I SEE YOU SEEING ME

An analysis of the relationship between invitation and participation in Theatre for Early Years

Sally Chance BA (Hons), PGDip

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Creative Industries

School of Creative Practice Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology

2020 I See You Seeing Me

I See You Seeing Me – Nursery, 2018

2 I See You Seeing Me • Abstract

Abstract

Through a process of scholarly research in the field of performance studies, and artistic practice in the field of Theatre for Early Years (TEY), my Doctorate of Creative Industries had the goal of understanding the work involved in structuring and presenting dance-theatre as an encounter (Kelleher and Ridout, 2006; Fischer-Lichte, 2009; Heim, 2016) between professional performers and audiences aged three years and younger, in the company of their adults.

The practice-led nature of the research contributes to TEY practitioner knowledge infrastructure by uncovering a fundamental aspect of TEY practice, namely an analysis of the relationship between the work of the performers and their performative material, and the experiences of the very young audience members for whom the work is created.

I chose the term participation to represent multiple types of involvement by very young audience members. My research makes an explicit link between the structure of the performance work, the work of the performers and the observable actions of young children as co-creative participants. I suggest that young children’s responses to live performance encompass a complex and codifiable spectrum of activities, expressed in aesthetic intention in relation to the world of the show. This becomes the key to the encounter, with the potential to be a critical aspect of the materials of construction of each show, when harnessed by the performers within the framework of performer responsivity proffered by this research.

3 I See You Seeing Me • Keywords

Keywords:

Theatre for Early Years, TEY, practice-led research, babies, young children, participation, intra-action, co-creation, infant mental health

4 I See You Seeing Me • Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge with enormous gratitude the time, wisdom and generous input of my supervisors, Mark Radvan and Kathryn Kelly. The chance to talk about theatre in theory and practice – and at length – has been a wonderful privilege. For the clarity and inspiration of our conversations I gratefully thank my industry mentor, Dave Brown. I warmly recognise Jennifer Roche and Lee McGowan for their support during the first year of my

DCI. Huge thanks also to Judith McLean, who opened the door.

I warmly acknowledge all the Adelaide-based families – the children and their adults – who attended Nursery and Seashore together and who were also willing to talk about their experiences. I thank the theatre colleagues whose views I invited, or whose shows I attended. I also thank my friend Judy Russell for her warm hospitality.

From the bottom of my heart I thank my company members, Stephen, Felecia and Heather; and Jason Cross, who holds us together as a small, independent company.

My DCI was made possible with the support of an Australian Government Research

Training Program Stipend, for which I am extremely grateful.

And finally, my love and thanks to my son, whose arrival 16 years ago opened my eyes to the exquisite inter-personal skills of babies, and to my partner, who has been with me every step of the way.

5 I See You Seeing Me • Contents

Contents

Abstract ...... 3 Acknowledgements...... 5 Statement of Original Authorship ...... 8 Prelude...... 9 Chapter One: Introduction...... 11 1.1 Overview of Chapters ...... 12 1.2 Projects One (2018) and Two (2019) ...... 19 1.2.1 Project One – Nursery...... 19 1.2.2 Project Two – Seashore ...... 20 1.3 Describing the Child Participants ...... 21 1.4 Rationale – I See You Seeing Me...... 25 1.4.1 Socially Engaged and Aesthetic Goals ...... 27 1.4.2 Creating a Space ...... 29 1.5 Participation...... 32 1.6 Contribution to Knowledge ...... 35 1.7 Industry Rationale...... 36 Chapter Two: Contextual Review...... 37 2.1 Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) and Theatre for Early Years (TEY)...... 37 2.2 Overlapping Frames of Reference ...... 43 2.3 The Presence of Adults...... 51 2.4 The Shared Quest for Legitimation ...... 53 Chapter Three: Literature Review ...... 59 3.1 Privileging the Non-Verbal...... 59 3.2 TEY as a Relational Exchange ...... 65 3.3 TEY Audiences and their Parents/Carers ...... 69 3.3.1 Parents/Carers as Catalysts ...... 70 3.3.2 Parents/Carers as Witnesses...... 73 3.4 The Dramaturgy of the Audience ...... 75 3.5 Towards Methodology...... 78 Chapter Four: Methodology...... 79 4.1 Introduction...... 79 4.2 Research Participants...... 82 4.3 The Projects ...... 84 4.3.1 Project One – Nursery...... 84 4.3.2 Project Two – Seashore ...... 85 4.4 Practice-led Research...... 87 4.5 Reflective Practice ...... 88 4.6 Towards Reflexivity ...... 89 4.6.1 Socially Engaged Dance Practice ...... 91 4.6.2 Dance in Perinatal Infant Mental Health ...... 93 4.6.3 Attending TEY as a Parent ...... 94 4.7 Qualitative Methodology ...... 98 4.7.1 Observation...... 100

