Seeking the Aesthetic in Creative Drama and Theatre for Young Audiences

by Nellie Mccaslin

Introduction

Is an aesthetic experience ever achieved in a creative drama class or in attending a performance of a children's play? If it is, how do I know and how can it be achieved? This is a question to which I have given much thought and in so doing have been flooded with memories of my own passion for theatre in all its forms, first as a child and years later as a teacher. These memories have shaped my perception of the aesthetic presence, elusive but powerful, which comes in its own way and in its own time. The following is an account of revisiting those memories in the light of today's practices and objectives. The result is not a scholarly piece or approach to the question but simply a record of one person's journey through the theatre arts as she experienced it at a particular point in time, when the pedagogy and the terminology of today were nonexistent, or at least were not generally known. Nor, I might add, was the question.