Toe Variations

In singing the instructor’s free soul is expressed. Children rejoice in the sound, they snuggle into it, they warm up in it. If I sing, I open the gates of my world, I let them glance at the garden of my soul, at least from across the hedgerow.

The success of my creative game depends primarily on the song. The song, as a resonant net, covers you, provides enough air, but at the same time encircles the space of dramatization. The song is a short, complete, comprehensible unit, its repetitions provide the frames for the game. We sing together in unison, but in our community it is through each person’s individual activity that the common creation develops, just like in a choir. 

The song supports dramatization like branches support twigs, leaves, flowers and fruits. They can’t fall apart as all of them hold on to one another. But they don’t have to be bored either for they can spend their minutes surrounded by resounding voices and influenced by human energies with as many ideas as they please. 

Children are unruly if they are bored. If they experience common creation, they will choose creation, because activity is so much more interesting than boredom. In the traditional, rigid nursery school and school activities children are forced to wade through assignments dictated to them, even singing is a task. Most of the children accept this, complete the assignments, get used to them, follow instructions. 

Yet there are some in every group who revolt, for example because they are faster or slower than the average, and they live and would like to learn at a different pace. Perhaps the need of physical movement or any individual activity bubbles inside them. Or they would like to learn with their hands or eyes, not with their ears. Through actual experience, not through abstract explanations. Our Noble Prize winner scholar, Albert Szent Györgyi told me this about his childhood, he spoke about his bitter school memories passionately and fervently even at the age of eighty.