6 I See You Seeing Me • Contents

Chapter Five: Creative Works...... 110 5.1 Introduction...... 110 5.2 Project One – Nursery...... 111 5.2.2 The Company...... 112 5.2.3 Content...... 114 5.2.4 Target Age Range ...... 114 5.2.5 Design ...... 115 5.2.6 Structure...... 118 5.3 Investigate...... 120 5.3.1 Festival 2018...... 120 5.3.2 The Adelaide Series...... 121 5.4 Analyse ...... 121 5.4.1 Taxonomy of Participation ...... 123 5.4.2 The Iterative Process of Developing Nursery...... 128 5.5 Articulate ...... 133 5.6 Towards Project Two...... 135 5.7 Project Two – Seashore ...... 136 5.7.1 Framework of Performer Responsivity...... 138 5.7.2 Initiative and Circle ...... 143 5.7.3 Other Uses of the Framework...... 147 5.7.4 The Project...... 150 5.7.5 Content...... 151 5.7.6 Stages One and Two ...... 152 5.7.7 Target Age Range ...... 156 5.7.8 Design ...... 157 5.7.9 Structure...... 158 5.8 Investigate...... 165 5.8.1 Performative Coherence ...... 166 5.9 Analyse ...... 175 5.9.1 The Work of the Show...... 175 5.9.2 The Work of the Performers ...... 181 5.9.3 The Work of the Parents/Carers...... 191 Chapter Six: Conclusion...... 197 Appendices ...... 203 Appendix A – I Am Interested… ...... 204 Appendix B – Ethnographic Texts...... 205 B.1 Colour Coded Text...... 205 B.2 Text Highlighting Initiative Factors...... 206 Appendix C – Company (AC 1A) Interviews ...... 208 C.1 Thematic Analysis...... 208 C.2 Interpretive Coding of Company Interviews...... 209 Appendix D – Performance Works...... 212 References ...... 213 List of Tables and Figures ...... 221 Tables ...... 221 Figures...... 221

7 I See You Seeing Me • Statement of Original Authorship

Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this exegesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, this document contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is given.

Signature:

QUT Verified Signature

Date: 9 November 2020

8 I See You Seeing Me • Prelude

Prelude

A cultural life for babies, November 2001

On the first day in my new role as the artistic director of South Australia’s

children’s arts festival I started to sift through a pile of material pitching available

works. I came across a powerful and tender image of eight mother-baby dyads lying

together on a dance studio floor, the babies gazing at their parents, the parents half

way through a deep out-breath, one arm swept across their foreheads, the other

wrapped safely round their babies’ backs. I noticed the performative coherence of the

image, the shared sensory focus of the ensemble, the physicality of the adults,

captured in the act of rolling with their children, and the security of the babies as they

allowed themselves to go with the momentum of the movement. I wondered what the

babies were wondering.

The image was from 9 x 9, a remarkable Les Ballets C de la B project directed

by Christine De Smedt, and involving a number of community-based groups. It

opened my mind to the very notion that babies could have a cultural life, let alone that

they could be actively involved in live performance. Some years later, I contacted

Christine and learned that 9 x 9 had enjoyed several performance seasons between

2000 and 2005 in a number of European cities. This impressed me as an incredible

feat of logistical complexity and aesthetic courage at a time when babies were not

considered cultural contributors at all.

On resuming my independent dance practice in 2007 I began to focus on finding

performance forms that would respond to the youngest of audiences. I entered the

field of Theatre for Early Years.

9 I See You Seeing Me

Ah, but somewhere in between action and reaction, there is an interaction, and that’s where all the magic and fun lies.

Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk

10 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

Chapter One: Introduction

This document frames my Doctorate of Creative Industries (DCI). I took a practice-led research approach to investigate, analyse and articulate the relationship between the structure and presentation of live performance for babies and young children and their participation in the work. My dance-theatre practice emerges from the idea that performance works are an encounter (Kelleher and Ridout, 2006; Fischer-Lichte, 2009;

Wartemann, 2009; Lerman, 2011; Heim, 2016), arising “from the interaction of performers and spectators” (Fischer-Lichte, 2009, p.391). Implicit within the concept of the encounter is that it involves “different groups of people who negotiate and regulate their relationship”

(ibid). The groups in my works are my company artists, parents/carers and the babies/young children themselves, and so my research projects harnessed the perspectives and experiences of the same groups to explore the question:

How can dance-theatre for very young audiences be structured and presented to

maximise the performance as an encounter between children and performers?

For artistic practice “the laboratory of doing has always been partnered with the rigor of articulating” (Lerman, 2011, p.xviii). Practice-led research requires “the articulation of the practice through the particular, symbolic and metaphoric languages that arise from the materials of that practice” (Stock, 2010, pp.6-7). My DCI represents this “double articulation” (Bolt, 2009, p.29) of artistic and research practices, because “creative practice undertaken as a research endeavour must be framed as such within a written explication which explains how it is situated within its field, how it is underpinned by a methodology and how it contributes to the formation of ‘new knowledge’” (Hamilton, Carson and Ellison,

2014, p.26). The forthcoming chapters situate my research within the scholarly field of

11 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

performance studies, describe its practice-led methodology, driven by two performance works for very young audiences, and proffer an original contribution to practitioner knowledge infrastructure within the artistic field of Theatre for Early Years.

Theatre for Early Years (TEY) can mean “theatrical events explicitly designed for audiences under 5-years old and their caregivers” (Fletcher-Watson, 2015, p.25). The Small size (sic) network’s mapping project (n.d., http://mapping-project.eu) considers TEY to include children as old as six; however, I find the following definition of TEY useful: “A professionally-created theatrical experience for an audience of children aged from birth to around three years old, accompanied by carers” (Fletcher-Watson, 2016a, p.2). This definition highlights the artistic professionalism of TEY, differentiating it from other more socially orientated early years experiences, and covers the child age range involved in my own practice and hence in this research. The description also maintains a reference to the important presence of parents/carers, although the following chapters will suggest that

Fletcher-Watson’s use of the term ‘accompany’ to describe the multiple layers of parent/carer activity involved in attending TEY is deceptively simple.

1.1 Overview of Chapters

This introduction summarises the performance works – Nursery and Seashore – driving the research. It goes on to describe the relationship between them as successive and iterative projects, at once responding to and leading the overall study. It also shows how the research questions and sub-questions steered the projects and emanated from them. I then provide a detailed discussion of the rationale for the research from the background of my dance practice and TEY experience and define my use of the term ‘participation’ for the purposes of, and as the key to, the projects.

12 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

Chapter two is a contextual review of TEY, positioning the field within the broader realm of

Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA). The review takes an industry perspective to compare and contrast motivations, challenges and principles of practice in both fields, suggesting that

TEY has emerged philosophically as a sub-category of TYA, in particular, in relation to the ways in which companies operating in or across the fields position children in philosophical intention to their work, with implications for the dramaturgy of the performance work itself

(Lorenz, 2002; Radvan, 2012; Fischer-Lichte, 2016).

Perspectives from the related fields of TYA and TEY segue into chapter three, a literature review describing how in practice TEY has developed distinct motivations and artistic features of its own (Young, 2004; Fletcher-Watson, 2016a). The dramaturgical need for

TEY to privilege non-verbal theatrical forms is linked not only to the very young audience’s age-related needs but to the kinaesthetic, embodied and affective skills young children bring to the encounter. The review goes on to consider theatrical experience as a shared affective space with its origins in the neurobiology of adult-baby interaction. This brings parents/carers into the TEY encounter.

