Flat Pack
Reminders about what good art can do from a TV show made for kids
One of the joys of writing is finding the same questions you ask or the beliefs you hold in the most unexpected places. This past spring, I had an early morning event with students. I was dashing around the house to make sure the dog got walked, breakfast was made, my lunch was packed, and I had everything in my backpack that I needed for the day. With breakfast wrapped up, I put the finishing touches on my “get-out-the door” routine and I plopped my 3-year-old son down on the couch to watch a little television. As I navigated the careful dance through our living room, stepping over dog/toddler toys and being careful not to block his view of the TV, I began to hear the show he was watching discuss familiar themes about the importance of community in our lives and how essential creativity is in establishing it.
With a toddler and a newborn, the most ubiquitous cultural medium in our household is Bluey. If you are not familiar with the most celebrated cultural export from Australia this side of the Crocodile Hunter or Hugh Jackman, then you probably don’t have kids at home or haven’t visited the toy aisle of a Target recently. Ostensibly, a kids television show about a family of anthropomorphic heelers (Australian cattle dogs), it’s become a cultural phenomenon occupying that magic territory of something designed for kids that you can enjoy as an adult. As I’ve gotten to know Bluey, Bingo, and the rest of their friends and family, I’ve been struck by what good art it is. Not just in the sense of something that is well crafted, but in the sense that it has something important to say about the world.
On the morning where I felt resonance with my own writing, my son was watching an episode, entitled “Flat Pack.” This episode features two parallel story lines. In one, the parents are struggling to build a new porch swing brought home from the ready-to-assemble furniture store. Their struggle proceeds along a familiar experience to many of us: disagreeing about the directions, someone getting lightly injured, trying to make heads or tails of which screw of the twelve different types included to use based purely on a nondescript picture, etc. Before long, the battle has gone beyond just the furniture and injected some unneeded strife into the relationship and you’re wondering why you’re even arguing in the first place.
As the parents struggle to build the porch swing, they are discarding a mountain of excess packing material into the yard where the other storyline takes place. Here Bluey and her sister Bingo imagine each new piece of styrofoam and cardboard as a landscape on which they can pretend to be different animals. Again, this will be familiar to anyone with kids: the box is always more entertaining than what’s inside. Each new landscape progresses their imaginary journey along the path of evolution, moving from fish, to the first animals to grow legs and walk on land, to the development of tools and writing, and eventually building cities and technological wonders. Throughout they pretend to be a mother and daughter pair. Bluey, the older sibling, takes the role of the mother teaching her younger sister, Bingo, who pretends to be the daughter, how to do new things. Eventually, Bingo builds a spaceship and leaves to explore space leaving Bluey alone back in the styrofoam city they built together.
The parents, while still fuming over the porch swing, notice their kid’s imagination and wholesome creativity on a much needed break. It causes them to take a hard look at themselves and commit to finishing the porch swing “without all the argy-bargy.” The argument resolved, they finish building the porch swing in quick fashion and then invite Bluey to sit with them. As they gaze out over their backyard, the sunset casts light on the littlest member of the family, Bingo, as she zooms around in her styrofoam spaceship. It’s a heartfelt and compelling story about the importance of family and community across evolutionary history presented through a piece of IKEA furniture and packing materials. Oh and the episode also tells that whole story in only seven minutes. If that’s not top notch art making, I don’t know what is.
I wouldn’t necessarily categorize Bluey as an example of teaching artistry, but it is art. I know this because it goes beyond entertainment, in which people can stay within themselves, and forces them to experience a world outside what they currently know. It does what art does at its best: transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, making miracles out of the mundane. How else do you explain the connection between a porch swing and the deeply human need for family, community, and belonging across our species' entire history? That’s a really important message for us all, but especially for young people, to be hearing in our current society that is dealing with loneliness, political polarization, and profound lack of community.
I see the creative impact Bluey has on my own kid. I’ve witnessed his imagination open up as he pretends to play a game he saw on the show or as he reenacts a favorite scene. His ability to understand complex concepts like empathy, self confidence, or how to recover from disappointment has often started with a seed planted by the show. As an educator, it’s refreshing to be reminded that learning happens through play and fun. We’d do well to remember that especially as adults.
Teaching artists thrive on that phenomenon, unlocking latent artistic potential within people through play and fun. Experiencing a work of art, tapping into our innate desire to be creative and experience something new, generates a burst of creative energy. Like rushing river rapids, art has the power and momentum to sweep us along with the same energy. Teaching artists are the raft guide, someone who has travelled that river many times before and can help amplify and direct that energy towards meaningful change and more artistic lives.
So of course my brain immediately begins to think about what the teaching artist followup is to “Flat Pack”. If it’s a work of art as I argue, then a teaching artist should be able to create an experience that deepens people’s personal connection with it and leads to meaningful learning and personal growth. I could talk about curricular choices to combine the science of evolution with music about change or develop some kind of artistic project that reinforces concepts of teamwork. However, I think it might actually be simpler than that and I can learn a lot from the best teacher in my household: the toddler.
His follow-up activity to watching Flat Pack is to try and build that civilization just like Bluey and Bingo. Sometimes we construct buildings out of pillows and cushions. Other times we walk around the house pretending to explore. But through it all we are bearing witness to the truth at the heart of that piece of art: the most important things we build are what we build together.