Reading and Playing Graphically Narrated Stories in a Live Audio-Play

By reading, viewing and discussing graphically narrated stories, children developed plays out of pictures and texts. These approaches shall be deepened in the context of an intervention study: in a project-week at a primary school, Anke Kuhl’s comic style novel Lehmriese lebt! [Clay Giant’s Alive!] (2015) will be scenically staged in a live audio-play. In this story, two children unintentionally create a Golem during a game. The Golem’s quest for orienting itself brings about chaos. Finally, its creators can prevent a catastrophe by giving the Golem the right task: to play with them. Reading and playing the comic style novel shall bring narrative resources of the respective art form to the children’s attention, but also change and widen perspectives on the story. The question emerges: how do waves of literary learning become visible in the soundtrack development and implementation of Lehmriese lebt! [Clay Giant’s Alive!]? Therefore focus lies on the children’s imagination, their subjective involvement and their perception of language and pictures in the comic style novel. The scenic development and conversation about it will be audio- and video-recorded. Based on this data, observation protocols and transcripts will be written in order to enable the analysis of verbal and non-verbal expressions. Transformation processes in a multimodal literary context will be explored from two different angles: transformation of the story (written language and pictures are transformed into spoken language and sounds) as well as the liminal experience of the children in the play. The reason for choosing Lehmriese lebt! [Clay Giant’s Alive!] is the Golem-motif, whose core aspects are transformation processes and animation from inanimate materials.