Report of the Council of the 13th Festival of Theatre Plays for Children Festic
This year’s theme of the oldest theatre festival for the youngest, Festic, is “A Child Between Life and Fairy Tale”. We did not wish this theme to narrow the view on the theatre production and to set the concept above the quality of the plays. On the contrary, it was the quality that defined the selection. By choosing the theme of the Festival, we wanted to point out some phenomena concerning every day life, which children’s theatre wishes to affect, above all through communication with the youngest audience.
Anyway, overwhelmed with every day life, we, the old people, often forget the sensibility of a child that draws in as a sponge this very same everyday life which holds completely different values from the ones a fairy tale proclaims- honesty, courage, persistence, devotion, emotions… Being brave, today, for many, means being a bully and being good in fighting, honesty is proved by not being convicted, persistence is short lasting when confronted by pragmatism and compromise, expressing emotions is interpreted as weakness, and devotion has disappeared from the hearts of many who barely survived the years the locusts ate, the years of war and transition.
Our wish to put the fairytale on a throne, make it more important than numerous senseless cartoons, but also Latin-American soap operas, so popular with the youngest (which are, imagine the absurdity, called contemporary fairy tales by many), which promote violence, bad taste and artificial, fake emotions, so this sincere wish brought us to and idea to organize a Contest for the best original fairy tale, to provoke children’s imagination, take them out of clichés of every day life and award their effort in an original, theatre manner, through realization of their story on stage and through a book- a picture-book. It is our wish to make them feel what is like to be an author.
Anyway, let us get back to the main Festival selection. The interest of local theatres for the Festival shows that Festic has won an important position on the festival map of Theatre Serbia. The majority of professional theatres for children, but also other theatres that have children’s plays on their repertoire, have accepted the invitation of the Festival and offered their best plays for the selection. Compared to last year’s production, drama theatre makes a significant step forward on the quality level, but as far as artistic result is concerned it seams that puppeteers continue to make a better part of theatre offer for children. It is interesting that some traditional drama theatres have had their pretty successful baptism of fire in the field of puppeteers, and on the other hand, proven puppet-masters have flirted with drama elements in their puppet plays, which implies that there are now better and more versatile troupes in children’s theatres, which makes us particularly happy. Improvement is obvious in the field of visual art of plays, and directors’ complex actions are a logic sequence of mentioned positive moving in troupes’ quality. Having this in mind, engaging young directors, who ambitiously approach the realization of plays, bears much fruit and makes the production at an idea level much more fresh and versatile.
Looking at the whole, a conclusion can be drawn that the theatre for children has continued its improvement, above all due to its openness, courage, but also curiosity, further on, significant improvements have been made in the recent years by artistic managements in Little Theatre “Dusko Radovic”, Theatre “Bosko Buha” and Theatre “Pinocchio”, along with standard quality work in Tiny Theatre “Puz”, and puppet theatres in Zrenjanin and Nis, which have brought to serious production the selection of which will be seen at this year’s Festival (with a reservation that each selection is a subjective act, which we tried to improve by making the decisions as a group, within the Council).
In Belgrade
On 9 November 2007 Festival Council