A robot who could not dance: Generating performative presence among performer, text, and audience through exploring and performing stories by children

A cyclic performance project enabled Australian tertiary drama students and primary school students to connect through stories written by children in hospital in the UK. Tertiary drama students undertook a semester of puppetry and created performances of children’s stories from Persephone Sextou’s book, Applied Theatre in Paediatrics. Children, Stories and Synergies of Emotions (2023). The tertiary students’ learning process involved exploring form and movement with inanimate objects to collaboratively create puppets which they allocated to the children’s stories they selected. These stories were performed for an audience of children aged between 5 and 8 years of age. This project used participatory action research and applied theatre to facilitate the tertiary students’ exploration of puppetry, story-telling and performance. While the tertiary drama students wanted to apply logic and chronology to the hospitalised children’s stories, they were willing to be vulnerable and to accept that they may not completely understand the stories. The drama students performed their puppet interpretations of the stories for young children. This co-presence of the drama students with the children affected a new understanding of the stories for both groups.