Tutorial for 'La caixa del Lliure' (children)

La caixa del Lliure for early years education is the educational proposal of Teatre Lliure for children (3-7 years), designed by Joan Baixas and Marina Baixas based on the idea of Dada. It is a box depicting the staged box of a theatre and allows children to enter the stage by taking a more polyhedral look at it, understanding stage art in a more global way in which different artistic disciplines participate. Following the philosophy of ancient set models, La caixa del Lliure plays around different theatricalities to discover the variety and infinite diversity of the world, awaken meanings, ask questions, investigate the possibilities of the body and discover the hands and their creative possibilities, prioritising stage play over the construction of puppets or sets. It is a versatile, easy, engaging and creative proposal, which can be implemented by a single teacher and with which it is possible to achieve surprising results from the outset, in line with contemporary theatrical practice.

This video is a tutorial to use La caixa and this text is a guide that complements it:
- La caixa del Lliure for early years education is the educational proposal to encourage theatrical practice for children between 3 and 7 years old.
- With La caixa, children will become stage creators of all disciplines.
- Thanks to the different stage play possibilities it allows.

Let's find out La caixa
- La caixa is protect with a black cloth case.
- It consists of two parts: the theatrical stage (up) and the storage space (down).

• The theatre stage: The theatre stage is a technical structure without ornament, open to four bands.
• The storage space: We find two boxes. One, with all the playing material, and other one with the technical material.

Let's find out the lights
- The light table must be placed near La caixa.
- We plug it into La caixa and into the electric current.

Let’s find out the sound
- There's also a Bluetooth speaker, which we can be tied to La caixa structure with Velcro.

We build the black camera
- La caixa has a drawer where the black camera (black curtains) is stored.
- The black camera sticks to La caixa with Velcro. It's a German closure.

Playing with puppets and objects
- We can start Building the stage design.
- There are three bars to be able to manipulate everything from above or to hang decorations, puppets, objects, etc.
- We are ready to play.
- With the light table, we can choose whatever colour we like for the scene.
- There are four colour-changing spotlights and two warm spotlight.
- We can make all the lighting changes that we want.

Playing chinese shadows
- The storage part and the stage can be separated.
- If we rotate the stage space, we have new possibilities.
- Let's place the lantern to the structure.
- Let's hook the white cloth to make shadows with Velcro.
- We can make shadows with silhouettes or with our hands.

Other possibilities
- We can also place the theatre stage on two chairs.
- If we remove the cover from the stage, we can go under it.
- In this case, the black cloth serves to cover the underside and not be seen.
- We can go in with puppets, with our hands, or with all our bodies!

Picking up
- Now it's time to pick up.
- Let's keep and put everything in place.
- We protect La caixa with the black cloth case.