Childrens Theatre Stimuli

For children's theatre we have looked at many stimuluses to gather ideas from. We started off by looking at the national curriculum in key stage 2 so that we could see what they are learning as a result we can infuse the information within our performance, so it is not only fun but beneficial for the children. From looking at the national curriculum we chose to focus on Space and The Stone Age, as a group we created a mind map for the two themes with ideas for characters, story lines and destinations here is what we came up with:
                                                         

After this we then started looking at other children theatre practitioners to see what they have done successfully and appeals to the target audience. A main one we looked at was the show The marvellous Imaginary Menagerie by Les Enfants Terribles, here is the trailer:

From this production we saw that they used features like colour, costume and song to make the performance more upbeat and engaging for the children which is a key point for our production. The song creates a break from just speaking and sometimes can help with the story line if it is getting too complicated. Also the crazy costumes and colours really help the children ignite their imaginations and get into it more, making them use their minds.



Another stimuli we had was Fairytales and Mythical themes in general. We focussed a lot on Pirates, Mermaids, Fairies and gnomes. For Pirates we stuck with the stereotypical Pirate themes like treasure, scrubbing the deck and their dialogue like the word aye, we incorporated this into the movements and our characterisation. The fairies were based on the more pantomime like fairies who are quite ditsy, airy and very typical girly. The same with the mermaids however with a lot of the mermaid mythical history mermaids are known for being good and bad so we thought it be a good idea to portray this within the performance. Lastly the gnomes are very humour based as they are quite odd and small we thought it be good to add them in as we had had quite a few girly based characters so we thought we would make it more equal.