ABSTRACT
This chapter expands on the importance of performance in extra-curricular development programmes. Through an analysis of the yearly cycle of NGO galas and performance events, and one group of girl’s recollections about “The Best Day of My Life,” this chapter engages in a series of theoretical reflections about fun and the kinds of temporal orientations produced through performance. While development programmes typically use performance to stage development, this chapter highlights the ways that these performances also provided a stage for children. This was a stage on which children could have fun as well as demonstrate their potential and make claims to certain futures. Attentive to the temporalities of children’s performances, this chapter explores the optimism of children’s dreaming, the pessimism of NGO workers’ fears, and both children’s and NGO workers’ active embrace of the potentialities of the present. Specifically, by foregrounding the latter, I seek to trouble any simplistic understanding of development as future-oriented, and to highlight the ways that much of the appeal of the media NGO’s programmes—and extra-curricular development programmes more broadly—lay not in the future but the present.
