Theatre enacts the recovery: Butterflies

In these anxious times, young people have been burdened with extraordinary uncertainty. The NSPCC reported a 33 per cent rise in referrals to specialist services for UK pupils needing mental health treatment. The charity Young Minds identified that one in six children aged between five and 16 have a suspected mental health problem in July 2021. Of those children and young people, 83 per cent said that the global pandemic had made their mental health worse. Theatre organisations such as Polka, Half Moon and Tangled Feet have recognised these problems and are playing a vital role in supporting schools in the recovery. Theatre offers young people the opportunity to control a narrative. This is particularly important during a time when they are navigating an overwhelming sense of loss and powerlessness.

To understand more about theatre’s role in the recovery, we must grasp how children and young people responded to the pandemic.

A curriculum for recovery

Barry Carpenter, the UK’s first Professor of Mental Health in Education, joined forces with his son Matthew, a school principal in Worcestershire, to study the impact of the crisis on the mental health of children. They developed a Recovery Curriculum to respond to the mental health crisis triggered by children’s experience of loss. They evaluated the different ways a loss of routine, structure, friendship, opportunity and freedom have created cocktail of anxiety, trauma and bereavement in our young people. Carpenter and his son argued that the anxious, traumatised and bereaved child is not capable of learning in the same way as before, so the continuing focus on traditional examination structures was misplaced. The Recovery Curriculum is a systematic, relationships-based approach to support children and young people to learn effectively again. It proposes five elements essential for recovery:

• Relationships
• Community
• Transparency
• Metacognition
• Space for rediscovery

Chase the butterflies away

Theatre can support and enact these five elements, allowing educators and children to journey together towards recovery. Together, award-winning theatre ensembles Tangled Feet and Half Moon co-created a small-scale work for young audiences. The resulting production was Butterflies, first staged in 2018 as an exploration of the feeling of anxiety. A filmed version is available to watch in full on YouTube. Revived in 2022 in response to the pandemic, the play is aimed at Reception to Year 3 and tells the story of three friends on an adventure to chase their butterflies away. It is an example of how carefully crafted theatre can model the five levers of the Recovery Curriculum.

How to bring the story to life

The three adventurers, Skip, Marshall and Holly, face their fears together, modelling how students might navigate relationships when feeling worried themselves. The production is accompanied by an excellent education pack developed by Emily Eversden, Participation Director at Tangled Feet and Rachel Rookwood from Adventure Yoga. It features ideas from daily gratitude and worry jars to yoga-inspired meditation, which empower both the children on stage and the audience. The innovative and imaginative staging playfully combines puppetry and physical theatre to aid the recovery of the audience, who is made to feel a part of the performance, co-constructing the adventure with Skip, Marshall and Holly.

Butterflies provides a space for the children watching to rediscover their confidence with a story that makes explicit the strategies for coping with anxiety. Tangled Feet and Half Moon demonstrate how theatre performance can enact the Recovery Curriculum and support schools to reignite the flame of learning in each child.

© NATIONAL SCIENCE MUSEUM GROUP

Butterflies (2021)

A post-pandemic update

Polka Theatre, Wimbledon’s dedicated children’s theatre, hosted Butterflies in 2022 and have created their own in-person workshops and free short films to support children ages 3–8 cope with the anxiety, trauma and bereavement triggered by the losses experienced during the global pandemic. Three 10 to 15-minute films feature stories, characters and creative activities to demonstrate ways of coping with these knotty emotions.

Participants have expressed how the films gave them time to reflect on their feeling and that it is good to know that others feel the same. These responses confirm the vital role theatre can play in providing space for children and young people to rediscover themselves as they recover from the pandemic. Inspired by the Carpenters’ Recovery Curriculum, Polka Theatre have created resources that focus on relationships in a format that is accessible for the whole community.

The journey to recovery will be long and, like the intrepid adventurers of Butterflies, many fears will need to be faced. But theatre, created with the care and attention demonstrated by organisations such as Polka Theatre, Half Moon and Tangled Feet, can enact the relationships, community, transparency, metacognition and space for rediscovery that is at the heart of the Recovery Curriculum.

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