A regular Carnival Cinema column of showbiz life musings by Captain Frodo –
On the way of the Showman: Explorations in the Kingdom of Childhood
I am in the middle of performing a season of shows for children. Three years ago my friend, Søren Østergaard challenged me to create a family version, a “translation” if you will, of his fantastic adult circus called Zirkus Nemo. We created that show together last year, and we present it again this year.
Our humour and ideas of what circus can be, align enough that he has given me complete freedom in the creation and forming of the material, whilst being an amazing director in shaping and adding to the final creation of the show. As I am wont to, I spent an excessive amount of time philosophically contemplating my new audience. Who are they?
For the last twenty years or more I have almost exclusively performed for adults. I am an adult myself, so there is no need for much thoughts about who my audience is, beyond restrictions in language comprehension, if performing in other countries, or the odd cultural reference. Children, on the other hand, are different. I am no longer one of them. Even though people often say I have a childlike occupation. That there is so much play in my existence as a Showman, and there is, but this is adult play. It’s different. I play with the intention of learning something, or to show someone something. I play with balls, wooden spoons, balloons, swords and bears on wheels, to discover material for acts. In my writing I imagine stories and worlds for others to read or hear (eventually). I’m a pretend child, an adult disguised as a child. My play is goal directed. It’s like when the teacher says, now we are going to play shop, so that we can learn how to buy things, how to shop, and prepare us for the responsibility of handling money. This is not real play. The guidance creates restrictions which makes it learning, rather than true play. Children learn immensely from their own free play, but its qualitatively different when it springs from the child. Free play has no other aim than reveling in the play itself. In play, as in almost every other thing, a child is different to an adult.
As a Showman I must know my audience. To be worthy of them all lending me their attention I must have put in the necessary work to understand them and the Kingdom they inhabit. This essay is an attempt to summarise some of the things I have been taking into account when I created my family show. Things I have read and insights I have had about the little bastards that have me creeping out of bed at nine in the morning to teach juggling and play circus for an hour before I start the show here in Denmark.
As I gather these thoughts I am again spurred on in questioning the structure and content of my show, the things I say, and the things I don’t say, as I step into the sawdust ring in our miniature canvas circus tent. Am I meeting them for who they are and how they see the world?
Who are they?
They are not like us. They look like us but are smaller and there’s something odd about their proportions. The smallest ones have such big heads they can’t make their hands meet if they reach up and around their heads. That is a grotesque image if we transfer it to us adults. Imagine I reach for the sky and fold my arms around my head and my hands could not touch. What a prodigiously outsized head, or grotesquely shortened arms I would have. The little ones’ point of view is always upwards and the objects filling every room, the buttons on elevators, appears to them to belong to giants. The differences go deeper than odd body sizes and proportions.
Their minds are different too. They behave, crave, and enjoy very different things than us. What truly gets them going, gets them into their flow states, are to us repetitive, unstructured, aimless, and outright boring. We have a name for this kind of misbehaviour, we call it play. We adults haven’t got time for it, we have a serious goal oriented business to attend to. If we grown-ups, against our better judgement, are persuaded to play with a child, perhaps our own, it is an arduous affair. After playing with my daughter for even just half an hour I need to relax afterwards. It is hard for me. Her flow is not mine, and attempting to stay within her flow is very tiring. Whilst when she comes home from pre-school, tired after a long day, she frequently gets into a good session of self play with her little toys. After the session, she emerges seemingly rested and ready to take on the next part of the day.
Among children a whisper of warning is passed around the playgrounds: Beware! Before you know it, you’re one of THEM; the adults.
They know we are not like them. I don’t know how many ways we talk past each other. Sometimes, as I stand before a child, in the circus ring trying to get them to partake in something seemingly simple, like playing a slide whistle like a snake charmer, I am dumbfounded as to how chaotic the attempt at communications can become. In those moments I am reminded of two adults from two completely different cultural backgrounds trying to find common ground, but in many ways, the children are even further apart from us than adults from halfway around the world. They are like an entirely different species.
