ABSTRACT
Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) provides artistic productions for young people, ranging in age anywhere from one through 18 years, with works involving one or more young protagonists that serve as metonymic representations of respective age groups. The chapter seeks to counter childist practices and pervasive myths regarding young minds, specifically aged 6 to 12 years, by applying the theories and developmental evidence of epistemic cognition to TYA. In order to optimise child spectators' aesthetic experiences, it argues that TYA practitioners need to create artistically driven productions from children's cognitive-affective perspectives. When TYA practitioners claim to know children by prejudging their minds, they tend to accentuate their cognitive deficiencies in comparison to adult norms. Most TYA companies operate from realist orientations when they reproduce dramatic and musical adaptations of literary and screen media, because adult ticket-purchasers desire to re-experience commercial titles associated with childhood.
