If we accept that the arts are valuable in children's lives, are we doing enough? The Baboró Festival has been asking this question since it began, writes Lorna Siggins.
Three Finnish men are passing the time in their hut in the forest or "taiga". There is some small, slow chat, mournful music, but they become animated when talking about wolf tracks in the snow outside. Wasn't there that village where a wolf snacked on 42 people? An animal who devoured a whole farm? Some pigs who turned on a hungry "loup" , buried him and watched as he rose to heaven? Then there was the wolf who developed scorpion's feet, the liver dying to escape from a human, only to encounter an enchanted dog which it mistook for a wolf and then married an enchanted rose.
"Too haphazard and muddling," was one irritated critic's response to a separate piece of work by the same company, Theater Sgaramusch of Switzerland, at Edinburgh's international children's festival, Imaginate.
Poor, poor critic. For if for one small moment one found oneself completely muddled in the maze that was Wolf Unterm Bett (Wolf Under the Bed) at last week's Baboró International Arts Festival for Children in Galway, it may have been the Swiss troupe's intention.
Their story was devised by 12 young authors, selected from a large young panel who were told they had complete freedom to write whatever they wanted, once there were three essential elements - a wolf or two, liver pate and a rose.
Howls of approval greeted the three energetic actors when they had finished their performance in the Taibhdhearc Theatre, and among those howling loudest were parents - a prime example of "cross-over" art, according to the chairwoman of the Baboró festival board, Rebecca Bartlett.
"You see it now in fiction - parents getting as much fun out of Harry Potter or Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series as their kids, but it still isn't quite accepted in theatre," Bartlett says.
"Philip Hardy of Barnstorm recently said that we ought to be seeing many children's shows at the Abbey, and it is quite normal to have such listings on the British National Theatre website.
"Of course a lot is being done through the educational curriculum, but if we accept that the arts are valuable in children's lives, and if research is showing that the arts can even be interventionist, are we really doing enough?" Bartlett asks. Her festival director, Lali Morris, has been asking the same question for the past 10 years since Baboró was founded as part of the Galway Arts Festival - and is now an independent entity.
To mark the big birthday, Morris, Bartlett and company have announced that they are planning an international conference on the role of arts in childhood, to be held as part of Baboró in Galway in 2008.
"We know now about the benefits, and it is brilliant that we have many more children's festivals and events in Ireland now than 10 years ago," Morris explains.
Boundaries have also been stretched. For instance, Morris incorporated several dance shows in this year's programme - eliciting a very positive response from young audiences.
One of the pieces also explored the issue of domestic abuse, allowing for a very difficult subject to be raised in a very safe and rich environment, Bartlett notes. Next year, Baboró intends to introduce an element of opera.
"But we need more than pockets of excellence," Morris and Bartlett argue. "The challenge is to ensure that every child in Ireland enjoys some kind of arts experience, and we are not just talking about performing arts. Museums, galleries, schools, parents, all have to become involved, and we also hope to examine how existing arts providers are being supported by the State and the community."
As a taster during this year's festival, broadcaster Gay Byrne conducted a public interview with four famous offspring in the Town Hall Theatre.
"All of them talked about their parents and the influence of the home environment," Bartlett notes. As author Philip Pullman noted in the Guardian two years ago, children "need to go to the theatre as much as they need to run about in the fresh air".
"The difficulty with persuading grown-up people about this is that if you deprive children of shelter and kindness and food and drink and exercise, they die visibly," Pullman said, writing in March 2004.
"Whereas if you deprive them of art and music and story and theatre, they perish on the inside, and it doesn't show. So the grown-ups who should be responsible for providing these good and necessary things - teachers, politicians, parents - don't always notice until it's too late," he continued.
Or they pretend that art and theatre is a luxury for "snobbish people". Or they claim that children are "perfectly happy with their computers and video games".
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/SJQTLMCMMRC2PLALXUKEWWS6HU.png)