The Starke Stücke International Children and Young People’s Theatre Festival takes place annually in Frankfurt, Germany.

 

In 2004, we met Suzanne Freiling at the Take Off Festival in Darlington where she had seen one of our performances of Barkin’. Suzanne is the Dramaturg for the Theaterhaus in Frankfurt who host a lot of the shows during the Starke Stücke festival. She consequently invited us to perform Barkin’, along with its post-show workshop in English, at the 2005 Starke Stücke Festival as part of the programme for secondary school pupils.

 

In 2006 we funded Suzanne to visit the UK to see some of our participatory work in primary schools in Leeds. She was interested in taking the work of their resident company out of the Theaterhaus and into schools and was looking at different models. At the time she was experimenting with theatre in the classroom.  

 

Last year as part of the 2008 festival, Anthony Haddon the Artistic Director and myself delivered a participatory workshop with primary school children (7 year olds) in a school on the outskirts of Frankfurt – partly in German and partly in English with a translator.

 

I went over to the festival in April this year as an international delegate, which is a new direction for the festival organisers. Although they host pieces of work from different countries and therefore sometimes in different languages, they don’t have a tradition of delegates from around the globe attending who aren’t connected to the visiting companies.

 

The theatre pieces performed at the festival tend to be black box shows rather than anything with much participation from the audience, especially not on the scale of how the Blahs work. In these black box shows, occasionally an opinion is asked of the audience, but they remain seated in the darkness throughout. However, the organisers are keen to make the most of the children and young people’s experiences by offering pre-show workshops which link to the shows. The workshop which we led last year involved building a garden out of paper. The children who experienced this then went on to the Theaterhaus to watch a Spanish show where the performers made a lot of their set and props out of paper as the story unfolded.

 

This year, as well as their timetable of pre-show workshops for schools and youth groups, the Starke Stücke organisers introduced post-show workshops for teachers / group leaders in order for them to explore how they could follow on from the children’s / young people’s visit to the theatre and therefore embed the experience in more depth. Suzanne and the other festival organisers are strong supporters of our work and are particularly interested in the way in which we encourage our audience to participate – a way of working which isn’t prevalent at the festival through the other work on show.