Playing the World-Upside-Down at a Children’s Medical Centre

Abstract

Childhood, like old age, is an oppressive socio-cultural construction. Although the modern invented category of childhood has gained increasing visibility and attention, children, like the old, are nonetheless stigmatized as weak, dependent and selfish. It is fortunate that while the elderly comprise an essential and permanent co-culture that signifies death, children are the signifiers of life and only temporarily positioned as a co-culture (Hazan, 2006a). Hospitalization, however, forces children to cope with a strange and painful environment that transforms them into a traumatic co-community This chapter focuses on how hospitalized children together with theatre students made do with ‘carnivalesque enactment’ in a children’s medical centre. Before discussing the theatrical event itself I shall first elaborate upon carnivalesque enactment as a unique form of acting.