Chapter four describes my methodology, which used ethnographic methods to explore qualitatively “the children’s lived experiences of theatre” (Reason, 2010, p.46) with the goal of “uncovering the meaning of [this] phenomenon for those involved” (Merriam and Tisdell,

2016, p.5). The practice-led methodological basis of my investigation had implications for the development of the research projects, the experiential nature of the involvement of the research participants and the context of this document as an exegetical account, working – as a fundamental requirement of practice-led methodology (Candy, 2006; Smith and Dean,

2009; Stock, 2010; Radvan, 2012; Hamilton et al., 2014) – in “dialogical relation” (Bolt,

2009, p.31) to the artistic works.

13 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

Bolt’s “double articulation” (2009, p.28) of arts practice and scholarly research characterises practice-led research (PLR) and describes the overlapping processes in which “theory emerges from a reflexive practice at the same time that practice is informed by theory”

(ibid). The presence as audiences of babies and children aged three and younger, in the company of their parents/carers, within two types of experience – performances (projects one and two) and a Family Dance Lab (project two) – created “experiential starting points from which further practice follows” (Haseman, 2009, p.36).

The trajectory of the research was driven by the development and presentation of the works themselves as sources of questions and sub-questions, and as the primary instruments for gathering observational data in order to answer the questions. My TEY practice was thus harnessed in order to explore, in Bolt’s terms, “the ‘work’ that art does,” (Bolt, n.d., http://supervisioncreativeartsphd.net, p.27, Bolt’s emphasis), which she defines as “the

‘movement’ in understandings/knowledges/affects/discourse that emerges out of the work”

(ibid), because the outputs of the research could only be put to the test in the presence of live audiences. In this way, new TEY practitioner knowledge emerged over the course of the study through and by means of the relationship between theory and artistic practice.

The practice-led nature of the research linked intimately with processes of reflective practice, which underpinned the entire study and adopted a range of meanings of the term

“from the idea of professionals engaging in solitary introspection to that of engaging in critical dialogue with others” (Finlay, 2008, p.2). Since “careful observation and description can create dynamic re-looking, re-observing and re-understanding in writing”

(Bolton, 2018, p.148), I undertook my own process of reflective practice, creating project journals to “give space for regular, frequent, private, explorative and expressive writing”

(Bolton, 2018, p.183).

14 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

An aspect of my reflective practice was to develop reflexivity, which “involves thinking from experiences” (Bolton, 2018, p.10) and interrogating the beliefs and assumptions inherent in my work, on the basis that “that we cannot be separated from our biographies”

(Lumsden, 2018, p.1). The methodology chapter unpacks aspects of my professional training and philosophy in relation to my research with the aim of considering how, “much more than a collection of skills, professional practice is intimately entangled with identity and belief” (Andersen, 2017, p.10). I represent this at points throughout the document using three types of boxed text as a way of “interweaving theoretical and experiential narratives”

(Pink, 2015, p.167).

Firstly, using four short reflective statements beginning “I am interested…” by dance practitioner Liz Lerman from the Prologue of her 2011 book Hiking the Horizontal: Field

Notes from a Choreographer, I make a reflexive link between my career trajectory and this research, with the aim not merely of relating some professional life stories but of interrogating my professional life history (Goodman, [1998] cited in Bolton, 2018, p.15) in terms of its relationship to my research. Secondly, six reflective practice observations from the trajectory of the research appear as ‘Insights’. Thirdly, three narratives relevant to the research appear as the Prelude and two ‘Practitioner Anecdotes’, proffered with the aim of

“providing critical and usable information” (King and Horrocks, 2010, p.128) from the background of my practice.

15 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

I am interested – No. 1 “…in remembering why I started to dance and how happy I was at that moment” Lerman, 2011

Like many middle class girls in England in the 1970s, my first experience of dance was classical ballet. Here I am (at right) at about the age of eleven. I began at six, only stopping at 18 because I left home. It was the part of my life that I most looked forward to. There was security in the formality, repetition and discipline. It also brought me joy.

Dancing Times, 1974

My experience of dance as a non-verbal language came about much later, as I began to work professionally with community-based participants and to understand the application of the art form in fields from health to youth work. In the company of people from a range of backgrounds I began to consider how dance functioned for them. I also re-considered my own emotional, intellectual, visceral, interpersonal and even mystical moments of knowing-in-dance. This was extremely hard to put into words. The power of dance, as a “symbolic order of knowing” (Haseman, 2009, p.57) lies in its capacity to contain and reflect multiple perspectives, but for many years I didn’t give this way of knowing much thought, in fact I didn’t think of it as knowledge at all.

