For months, maybe even a couple of years, my son thought that the “worst word” in the English language was either the i-word, idiot, or the s-word, stupid. When he finally learned that the f-word wasn’t fat, soon after his seventh birthday, I reminded him and his older sister of one of my favourite family incidents: the day we were driving home from Bath and hit standstill traffic, which so infuriated their father that he shouted “fuck”, with vehemence, at no one in particular. “What did you say?” our daughter inquired, to which he answered, after a quiver: “Duck. I saw a duck.” This is relevant – honest – because there’s a nerve-racking moment in Ready Steady Go! when the assembled children are asked what their parents do in a traffic jam. Until then, my son had been a cheerful and vocal participant: the relief that he knows when to rein himself in.
It’s a much more innocent world that Ready Steady Go! inhabits. One of a panoply of works created by artist/designer Anna Bruder with her company A Line Art, it uses the simplest design aesthetic, outline illustrations in black on white, splashed with bold colour, to suggest, in Bruder’s words, a “world of naivety”. And yet, there is a satisfying political undertone to this particular piece, perhaps unintentional, but possible to read as a quiet attack on stultifying educational practices that value book-learning over first-hand experience, and repetition by rote over self-discovery, creative process and play.
Ready Steady Go! opens with Argi (Manuelpillai) and Robin (Hemmings) fretting over a letter from the council warning them that their driving school will be closed down because it’s “too boring”. For Argi, the solution is clear: get the learners involved in the lessons. How this plays out is that each kid is given a cardboard car, shared “toolboxes” of paint and pens, and a good 10 minutes in which to decorate their vehicle as they choose. Although the company lose their bottle somewhat after that – there is much more scope for the kids to interpret road signs for themselves, for instance – the rest of the show is no less active, with the kids wearing their box-cars and circling a cartoon road in an extended game of Simon Says. Argi, their charismatic leader, gets them jumping over speed bumps, pulling faces at strong winds, navigating mountains and more. The age-range suggested for the show is three-to-nines, but the younger ones could barely keep up and my nine-year-old looked painfully self-conscious throughout; the middle kids, on the other hand, relished every minute.
There’s room for development in the text and interaction, but in concept and philosophy, Bruder’s work is impeccable. By aiming at naivete, her drawing style functions anti-hierarchically: anyone in the room, adult or child, could have drawn what she’s drawn for the set, and that instantly narrows the distance between professional practitioners and instinctive amateurs – a distance that comes to feel huge in later years. Bruder’s invitation to the imagination also goes against the grain of conformity that makes life at primary school so abrasive, sloughing off the creativity from children through the requirement to perform writing and drawing tasks whose outcomes are easily evaluated and quantifiable. Yes, it’s useful to learn rules and techniques – but it’s also important to have unfettered space for the imagination to roam, and it’s my daughter’s consistent complaint about school that she doesn’t get that enough.
Then again, she also complains that no one will tell her what the word is that’s even worse than fuck. There just are some things that children can’t be trusted with, aren’t there?
Ready Steady Go! was performed at the the Discover Children’s Story Centre. Click here for more details.