imaginative projects underway, run, in the main by large statefunded Arts Institutions such as the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and some of the major Symphony Orchestras, all of whom now regularly work with children. But it’s perhaps in the smaller, more flexible arts organisations that some of the most exciting educational projects are taking place around the country.
The English Touring Opera has established a truly excellent ‘offshoot’ company, which sends a musician into schools and community centres, in those towns where the opera company is playing, so that the children are alert, well-prepared, and excited by the prospect of a music/theatre group visiting their school.
This autumn, a new, specially written ‘opera’, based on the myth of Orpheus, has been taken into 30 primary schools across the country.
I recently attended a workshop performance of Crossing the Styx at Childs Hill Primary School in north London. This is a lively, racially mixed school, bright and cheerful: a model of its kind. Proper groundwork had clearly been done before the company’s visit. A member of the Wonderful Beast Theatre Company, who collaborated with the ETO on this project, had visited the school over a period of one and a half days, and worked with the children, teaching them the songs they were to sing. At least one of these, a wedding song, was from Orfeo, Monteverdi’s version of the legend. The second part of the performance had music specially composed by Rachel Leach and the company of six were required to move from piano playing to singing, from mime to trombone or sackbut and back, all of which they did, with apparent ease and considerable skill.
Throughout the performance that I saw, the children were utterly absorbed. They listened quietly, responded intelligently and when required to, sang with thrilling commitment. The teachers had been given education packs, which included a cartoon strip of the story: a clever idea which meant that, by the time the performers arrived, the children were already familiar with the legend. The props and costumes were simple and effective. In addition to this, a versatile and engaging storyteller acted as a link, appearing throughout the show in various guises, sometimes as a Pied Piper-like figure, then as a strange creature, half human, half from the underworld.
The young volunteers from the audience chosen to play two of Cerberus’s three heads were utterly compelling in their portrayal of this scary creature.
Yet another dimension was added through the skilful manipulation of shadow puppets. Later, when Orpheus turned around to look at Eurydice, too soon, before they had reached earth again, and he lost her forever as she faded back into the Underworld, one child had to be comforted by a teacher. But soon, she, like her classmates, was eagerly raising her hand during the time set aside for questions afterwards.
Among the many questions put to the performers was, ‘What happened next?’ – surely a measure of the success of the venture. I believe that those children lucky enough to have taken part in such an imaginative educational project will have been profoundly enriched in ways that will stay them all through their life, here, on Earth.
This autumn Crossing The Styx visited 30 primary schools in Sheffield, Doncaster, Buxton, Lincoln, London, Cambridge, Snape, Malvern and Ulverston.
The deep of winter came, What time the secret child Descended through the orient gates of the eternal day:
Cicely Herbert is one of the trio who founded and continue to run Poems on the Underground.Her poetry collection In Hospital,together with theVictorian poetW.E.Henley,was published by Katabasis in 1992.
A Primary Schools Project by the English Touring Opera and the Wonderful Beast Theatre Company.