Children the audiences of now

Arts editor GILBERT WONG meets the director of a children's art festival aiming to give its audiences a sense of themselves as artists.

It sounds like a minor nightmare. Ninety primary school children, no script and a play to produce. But Sue Richer is in her element. She's concocting a novel art form, theatre by children that has none of the peekaboo kitsch they're used to.

Richer is artistic director for Out of the Box, the annual children's arts festival in Brisbane held in conjunction with the Queensland Arts Festival.

With Richer at the helm, the festival has strived to encourage children to produce and perform their own artistic activities.

The festival is not about pleasing audiences of adults or teachers, instead children's experience of art is the cornerstone.

As Richer says, we tend to confuse children's entertainment - puppet and pantomime shows and their ilk - with children's art.

She sees a child's art experience as akin to an adult's. "All that peekaboo kitsch is served up as arts, but that implies that there is nothing beyond children's arts than face painting, clowns and balloons.

"Children are not empty vessels, five years of cultural capital is as valuable as 55."

As parents know, the ages from 3 to 8 are times of rapid development.

Richer: "Children as young as 3 are quite sophisticated in the way they perceive ideas, concepts and everyday cultural lives."

Richer, who was originally from Matamata, before training in theatre education in Australia, has asked children what their interpretation of art is.

"When I asked, 'What are the arts?' the common response was cutting and pasting. But when I talk further they are engaging in more interesting ways with the use of the television, cinema, the internet.

"The activities they engage in are quite rich, but not seen as in the realm of the arts."

Yet, she says, if the very definition limits what children engage in, then that presumes their lives will not be enhanced by exposure and participation in the arts as it does with adults.

"Aesthetic learning and development is every bit as important for a 3-year-old as a 30-year-old. These complement cognitive and physical development."

Richer's aim with the wealth of activities in the festival is to give children a sense of themselves as artists.

"What I have observed is their development in terms of making artistic decisions, being able to articulate these decisions and a huge sense of pride."

She rejects the approach of many arts institutions that set up children's programmes with a view to grooming future audiences.

"I am so not interested in grooming the audiences of tomorrow. Children are not the audiences of tomorrow, they are the audiences of now. If we are are not producing cultural product that engages them that isn't their responsibility. Why don't we watch comedia dell'arte any more? It's not relevant.

"Cultural forms are changing as they should.

"This is not an audience-building exercise at all. It's a problem that arts organisations have. To them exposure equals education, but it's a false theory."

Childhood changes as fast and as much as adulthood. Richer is a fan of futurist Douglas Rushkoff who has written of today's children as being more media and image savvy than their predecessors.

"Like him I would argue that children today have the ability to make sense of the multinarratives of a post post-modern society. Meaning is contingent and that's the society they've been born into.

"Our children have to be extraordinarily clever to navigate society - they still play in backyards and surf the internet. Children understand the convergence of technology in a way no adult can."

For all her passion, Richer speaks from the point of view of a practitioner rather than a parent. She laughs at herelf - a passionate advocate for children's art, who hasn't had time to have children herself.

* Gilbert Wong travelled to Australia with the assistance of the Australian Government Cultural Award Scheme.