The project “Europe Theatre” is a cooperation between two elementary schools in Germany, (Essen) three elementary schools in Poland (Wlen), a school in England (Hampton Wick) and the University of Duisburg-Essen in Essen.

Objective

The objective is the initiation of an understanding of “Europe” in the minds of younger children by means of “theatre playing with the children”.
Theatre playing with the children appears to be a promising way to develop a first knowledge of “Europe”, for, by playing theatre, the children can open up for themselves “hands on” the living conditions and cultural characteristics of different European countries and so get a first living impression of Europe.

Modus operandi

As mentioned above, in this project “playing theatre with the children” is chosen as the method to try to achieve the also above mentioned objective. Therefore, the theatre teams in the participating schools rehearse and then perform theatre plays e.g. belonging to the cultural background of the country, or with contents, dealing with the cultural background or with nowadays living or school conditions in the different countries. The plays may even be especially written for this purpose by the teams. On the website of “Children play theatre” (www.childrenplaytheatre.de) a few of these especially developed plays can be looked up.

Preliminary work

This project is part of the project “children play theatre” (www.childrenplaytheatre.de), which started about 20 years ago at the University of Duisburg-Essen. During this time, about 60 theatre plays for children (ages 5 to 12 years) have been developed, the individual plays dealing with contents belonging to different topics, e.g. “Cultural Heritage” (s.o.), “Natural Sciences/Technology”, “Respect for the Environment”, “Tolerance”, “Tales, Myths and Legends” a.s.o. (see the Website).