The Child Audience: Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Development

During the past twenty years, I have observed around a million children attending theatrical presentations of one sort or another, from child performers attempting to impress their peers and parents in barely audible school assembly programs, to the world class artists of the famous Theatre for Young Spectators in Leningrad, the visually stunning confections of the Minneapolis Children's theatre Company, and the heartrending emotional truth of smaller professional companies from Czechoslovakia to Seattle. I have seen the old favorite titles—the Cinderella's and the Alice's —in dozens of interpretations, with budgets from zero to hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have seen children who saved their allowances to buy tickets, and those who were dragged off by parents or teachers, sometimes not even knowing where they were going or why. I have seen tears of laughter, and heard gasps of real pain. I have seen enough to convince me that there is something going on in that often darkened space when the performers repeat their lines and the audience tries to believe them.

The pages which follow are not based on research, but on observation and intuition. My object is to form an understanding of a phenomenon I call "aesthetic development." By "development," I mean those changes in the individual organism which bring it from one level of ability to another, presumably higher, level. While "aesthetics" is much harder to define. I use the term to mean the ability of the human mind to respond to stimuli that aren't there as if they were. When we see a canvas depicting the full power of an ocean storm, we make a response that is cognitive—we recognize the scene; and emotional—we feel the power. Yet there is no ocean before us, it is merely pigment arranged carefully of a flat canvas. Somehow we have supplied enough information from our memory or imagination to complete the process begun by the person who arranged the pigments—the artist. This active mental process by the viewer is the aesthetic process. It can immediately be seen to be a process, like most mental processes, which allows of a range of individual differences; and which is subject to development.

Artists arrange stimuli; audiences perceive stimuli. The aesthetic process mediates these perceptions; audience experiences something that was perhaps intended by the artist. But in the theatre, the stimuli are provided by whole teams of artists, and are of a complexity that approximates a real life situation. We get human behavior, language, locale, music, costume, symbolic use of properties, and other kinds of content. We get them all simultaneously; and we get them in real time, with no chance to go back and review. We are generally attending to one set of stimuli at a time, and we do so knowing that we are thereby missing other stimuli. If we watch a speaker to see how her behavior corresponds with her language, we cannot usually also watch a listener to evaluate his reaction to the words. (It is one of the Stage Director's main functions to ensure that the attention of the audience is directed to the onstage event of greatest import.) Because of this complexity, the advantage of developing aesthetic processing skills to a theatre audience member is significant; but the same complexity makes it hard to study this development. Only recently has a reliable instrument been created for categorizing the responses of children to theatre. While this instrument, as described by Patricia D. Goldberg, should make it much easier to identify steps in the developmental process, we must rely on observation to try to understand how the child develops these processes.

If there is some truth to the notion that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, it should be useful to review some key stages in the development of the Western theatre from primitive cultures to today. Theatre seems to have grown out of the same basic human need as religion, and theatre and religion together took shape in primitive society as magical ritual. By acting out the capture of the buffalo, the primitive hunter increased his chances of actually catching...