Catherine Dasté, pioneer of children’s theatre, has died

Paris – 08.08.2026: Catherine Dasté, one of the defining figures of French theatre for children and young people, has died at the age of 96. The actress, director and educator became an artist who never treated young audiences as a mere educational target group. For her, children were spectators with their own imagination, discernment and a claim to poetry.

Dasté came from a family in which theatre was almost a family language. She was the daughter of Jean Dasté and Marie-Hélène Dasté and the granddaughter of reformer Jacques Copeau. Yet her work was by no means an addendum to these famous names. From an early stage, she sought a stage where children would not be instructed, but addressed as serious partners in an artistic encounter.

After training at the Old Vic Theatre School in London, she initially worked in France and developed plays together with young people during the 1960s. This practice was unusual at the time: children did not merely provide material for adult authors; they became fellow thinkers in a theatre that took their fears, their humour and their view of the world seriously.

In 1969, Dasté founded the Compagnie La Pomme verte. Its name sounded friendly and somewhat idiosyncratic, but its programme had far-reaching cultural policy implications. The group combined literary material, music, movement and visual power in productions that neither sought to be cute nor came across as primly didactic. Children’s theatre thereby acquired an aesthetic dignity that had long been denied to it.

Her name is particularly closely associated with Sartrouville. In 1978, France’s first Centre dramatique national for childhood and youth was established there, and Dasté played a key role in its development. Such an institution meant more than a new venue: theatre for young audiences was institutionally recognised as an art form, with permanent ensembles, production resources and a nationwide mission.

She later led the Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry from 1985 to 1992. There, too, she remained committed to an approach that did not pit professional art against outreach. Dasté directed productions, ran workshops and worked with groups in France and abroad. Her plays trusted that imagination is not a preparation for culture, but already its living form.

Only last year, an academic colloquium and an exhibition in Paris reassessed her long career, which had often received too little recognition. Catherine Dasté leaves behind an understanding of theatre in which young spectators are not second-class visitors. Her Compagnie La Pomme verte and the centre in Sartrouville are among the enduring traces of this persistent, cheerful seriousness.