Escaping Childhood
Anyone who’s spent any time with kids knows that their behaviour seems directionless and that they can’t even do the simplest tasks like scrambling eggs, tying their shoelaces or doing their tax returns, which of course, they don’t need to since most of them can’t even hold down a job. No wonder childhood can seem like something one is stuck in, and the sooner one can escape into adulthood the better. A whole industry has popped up to help save our children from prolonged childhood. Educational toys, games, apps, tv shows, as well as genius programs in learning institutions all aimed at escalating brain growth and intelligence boosting the potential of children.
Behind the attempt to rescue them from childhood lies an assumption that a human being’s development is a linear process beginning with a child; helpless, inefficient and inexperienced, and ends with the full potential of mankind; the adult filled with capability, resourcefulness and experience. If we can just skip past all the childish time-wasting and aimless play, we can get to the “important” stuff sooner. Adulthood is, after all, where all the important stuff happens. Biologically adults partake in the evolutionary cornerstones of mate selection and reproduction, leading to child rearing, (leading to me writing this article). Only in adulthood do we become productive members of society, and learn to hold down a job, make money, and fill out tax returns.
My question is whether the things children do and the ways they do them serves purposes beyond merely preparing them to become adults? Are their activities really only pointing to the future? Or do they perhaps also serve to fulfil the child at the particular stage they are at? Is it maybe important that the fulfillment happens in just those ways at exactly that time? Perhaps even, this forms the foundation upon which the rest of the human is built. Without a solid and well-constructed foundation very few things remain robust.
Metamorphosis
I mentioned that children are like a different species, but of course this is not entirely true. They behave and desire different things than adults, but are still us. The image that springs to mind is the butterfly. Its life cycle has several very distinct phases, egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly. The caterpillar is not an immature unfinished butterfly. It is a distinct animal in its own right, as perfectly adapted to its leaf-munching life, as a butterfly is to its flying, nectar drinking, mate seeking existence. Both have been shaped to their own perfection by the great universal intelligence of evolution. What is good for the grub, necessary in fact, like eating prodigious amounts of leaves, are severely detrimental to the butterfly. Neither one is more important than the other, and each one must realise their own needs to fulfill their destinies, if I may use such a word about a grub.
Children are not just unfinished grown ups striving towards becoming adults. They are our caterpillar stage, an aspect of our species uniquely adapted to the demands their life and environment throws their way. They have their own demands, cognitive, physical, and emotional, and I don’t think these can be developed and fulfilled by adult behaviours and solutions.
As an excited student of evolution, I am pretty sure childhood, as a thing, has been shaped by evolution’s non-random tool of natural selection, or death, as it is known. Those traits in childhood that aided the survival and optimisation of the species, all stages of development included, are favoured and passed on. The characteristics of childhood should be as well adapted and important as any adult trait. If any of our adult needs or passions aren’t met, illness, mental or physical, is always close by. Such it is with childhood. Thus its not something to be hurried through.
Like with a symphony the first movement is not just something we have to endure to get to hear that final chord of the final movement. We listen to experience the richness of emotion, beauty, and thoughts it inspires along the Way. Each movement is to be enjoyed for its own unique contribution to the whole leaving the final chord rich, majestic and fulfilling exactly because of the sum and order of everything that led to it.
I would also expect the content, proclivities and delights we find in the behaviour of children to be evolution’s optimal solutions to the problem of survival, and the development of our abilities mental, physical and emotional. The way it all points to the future might be how a well rounded, autonomous, pleasant and self-assured individual, arriving out of the chrysalis stage of youth into adulthood, might have more luck in the mate selection business in the later stages.
