Kamishibai

Athena won't sleep

Children follow the adventures of the owl depicted on several objects in Georges Clemenceau's house. Athena the owl will emerge from a kamishibai (a small wooden theater on a stand) to surprise them and continue the story.

Athena, the little owl, doesn't want to go to bed during the day. When her sisters and parents are resting, Athena flies with the butterflies and chickadees. But owls are nocturnal animals....

After the reading, the visit continues in the house to find Georges Clemenceau's owl.

Kamishibai is a storytelling technique of Japanese origin, based on illustrated A3 boards that are slipped into a small wooden or cardboard theater with three doors, called a "butai". The front of the boards, facing the audience, is reserved for the illustrations. The narrator reads the text on the back of each board. The audience's attention is thus focused on the illustrations, which the narrator slides one by one to the rhythm of the text being read or narrated.

In the 1930s, kamishibai was born in a working-class district of Tokyo. In Japan, the global economic crisis was creating large numbers of unemployed. To earn money, some of them set up shop on the street, where children pass by, and tell them stories while selling sweets. This street performance became known as "kamishibai", or "paper theater". By 1931, 2,000 people were working in this profession in Tokyo.

Numerous kamishibais were produced, notably by Koji Kata (1918-1998) and Gozan Takahashi (1888-1965). In 1938, Matsunage Kenya (1907-1996) founded the Federation of Educational Kamishibai. In 1940, the process was introduced into Japanese schools and became an important teaching aid. During the Second World War, the Japanese government used kamishibai in its propaganda aimed at children. In the 1950s, street kamishibai was resurrected, and some 50,000 people made a living from it in Japan. Educational kamishibai was then used in kindergartens and small private libraries. This storytelling technique was introduced to Europe and the rest of the world in the early 1970s.

The kamishibai is not an illustrated album, but a way of telling a story in a theatrical setting. Made up of 15 to 25 boards, the kamishibai captures the audience's attention over a short period of time. Children are not only spectators of the story, but also actors, and can interact with the narrator. This multi-disciplinary tool enables children to use several of their skills: listening, memory, imagination and language.