Magdalena Lupi Alvir is a playwright and director of the Rijeka City Puppet Theater who brought to Novi Sad Theater Festival the tender and warm "Frozen Songs". It is a performance that we needed, not only in this moment of our social-political situation and ways of dealing with children or not, but in general the kind of performance that should be created for our youngest at all times. It talks about the fact that a smile comes to your face even if you think it will never be on your face again, and you only need to have someone next to you who feels and understands your being...
We live in a part of the world where there are no such great colds as in "Frozen Songs", but because of everything that is happening, both in this part of the world and worldwide, we can say that the mistakes of humanity are beginning to chain us. What songs would have to be sung now to thaw the frozen heart of an alienated world?
The initial title of Tamara Kučinović's play was "Frozen songs for warm hearts". Warm hearts are a terribly important place for us. It is the only place that is safe, which is our home and it should always be open to everything that the outside world tries to cool. We definitely need to talk about these topics with children, because we live in a world that is quite ruthless, more and more merciless, less and less communicative and more and more cold; to talk about true emotion, true friendship and love, about the fact that you always have room in your heart for others and for those who are different from you. The girl in our play comes "from Europe" to a region that is an imaginary part of the Russian northern regions, which the director Tamara took from the original author, the Russian writer Stepan Pisakhov. We must constantly keep in mind that those warm hearts are always open to all people who need warmth, and everyone needs it. We have to constantly try in any way to thaw that world that persistently freezes us for various reasons and find a moment and a sincere emotion, and children know how to recognize that. That is why we must speak honestly, truthfully and openly with our children, and that is the only space that we must be aware of and invite adults and parents to enter. Children have it innately, they know how to recognize it, and we adults often forget it and often build this dull, frozen world around them, which is terrible for an adult to admit. We adults must therefore be aware that we must open our hearts.
Why do we push children to be more grown up than they are?
That's exactly what we're doing. Constantly skipping over them, we accelerate and measure them according to some of our own, wrong standards. And as much as we think that everything else is not letting them grow undisturbed at their own pace, we are actually the ones who are not letting them grow up, with both good and bad things, to simply live a life appropriate to their age. We do it out of some fear for them, and we are afraid because we ourselves have too many fears, some inherited, some from the past, some from the present, and some from the future, because we constantly project fear from some future. We are doing wrong to ourselves as parents, and also to our children. You just need to let them go, which, I know, is easy to say, because it's not easy from a parent's position. Practically, you should let them go and only be their support and help, and try to direct and channel everything that bothers and interests them, talk, channel both your own and their fears. And it comes to some solution, which in the end may not even exist, but at least ask the right question at the right time. And be their support in growing up. It is involuntarily absent, and it is not our intention to do so, however, the culture of growing up at any cost, by any measure, pushes us towards it. And the world is accelerated enough without that and they should not be pushed into even greater acceleration because we have all become victims of that acceleration. It is important to let children grow up at their own pace.