Golden Child

Golden Child is a new ritual which deploys dramatic conventions and the institutional environment of the performing arts to transform one child’s experience of loss into a collective work of care. Although originally programmed as a performance in a public, socially shared space of a major theatre festival in the Belgian city of Ostend, Golden Child is foremost a rite of passage in which one singular child honors and works through an experience of grief. Situated then at the crossroads of art, care and ritual, in Raes’ terms, Golden Child is “theatrical but not theatre, artistic but not art, therapeutic but not therapy, festive but not a festivity, playful but not a game, time out of time but not a time-out”.  

Like most rites of passages, Golden Child has a deceptively simple narrative structure. The child enters a realm where fiction and non-fiction, imagination and daily reality, become entangled. He or she is woken up by a Sun Princess who asks the child to help the sun rising by singing a song. The child is thus invited to play a protagonist role alongside the Sun Princess in a theatre play in which the dramatic turning point is in fact one of the most normal, everyday natural phenomena: the rising of the sun. This pivotal encounter between the sun and the child will change the protagonist's fate, which is encapsulated in the double meaning of the Dutch title Zon. Dag. Kind. A composite that translates as Sun. Greets. Child. It also refers to the well-known expression ‘zondagskind’, a very fortunate person. The suggestion is clear. Just as the end of the night promises the breaking of a new day, so does loss opens up space for the beginning of something new.   

Natural elements

Centralizing a sea journey by boat, Zon. Dag. Kind navigates along the classical three-phases structure of a rite of passage – separation, transition and reintegration. After the boat’s departure from the shore (and its separation from society), the child enters a transition phase in which the cyclic time of the natural world prevails and where loss signifies rebirth and regeneration, as night always becomes day. 

In this shifting, fluid space, the child is invited to abandon the position of the passive sufferer of private pain in an isolated world and is instead endowed with the more active role of singer and accomplice of the sun, bringer of light. It is worthwhile mentioning that not only water (sea) but also other natural elements play a vital role – earth (port), fire (sun) and air (song). 

Shared vulnerability

The institutional arrangements of the performing arts environment in which Golden Child is embedded, further serve to transform individual feelings of loss and grief into a collective experience of care, into something which is socially shared and can be worked through together. Golden Child establishes a formal instantiation of making visible the invisible, of creating space for absence, of acknowledging loss publicly. It makes a collective experience out of individual grief which is too often left unrecognized.   

In doing so, an individual’s grief is honored in its singularity, yet, it is also seen and recognized by bystanders, and becomes a source of shared vulnerability. In Precarious Lives, author Judith Butler indeed argues that through the act of grieving we come to realize that we are inherently connected to others, both human and non-human. There is a realization that there is a ‘you’ in the collective notion of ‘we’ but that part of us is lost when we grieve for others. This notion is aptly expressed by Butler, who contends that "we are undone by each other". 

Source of hope

Yet Golden Child goes one step further: this shared sense of vulnerability becomes a source of hope. By means of a daily one-sentence announcement on social media, the general audience is implicated into the collective experience of a caring community. Every day for the duration of the festival, the particular child who undertook the rite of passage was designated and mentioned on social media. This simple sentence draws for its immense emotive effect on the simultaneous invocation and disruption of the association we usually make between children and new beginnings. 

We feel it appropriate that precisely children help the sun announce the start of a new day, both conventional symbols of optimism and future. Yet this impression is unsettled since in this particular case, the child embodies loss and grief, which only we, as adults, can connect to and identify with. Right at the moment when we start resisting, or feel confused by this disruption, we are consoled by the reinforcement of the association we usually make between children and beginnings. This particular child transforms a personal experience of loss and pain into a courageous, communal act of care by inviting the sun to start a new day, for us all.