Our Philosophy

Our mission is to promote the power of the arts to enhance the lives of children and their carers and teachers by stimulating imagination and creativity.

We achieve this by aiming to make children the centre of everything we do.

We do this for example in our theatre work. Our goal is not to demonstrate to children what we adults have imagined, but to stimulate children to imagine for themselves. So our theatre is an 'imaginary' one - the performers evoke imaginary worlds, creatures and characters in the minds of the audience by transforming their bodies, language and simple objects in ways that the children instantly interpret in their imaginations as 'real'. We make the imagination of our audience central to our work.

Underlying this work are a number of key philosophical principles.

Firstly we respect children as intelligent makers and investigators in their own right. Children deal with complex problems everyday both in the real world and in their imaginations. Our role as art makers is to celebrate and empower their imaginations, not to instruct or cheapen; and to show the inner workings of the world not as a clichéd idealisation, but as it really is in all its complexity and variety. Secondly we uphold the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, in particular that children should have the same cultural rights as adults. One important facet of this is that our approach to making and showcasing our art has exactly the same rigor and concern for standards of excellence as it would if we were making art works for adults. This applies to theatre, to participatory workshops and to any other artistic experiences we are facilitating.

Thirdly we recognise that when participating in cultural events, children (along with their carers and teachers) have their own needs quite different to those of adults and are sometimes negotiating public spaces that are not sympathetic to those needs. (For example inadequate change or toilet facilities, poor access for prams and so on.) We make it our business to understand and accommodate or advocate for those needs as much as we can.

Fourthly we connect with researchers in Early Childhood and the Arts so that our understanding of the role the Arts can play in the lives of children is as advanced as it can be. For example we recognise that the Arts not only provide children with opportunities to develop their imagination and creativity, but also have a powerful role to play in stimulating wider learning particularly in the development of literacy, emotional intelligence and social skills. We also recognise that children in contemporary society come from very diverse backgrounds and thus can have very different artistic and developmental needs.

Fifthly we cultivate a spirit of openness. For example we participate in our industry associations and research networks; we contribute to industry publications, and to cultural policy debates; we create secondment opportunities for trainee arts workers and invite the participation of established artists into as much of our work as possible. Our aim is to constantly seek enhancement of our practice by open engagement with our communities of artists and arts workers, researchers, children, teachers and carers.

We know that the arts have enormous potential to develop skills in innovation and creativity and to help build and celebrate resilient communities. However the opportunities to reap that potential are distributed very unequally. Children's access can be disadvantaged by distance, geographical location, by poverty or by cultural dislocation. Imaginary's long-term goal is to work closely in partnership with similarly minded organisations to bring the benefits of the arts to all children in Queensland.