Theatre Week at the library
The 27th of March is
the International Day of Theatre. Fortunately, this dramatic art is recovering the importance it used to
have in our societies, and more and more people enjoy with the different
performances available nowadays.
For this reason, the library decided to organize an event for
children about theatre, specifically about our already famous orange box, the Kamishibai show.
In case you don’t know, kamishibai is an ancient Japanese
theatre art that literally means “paper play.” It consisted on wooden boards
with illustrations drawn on them. The narrator would change the slides and go
on telling the story. This theatre was very popular from the 30s till the
popularization of the television.
Therefore, Marine and I did our version on cardboard, and
chose the stories of “The Ugly Duckling” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”,
for they are tales that everyone is familiar with and we needed that since we
narrate them in English.
We also prepared a little craft puppet based on Goldilocks
story. The children had to choose one of the characters, paint it front and
back, cut it and paste it to a wooden stick to make the puppet. I have to say
that seeing the children play with them afterwards was simply adorable. I also loved
discovering pink-haired Goldilocks and rainbow bears!
The activity took place four times. On Tuesday 26th
we went to the Kindergarten of Pomiechówek. The kids were three and four years
old, so they paid close attention to all the performance. For the craft they
needed help from all of us but it was super cute!
The next day we had two different school groups at the library, so it was an exhausting day, but they were older kids, hence required less attention.
On Friday we had another group from the primary school. It was really nice to see that the children did not feel themselves too grownups not to want to paint, and I believe they enjoyed the process!
In summary, it was a really good idea to organize this
Theatre Week for the children really need this kind of cultural activities. And of course we also enjoyed ourselves quite
a big deal!!