16 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

The three performers involved throughout my study – Stephen Noonan, Felecia Hick and

Heather Frahn – also took part in processes of reflective practice, using reflective writing to

“gain power over their practice” (Bolton, 2018, p.155) and to feed a systematic process of observation into the artistic work, and thence to the research. The artists’ input mirrored

Finlay’s observation that in the act of reflective practice “professionals … draw on both practical experience and theory as they think on their feet and improvise … act both intuitively and creatively [and] revise, modify and refine their expertise” (2008, p.4).

Young’s case study of London-based company Oily Cart’s TEY work Clouds provided an artistic exemplar of “learning within the doing” (2004, p.17), which describes how the performers responded to the variations between discrete performances and assembled this experience to consolidate the performance work overall and the company’s broader language of practice. Young notes that this “throws the onus back on the actors who had a responsibility to remain reflective and alert” (ibid).

Similarly, and motivated by an “urge to reorientate the enquiry of performance studies from spectatorship … towards a more acute concern with – a closer listening to – what practitioners themselves perceive that they are doing,” my research was “concerned to reposition the articulate practitioner at the heart of the discipline” (Pearson, 2006, p.147). In this context I gratefully acknowledge the articulate practice of Stephen, Felecia and Heather, who accompanied me with generosity and reflective rigour throughout the course of this research. Here, I also acknowledge Stephen’s phrase ‘I see you seeing me’. Stephen proffered it during an exercise within an interactive TEY discussion held as part of

Converge, the national Theatre for Young Audiences symposium, convened on 16 October

2019 by Theatre Network Australia (n.d., https://www.tna.org.au/wp- content/uploads/2019/11/Deep-Dive_Theatre-for-Early-Years.pdf). Stephen’s phrase speaks to his reflective skills and experience in the field and encapsulates the ethos of our company’s work. Stephen has generously permitted me to use it as the title of my research.

17 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

Throughout my study my intention was “to research and not solely to create art” (Nagel and

Hovik, 2016, p.155). On the basis that “human life is fundamentally dialogical and polyvocal” (Angrosino, 2007, p.13), and that “knowledge is constructed jointly in interaction by the researcher and the researched” (Grbich, 2013, p.7), a relativist and social constructivist epistemological stance underpinned my investigation and analysis, with the goal of generating new knowledge relevant to performers and young audiences using qualitative methods. In addition, the constant presence at the heart of my research of young children, and the multimodality of their meaning making, including gestures, movement and

… play (Hackett and Rautio, 2019, p.1023), lent itself to a post-qualitative paradigm, particularly in articulating my findings. Kraftl describes this as an “expressive … form of knowledge production” (2013, p.15), registered by “the visual, the haptic, the danced”

(ibid). Similarly, Smith and Dean argue that a definition of knowledge needs to include non-verbal … forms of transmission (2009, p.3).

Following Smith and Dean, the most effective means of communicating new TEY knowledge is “through the symbolic and metaphoric languages that arise from the materials of [TEY] practice” (Stock, 2010, pp.6-7). Given that my TEY welcomes the participation of young children, they become a critical aspect of its materiality. Chapter five proffers findings suggesting that when the performers in a responsive performative relationship explicitly harness the children’s participation, it becomes “the means to create the performance as well as the performance itself” (Knapton, 2008, pp.60-61, Knapton’s emphasis). The chapter also provides links to archival footage and clips of the works, and providing detailed descriptions and analysis of projects one and two, which I now introduce.

18 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

1.2 Projects One (2018) and Two (2019)

1.2.1 Project One – Nursery

Project one focused on Nursery, a live dance-theatre work, created for audiences of babies aged 4 – 18 months, in the company of their adults. Nursery was an extant work collaboratively devised by my company, Sally Chance Dance, and performed by dancers,

Stephen and Felecia, and musician/composer, Heather.

