How was the first version of the script written?
How was the first version of the script written?
Feltöltve 2022. szeptember 12.
As a writer-dramaturg, I have often found myself in the situation of not working on a text of a classic drama, but creating a new text myself, often with the help of experts. These experts always worked in an area closely related to the central theme of the drama. Their input and background knowledge helped to make the story as realistic and authentic as possible.
In It's good just to be! I consider the preschoolers and kindergarten teachers involved in the research as experts. This time, it was with their "active participation" that the script was written.
As a starting point, after learning about the research findings and the basic principles, I read, watched and listened to all the documentary material that the participating kindergartens made available to the researchers. It is interesting to note that most of these were textual materials, so the composition of the textbook was not based on visuality but on verbality.
From the very beginning, our creative principle was to respect the texts of the kindergarten children to the maximum and to treat them as documentary material, which means that when writing the script, I did not change the texts recorded during the research - exactly as a script for a documentary theatre performance is written.
Still, it was essential to look at these texts with 'theatrical eyes'. In other words, I had to choose which texts could work as theatre scenes. So, in the first round, I selected and literally typed those texts in which I could find a situation as the basis for a theatre scene.
It was easy to find situations in the recordings and notes that captured children when playing freely. For in this case, what happens is that children take on roles and act out situations, even complete stories – like we do in the theatre.
There were, however, research materials of the type that recorded the sometimes spontaneous, but often rather guided conversations between kindergarten teachers and children. The dramaturgical work in this case was how to make these particularly exciting conversations, which fundamentally question and respond to children's rights, theatrical. The pedagogy of a kindergarten session is quite different from the way a theatre scene works.
Finally, the selected free play and guided discussion texts had to be edited side by side, the aim being to link the scenes as loosely as the children play. At any moment, a new idea could come up, a new game (scene) could start or the kindergarten teacher could intervene in the activity.
In the process of developing the scenes and the structure of the drama, a figure of a kindergarten teacher and six children (three boys and three girls) emerged. Since the research involved many more children than this, i.e. the different situations and texts were taken from many more children, the task as a writer was to distribute the different utterances and behavioural patterns among the six characters in such a way as to create psychologically authentic figures who could roughly represent the dynamics of a kindergarten group. On the other hand, from the many different kindergarten teacher attitudes recorded in the research materials, I had to assemble the figure of THE kindergarten teacher, who embodies in a complex way what the ideal kindergarten teacher is like.
The first version of the script is therefore a verbal impression of the research, which was the starting point for the rehearsal process, when the non-verbal, visual and musical world behind the texts, between the sentences, had to be put in place, which also reflected the child's way of thinking.
Júlia Róbert
writer, dramaturg