What kids do
An example of things kids do that is good for them but not necessarily so for adults is the way they often believe they are more skilled than they really are. Apparently this is because children who overestimate their own abilities attempt more challenging tasks and persist longer than more realistic children, and this increased persistence boosts learning. A child standing with their skate board over the edge of the vertical drop of a half pipe and really think they can drop in, succeed more often than those who, perhaps wisely, refrain from dropping in at all. Also, if you’ve ever seen a child try to put on a show you might know what I’m talking about. Their ability to perform, the skills they say, and imagine themselves presenting as well as their abilities to keep our attention fall short of great showmanship, by adult standards. In their minds though, they are great and this leads to persistence and enthusiasm which might push them along the Way of the Showman.
At some point, their awareness grows and the antics of the 3-7 year olds change. They become better judges of their own capabilities. It’s never fully aligned with reality, of course. The Dunning Kruger effect makes fools of us all. By the time they are adults the childish showmanship would be outright offensive and inappropriate but for a kid its charming and absolutely appropriate. Along the way, there is a metamorphosis and the childlike traits vanish or are transformed.
I try to incorporate and encourage this behaviour in my show. I use magic and silly props to make them achieve impossible things, like making something invisible float in the air. An egg from a chicken’s phantom pregnancy flies under a red silk handkerchief. They don’t know how they did it, but since I, an adult, claim they succeeded and the audience roars with a positive response, I hope it boosts the feeling of over-confidence in the child that’s helping me in the ring and also in the children watching it happen.
Another example which, in a way, is the common denominator of all childlike behaviour, is play. The particular type of free play children so wholeheartedly engage in if we adults leave them undisturbed long enough in a safe environment. The environment must be such that the child feels it can fail without serious consequences. In many ways, a child’s whole existence is about play. Through play children make sense of the world. Engaged in it they gain some control their lives, giving them their first sense of autonomy. It also develops their creativity and gives them room to explore their whole personality. What better way for an individual to discover who they are?
Knowing how important the environment is for stimulating play, I work hard to make sure the children in the circus tent, as well as the kid in the ring helping me, knows that what they are about to do is easy and that there is nothing they can do that is wrong. My body language, the way I talk, the time I take before getting to the task at hand, is all aimed towards making them relax. It still does not always work. I try to show them that we are all just playing, but the children in the ring often becomes dead serious. They can easily freeze up under the perceived pressure. I try very hard to not underestimate how easy it is for a child to feel pressured.
Play is the child’s work, my mother used to say. She was a Steiner/Waldorf kindergarten teacher for most of her life. Children take play very seriously, and so should we adults do. Play serves many of the same functions work does for adults. It gives children purpose, comfort, and it’s fun. Most adult work does not tick all those boxes, but it should. Mine certainly does.
For my family shows, play and playfulness are essential and I aim to weave it throughout the performance. Playful is the Way the material in the show must be presented. Play needs time, and a certain feeling of relaxedness. I try to find ways of making room for this in my routines. Let there be time to take a sidestep if the children suggest something, or I see an opening. Give them room to breathe, think, and respond. I am currently tuning this every day. As Zirkus Director of Zirkus Barnly, it falls to me to drive the show forward, but still, I search to balance this with the feeling of play.
Here and Now, the official Time and Place of the Kingdom
The expression FOMO floats around these days. Fear Of Missing Out. “A pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.” We parents have it about parties and whatever else we feel we are missing out on, but we also have FOMO on behalf of our children. We fear they are missing out on future opportunities. Be it school, university, or career.
Children don’t live in the future, they live in the now. If we as adults can protect them and give them a safe environment they will be consumed by the now, like the most ardent Zen practitioners; swinging their wooden swords with the intensity and seriousness of Rembrandt’s paintbrushes. They will be in their flow zone and at peak experience, so deep into the creative and joyful experience, that time never is long enough to satisfy their need for play. Of course in the real world sometimes the flow of play doesn’t come and the tragedy and gravity of the situation is so severe that it is as if the boredom’s immense gravitational pull slows down time itself. Each second becoming a vivid and agonising eternity.