A professional season in Queensland in April 2018 launched the process for my use of this work as a research instrument and artistic artefact, developed through the six performances presented in this season and, later in 2018, through three presentations I describe as the

Adelaide series. Each presentation in the latter series involved the performers and me in reflective practice and observation of the “firsthand encounter” (Merriam and Tisdell, 2016, p.137) between artists and very young audience, and was followed by a Planned Discussion

Group (PDG) for parents/carers. This allowed Nursery to be the primary instrument for gathering observational data as well as project one’s artistic artefact, having advanced in its development through, and as an output of, the research process. The project was my first foray into exploring the overlapping relationship between research and practice and was underpinned by the following practice-led question:

What are the structural, spatial and relational factors in Nursery that invite the

babies’ participation?

Inherent within this question is the ethos of the work as a participatory encounter, and so each query about the structure of the performance, its use of space, the choreographic material and sonic environment, was entangled with the fundamental query of the nature of the babies’ experiences. The main work of Nursery was therefore an examination of the

19 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

babies’ participation, and the factors that invited, supported or interrupted it. A research group of parents/carers, identified throughout this document as adult cohort 2 (AC2), observed the nature of their baby’s experience of Nursery. I compared this observational data with that of the company members harvested “after events” (Boud, 2001, pp.12 – 14).

I functioned as a “participant observer” (Merriam and Tisdell, 2016, p.139), using my participation as a process of learning through my own “multisensory, emplaced experiences” (Pink, 2015, p.96) to harvest observations “in the midst of action” (Boud,

2001, pp.12 – 14). I also relied on footage of each presentation. By triangulating my observations with those of the performers and the parents/carers, I was able to analyse them thematically to arrive at a taxonomy of babies’ participation involving four categories:

‘gaze’, ‘initiative’, ‘sharing’ and ‘circle’. These are discussed in detail in section 5.4, where

I also show how they paved the way for project two, Seashore.

1.2.2 Project Two – Seashore

Seashore was a new dance-theatre performance project organised in nine weekly one-hour

Family Dance Labs for babies/children aged three years and younger, with a parent/carer, in collaboration with my company members – dancers, Stephen and Felecia and musician/composer, Heather. The Labs began in March 2019. The children and their parents/carers, and the professional artists, presented Seashore on five occasions as part of the DreamBIG children’s festival, Adelaide (23 May – 1 June 2019).

Where the research focus of project one was on codifying the responses of the children, project two considered the two-way nature of the encounter inherent within the company ethos of ‘I see you seeing me’, where the ‘I’ is the performer as much as the child. Young children demand the kind of response referred to by Lerman when she wrote: “I had to focus

20 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

on the people I was performing for. I couldn’t pull the modern dance stare or the inner- directed movement gaze. They demanded a relationship with the dancer. I found this intriguing, challenging and difficult. And I felt it a worthwhile problem to solve” (2011, p.10). Seashore therefore created a focus on how performers might respond to the presence of the children, asking the question:

What is the work of the performers in maximising Seashore as an encounter?

Seashore also harnessed “the generative role that child collaborators and performers can have in the development of … performance practice” (Hopfinger, 2018, p.61). The project involved babies and young children from a broader age range (4 months to 3 years) than

Nursery (4 -18 months), as the creators and performers, with their parents/carers, of performance material. During their weekly Family Dance Lab they were also audiences for draft performance material devised by the professional artists. This gave Seashore a useful agility as a research instrument because it allowed me to test, through short performance fragments, the relationship between the performers’ developing material and my research goal of maximising the child-performer encounter. Over the course of the project I analysed my observational and reflective practice, and that of the performers, to arrive at a framework of four categories of performer responsivity: frame, contrast, track and balance.

This is discussed in detail in section 5.7.

1.3 Describing the Child Participants

This majority of this framing document discusses TEY and my focus age group of three years and younger. I use ‘baby’ and ‘babies’ when the age group referred to is 18 months and younger. This is particularly relevant to my writing on project one – Nursery. When discussing project two – Seashore – I use the terms ‘young child’ and ‘young children’ to refer to the target age range of three years and younger, including babies, for this project. If

21 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

the context makes it clear that my references are to my own research and its emphasis on the latter age range I allow myself the shorter ‘child’ and ‘children’. I use the phrase ‘very young audiences’ to refer to TEY. My practice and my research are contextualised within the broader field of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA). The term ‘young audiences’ is used in this context, referring to ‘children’ in the age range of 5 to 12 years, or to ‘young people’ aged 13 years and older. Table 1.1 provides a summary of these terms.

