Children of Paradise: Working with Kids

Children of Paradise Working 4\ Kids Spalding Gray "And since the pleasure-giving principle is forced to capitulate against its will for reasons which the child does not understand, under circumstances which reproduce its primal experiences of helpless dependency (anxiety), the capitulation can be accomplished only by repression. Hence it constitutes trauma from which the individual never recovers psychologically." -Norman 0. Brown Life Against Death EDWARD: Iremember, in my childhood ... REILLY: I always begin from the immediate situation And then go back as far as I find necessary. You see, your memories of thildhoodI mean, in your present state of mindWould be largely fictitious ... We must find out about you, Before we decide what is normality. -T.S.Ellot The Cocktail Party SPALDING: Michael, use the word "normality" in a sentence beginning with "Dick and Jane and Spot." MICHAEL: Dick and Jane and Spot were on the vergy of normality. -From an improv for NayattSchool When I first came to New York in 1967, I worked as a life model at an art school on Eighty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. The class I sat for was in portraiture , so I got to sit still for long periods of time. All this sitting had an 61 unexpected centering effect on me. After I left a three-hour sitting and went out on the street, I found that I was able to see things with a new and simple clarity. Everything was very vivid. Colors and movements of people and things around me were more intense. I found that I did not try to interpret what I saw. I was only a perceiver, walking through some streets and seeing in a fresh way. I felt that I was seeing "the thing in itself." I felt more open when I left that art school. As I walked back to my apartment on Ninety-third Street; I would pass the public school playground on Ninety-fourth Street and Lexington Avenue. The school yard was often filled with children playing, and I would stop to watch them. At first, my perceptions of them would take a wide sweeping view. Their play seemed random: like molecular energy patterns, too fast for me to frame or put together in my eye. It was all color and movement of color, mixed with the sound of voices and traffic. After watching in this way for some time, I would focus in on a detail and see that the children were also involved in small group games and activities that lent themselves to a more sociological view, a more psychological story of motivations. Not having any such knowledge of the children, and no relationship to their contingent lives, I found that one interpretation of what was going on there was as valid as any other. 1.would make up a multiplicity of stories until I was exhausted, confused and longing again for one story: a story that I could get to know, to be in and control to some degree. I was looking for a story that was a story that was my life. At this time, I thought of doing a theatre piece in which I would invite an audience to come and watch the children play. I never did this. It seemed to me to be too presumptuous and I felt that an audience, however small, would make the children too self-conscious. In 1973, I volunteered to do a theatre workshop with children at PS 3 on Hudson Street in the West Village. I was to assist Nancy Gabor, who was teaching dramatics there. This experience was my first real involvement with children, and I found that I was projecting-and experiencing, in some real way-that they were in touch with a reality I had lost track of. These children became a new natural "source" for me. Their energy became analogous to the creative energy necessary for the making of an adult "art." They were all little "sivas" in a constant flow of the creative and destructive. Perhaps because PS 3 was an "open school," it was more anarchistic than other schools might be. I had never experienced anything like it before and at first...