In 2018 ASSITEJ Serbia celebrates 15 years of intensive work on promoting theater culture and creativity for children and youth in Serbia and its active participation and contribution to the international ASSITEJ community. In this spirit we will celebrate World Day of Theater for Children and draw media attention on our recent activities and spread the message written by one of our ASSITEJ National Center founders, the famous poet Ljubivoje Ršumović, who is among the first in Serbia to speak in favor of children's rights.
„ Isn’t one of the tasks of theatre with young people as its target group, to make these young people happy? It is only happy young people that turn into happy adults, who then become happy citizens of a happy country! Isn’t yet another one of the goals of theatre for the youngest to educate them on living together with nature, with plants, with animals and natural resources, with rivers, seas and lakes, mountains and forests? Young people fascinated and ecologically educated in their childhood will try to and succeed in teaching their parents and other grown up folk on what sustainable development is and what wealth there is to be found in biodiversity that surrounds us…“
Ljubivoje Rsumovic message on the occasion of the World Day of Theater for Children 2018
I dare say that the beginning of the year 2018 was marked by two news items that I believe were unjustly removed from the general focus of attention, but whose noble messages concern both us, the grown-ups, and the youngest ones.
Firstly: Finnish teachers got an imperative recommendation to teach their students to be happy. Secondly: Government of New Zealand passes, after a legal battle of 170 years, a law which proclaims Wanganui, the holy river of the Maori, a living creature.
The status of happy human beings in Finland and the legal entity status of the Maori river in New Zealand instill us with hope that there may still be a chance that the World will start thinking about the survival of life on the planet Earth seriously.
Isn’t one of the tasks of theatre with young people as its target group, to make these young people happy? It is only happy young people that turn into happy adults, who then become happy citizens of a happy country!
Isn’t yet another one of the goals of theatre for the youngest to educate them on living together with nature, with plants, with animals and natural resources, with rivers, seas and lakes, mountains and forests? Young people fascinated and ecologically educated in their childhood will try to and succeed in teaching their parents and other grown up folk on what sustainable development is and what wealth there is to be found in biodiversity that surrounds us!
The road that the contemporary civilization has been taking for a while now is unfortunately not the road of the arts, not the road to happiness and by no means the road leading towards defending the planet Earth from merciless profit chasers and polluters of relations between people and between countries, who recklessly threaten us with a nuclear catastrophe.
Such people are difficult to re-educate now!
Still, if the World immediately understood and accepted the Finnish and the New Zealand examples, if it immediately banned production of plastic toy arms, if it abolished the kitsch commercials and worthless series on television, if it were to fascinate young people from their very birth with beauty, playfulness and freedom, perhaps in a century or two we’d have a happy, clean and well bred Planet!
By the way it should be noted that Nikola Tesla was first fascinated by electricity as a child, playing with his cat, stroking its back. The personality of man is formed in his childhood. “The child is father of the man”, as William Wordsworth, an English poet, knew and pointed out two hundred years ago.
Ljubivoje Rsumovic, poet
March 2018.
*Ljubivoje Ršumović is the laureate of numerous awards, including the prestigious UNESCO Award for his “Primer of Children’s Rights”.