Term Age Range

Baby/babies 18 months and younger

Young child Three years and younger, may include babies

Very young audiences Babies and children aged three years and younger, attending Theatre for Early Years (TEY)

Child(ren) 5-12 years

Young people 13 years and older

Young audiences Children and young people aged 5 years and older, attending Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA)

Table 1.1: Audiences and their age ranges

Project One – Babies

Project one was underpinned by the performance work Nursery, for audiences of babies aged 4 – 18 months. In the context of the lack of a widely used alternative word for the age group under three years (Gopnik, 2009, p.5), I use the terms baby and babies – even though toddlers or very young children may be just as relevant – in all my references to Nursery.

Winnicott uses the word ‘infant’ to refer generally to the very young child, noting that etymologically the term implies not talking (infans) and suggesting that “it is not un-useful to think of infancy as the phase prior to word representation” (1960, pp.587-588). In a moving corollary, Winnicott also notes the emotional layers of infancy as a pre-verbal

22 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

phase, in that it “depends on maternal care that is based on maternal empathy rather than on

[the baby’s] understanding of what is or could be verbally expressed” (ibid). (Winnicott’s use of the term maternal speaks to the era in which he was practicing, but also to his view, still considered relevant by some contemporary attachment theorists, that paternal input – although of equal importance and clearly including skills of empathy – has some differentiated parameters. The topic of parenting is highly gendered, however a specific discussion of this is beyond the scope of this study).

One of the pioneers of TEY was Suzanne Osten, artistic director of Swedish TYA company,

Unga Klara. From a theatrical perspective Osten echoes Winnicott’s emphasis on the emotional adult-baby connection achieved through empathy, explaining that she always works “with an expanded meaning of the concept understanding which not only means an intellectual understanding but also, to the highest degree, an understanding based on feeling” (2009, p.9). My use of the terms baby and babies, when describing my project one work, aims to maintain the emotional and relational resonances of the perspectives of both

Winnicott and Osten.

Project Two – Young Children

Project two was underpinned by the performance work Seashore, a new dance-theatre project developed through weekly Family Dance Labs for young children aged three and younger, with a parent/carer. The young children who took part as research participants throughout Seashore had three distinct roles as the project played out. The complexity of this necessitates some further clarification of the terms I use to describe their work.

The first 10-15 minutes of each weekly one-hour Family Dance Lab invited the children to be an audience for a short section of draft performance material. Within this activity they

23 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

had the potential to participate in terms of the taxonomy of responses I identified as gaze, initiative, sharing and circle (see chapter five), in the same way as children attending a single show as ticketed audience members. Their responses as audiences also applied to the DreamBIG Festival performances, in which they were both audiences and performers, although they were quite at liberty to decide not to perform.

My observational practice during the course of the Seashore project allowed me to refine my concept of ‘initiative’ and so I reserve its use for the children’s active responses to live performance (Labs and shows). The second section (45-50 minutes) of each Lab session invited the children into a workshop/devising setting to collaborate as artistic co-creators. I use the word ‘offer’ to refer to their spontaneous responses in this context.

Table 1.2 summarises the range of the children’s roles and the work involved in each.

Role Setting Work

Audience Lab Viewed short sections of draft performance material. Responded using ‘gaze’, ‘initiative’, ‘sharing’ and ‘circle’.

Artistic Co-creators Lab Took part in a co-creative workshop/devising, making offers, devising and rehearsing performance material.

Performers and Performances Viewed performance material. audience Responded using ‘gaze’, ‘initiative’, ‘sharing’ and ‘circle’. Presented performance material.

Table 1.2: Young children’s roles in Seashore

In this complex and interesting way, the children’s multiple roles in Seashore re-configured conventional notions of the relationship between performers and audiences. Wartemann describes this as the “lively interplay” (2009, p.7) between performers and audiences, a concept lying at the heart of the rationale for my research, which I now go on to discuss.

24 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

1.4 Rationale – I See You Seeing Me

The rationale for my research stems from my practice. I harness the creative capacities of young children within an artistic dialogue with professional artists, and promote the artistic outcomes of this process as a means of enhancing the social status of young children. I express this in my company mission, which aims to:

1. Discover new performance forms, which meet the needs and respond to the skills of

babies and young children.

