Chalk About: The playtime’s the thing
An excellent exploration of life's big questions, using the logic of children's art and play.
The Ark, Dublin Theatre Festival
★★★★★
How do we talk to children about the meaning of life? The idea of a serious sit-down, delving into the complexity of adult relationships and self-acceptance, could sound like something that relates to grown-ups’ experiences only; isn’t it the case that children have their own logic, expressed through their own art? For instance, drawing was long considered a barometer of child development (how realistically can you depict something?), but some psychologists suggest that children are less concerned with realism than they are with the physical sensation of moving their arm along a page, to live completely in a different world for a few moments. Perhaps that is somewhere where life’s big questions can be tackled: let’s chalk about it.
At first, there is no clear connection between the shapes seen in Chalk About, Curious Seed’s excellent dance-play transforming the floor of The Ark’s stage into a gigantic blackboard. There are rainclouds, airplanes, outlines of missing people, all of which get erased by the busy footwork of two dancers Holly Irving and Sky Su. They have already asked kids what they want to see at the theatre, and now they are using movement to present a blockbuster collage of dinosaurs, volcanoes, sharks, franchise crossovers, and a cameo by Beyoncé. There is even a death scene, where they become victims of a lava flow – they melodramatically cry “Noooo!”, and they end up surviving (because they are superheroes).