The now, the complete immersion, the ability to not worry about the future is a common trait of the citizens of the Kingdom. So don’t break into a child’s Now with pointless interjections about what they are going to be when they grow up. Of course, adults want to know what kind of work they will be doing in the future, but from the child’s point of view, they are already doing their work. They are playing, and this is possibly the most rewarding work they will ever undertake.
Exile from the Kingdom of Childhood
The Kingdom’s gate is such that it’s difficult to go back through it once you’ve left. I don’t know when I lost my key to the Kingdom. The days ran away like wild horses over the hills and in hindsight that could be when it fell out of my pocket. The playground whispered warnings: “Before you know it, you’re one of them; the adults.”
It doesn’t happen overnight. Like how you don’t notice your own hair has grown until you see a picture of yourself from five months ago. You don’t notice until a younger child asks you to play Star Wars with them and you realise that you can’t. Even when you try, something is missing from the play. You are no longer in it. You are outside looking in unable to embody the figurines of Chewbacca and the Hoth Wampa.
I have a memory of this from my own childhood where, after trying to get my dad to join me in play, he tried to express something I didn’t understand at the time, but that I feel today when my daughter invites me into her play.
He said something like: “Play is not so fun for me because I can’t see the whole world.” He claimed that when I played I could see everything clearly with ice planets and desert landscapes for my Star Wars figurines to inhabit. This was odd to the young me, because I didn’t see forests and moon bases, beyond the bushes and shrubs outside our house. I saw the piece of grass and rocky outcrop across from our driveway. The rest was just pretend. It was just play. It wasn’t there. I just played that it was. Why didn’t he just play that the tarmac was a river and our hedge the Endor Moon base? Well, now I know. It’s because we adults just can’t.
I can’t conjure up the genuine play which makes it possible to inhabit the consciousness of the little mice and rabbits in cute little outfits which my daughter wants me to play with. I didn’t consciously exit the Kingdom, yet I find myself on the outside looking in, and that I no longer possess the key to get back inside.
Let them stay in the Kingdom
When kids grow up they don’t just gain an adult understanding, they lose something. They lose the keys to the Kingdom of childhood. We all do. But I, for one, am learning lockpicking, designing maps with my little girl, sailing the Fantasea in ships made from cardboard to steal little glimpses through kitchen paper-roll-core spy glasses, of the Lost Kingdom of Childhood. The world she herself is on the cusp of leaving. Turning seven is a big deal for a child. School. Things are changing. Thoughts are forming that weren’t there before.
My girl could have been in school already. If we lived in Australia, and not Las Vegas, she would have started school last January, that’s like eight months ago. I find myself wondering nervously whether I am holding her back. Could she be doing algebra by now if I had her in a special maths program? Because she loves numbers. Addition. Times tables. Reading. Maybe I should buy some kind of product that would transform her reading out of joy into an accelerated educational learning process.
Then I see her piling every single one of her tiny toys and figurines into the toy-sized circus living wagon we bought her at a flea market in Copenhagen, she ties a stuffed black dragon on a leash to the front of it and the dragon pulls the wagon with every one of her little friends inside. Each mice in a pretty dress, with their own name. Each with their own history. A real-world history of where she got it, who gave it to her, on which of the tours around the world it came into her life. And a history derived through every game she has imagined, invented and experienced with it. Elly the little antique, one of a kind baby elephant. Molly, the mouse. Nalle and Nella, the twin baby mice. They all get to be pulled behind Midnight the Dragon, they all journey together with my little girl around the Kingdom of Childhood. Whilst I sit on the couch in my full sized circus wagon watching in envy from the outside and become certain in my choice to not hurry her along.
See you all along the Way.
Captain Frodo
Master Showman, dad, husband.
Currently performing in Opium at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.
(And Carnival Cinema Co-Founder)
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