Children performing curriculum complexly
(images 29 & 29a) satisfied that his territory is free from invaders. If his chocolate workers had not explicitly acknowledged his leadership to any great extent, the girls fleeing the territory were doing so – explicitly in physical terms as they race away from Kane and implicitly in terms of supporting Kane’s authoritarian role in the chocolate factory game; explicitly as they flee the territory of the sandpit and implicitly as they flee the territory of the game. In this moment, Kane’s leadership has flowed beyond the performance of the chocolate factory in that he utilises the girls’ presence to affirm his leadership as he wanders rhizomatically through the game. As expected with rhizome, in that the ‘fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and…and…and…”’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 23), there is another dimension of complexity about the chocolate factory game. It is therefore not surprising that within the game a monster game emerges and Kane, as Willy Wonka, segues into monster.
introducing an (e)merging monster game With/in and around the physical and imaginative territory of the chocolate factory game, there are intersecting lines of flight as other games emerge from within and merge with the chocolate factory game. A muddy monster game, involving Nic, Josh, Alec and Kane, is one such game. As this snippet opens (images 2 & 3), Nic is working as one of the chocolate-makers and Alec is playing alongside with a digger. Kane is prowling around the water trough positioned in the sandpit chanting and making strange sounds. Josh wanders into the scene a little later. To begin with Kane presents as Willy Wonka, but a(nother) rhizomatic reading presents him as emerging monster. This monster character segues through various players as the plot evolves and in the process illuminates the children playing out their power-fullness alongside and amongst each other. Whether the monster theme that emerges is an aside, an entertaining deviation or a common part of such plots is incidental. What is interesting is that it arises and that it works to enhance the chocolate factory game and that in the process of playing out the monster theme, the children enact a complex understanding of the Deleuzo-Guattarian conjunctive ‘and…and…and…’ (Deleuze & Guattari , 1987, p. 25). Note: The numbering of the images of the chocolate factory storyboard now becomes a marker for all three games in play during this four-minute play episode, so the following images in the monster game storyboard are numbered to coincide with those in the chocolate factory storyboard. Where an image that appears in the chocolate factory storyboard is used in the monster game storyboard, the number stays as 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 etc. To keep the storyboards aligned, some numbers are missing, e.g., the (e)merging monster game becomes evident in the midst of the chocolate factory game, after the storyboard sequence of the latter has opened, so the first monster game storyboard image is #2. There are also numbers inserted, where other images are significant to the activity of the monster game. For example, between images 8 and 9 in the chocolate factory storyboard, there is significant activity in the monster game; this activity is seen in images 8a and 8b. 57