2. Make visible the cultural practice of this population by means of their responses to

performance works created specifically for them.

Liz Lerman’s dance practice is similarly motivated. She describes it as being about “ways of seeing and being that have the power to change the environments we live in and the encounters that we have with each other” (2011, p.xv). Eisner’s reference to the need for representation as the link between “the products of our imagination [and] a social contribution to our culture” (2002, p.5) is also relevant here.

The co-creative role, and hence the high artistic status, within my TEY of young children enhances their social status by offering audiences a powerful representation of early childhood for young children and by young children, which “stabilizes the idea or image and makes possible a dialogue with it” (ibid). In Eisner’s terms, the idea or image of very young children’s agency through cultural participation is stabilised, and made visible, through my TEY.

25 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

I am interested – No. 2

“…in making an environment that somehow leaves room for individual and collective participation but stays loyal to an artistic idea and focus” Lerman, 2011

TEY works are “inspired by the lives of young children and offered up to them as an audience” (Miles and Nicholson, 2019, p.283). The presence of young children can challenge the very notion of audience in its conventional sense of being separate from the performative action. I find this exciting.

For me, TEY’s seminal works were Tom Morris and Guy Dartnell’s Oogly Boogly (2003) and Unga Klara’s Babydrama (2005), created by Suzanne Osten and Anne- Sofie Barany. I saw Oogly Boogly live in 2008. Afterwards, Guy Dartnell graciously spoke with me for some time about the development of the work. When Suzanne and Anne-Sofie attended the 2008 ASSITEJ World Congress in Adelaide to deliver a lecture about Babydrama I was their driver. This gave me privileged access to their inspiring company.

At first glance, the two works appear to have contrasting, if not opposing, approaches to TEY. Babydrama draws a clear audience-performer line, in contrast with Oogly Boogly’s emphasis on the dance action being entirely led by the movement of the babies. However, I feel that the works share profound points of similarity because both acknowledge the presence of babies.

When I began to create my own TEY in 2007 I held both works in mind. My hope is that my works have the performative formality of Babydrama and the joyful, child- led quality of Oogly Boogly, staying loyal to the artistic idea I wish to pursue, but allowing the idea to be shaped by individual and collective participation.

***

26 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

1.4.1 Socially Engaged and Aesthetic Goals

The philosophical basis of my dance practice is most usefully summarised as a collaborative process of working artistically with specific populations, (for example, earlier in my career my collaborators were young people with disabilities) to discover new performance forms.

My background in community dance underpins my belief that “the arts in the community and art form development are non-hierarchically positioned along a continuum of practice which explores the cultural lives of specific populations and how they take part in the arts” and that “when the art form evolves under the influence of that population as creator or as audience exciting possibilities emerge” (McLean and Chance, 2019, p.306).

I also “look beyond the making process to the local reinvention of social relations” (Carter,

2004, p.10), in keeping with Hickey-Moody’s statement, “much of the art produced through socially engaged practices is collaborative and can focus on choreographing social change”

(2018, p.1). I share the political stance inherent within Carter’s reference to reinvention and

Hickey-Moody’s reference to change in the sense that my goal is to work with specific populations in “agentive partnership” (Finneran, Anderson and McDonagh, 2019, p.11), putting my practice to use “as a theatre entitlement that stresses plurality, active creation and active responsiveness” (Neelands, 2019, p.v).

The inextricability of my own artistic and socially engaged goals is matched by the link between the cultural lives of young children and their own “socio-affective competence”

(Stern, 2010, p.137) or capacity for relationship. Babies and young children initiate affective interaction and have an ability to communicate emotional experience (Mares,

Newman and Warren, 2011 p.8). This process of forming a sense of the world within relationship begins in the earliest months of life and is understood by attachment theory, generally regarded as having been developed in the 1950s by John Bowlby as “the innate

27 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

capacity of infants to form relationships” (Mares et al., 2011, pp.6-7), and as “implicit relational knowing” (Stern, 2010, p.111).

Relational knowing creates the conditions for intersubjectivity between babies and the adults in their lives. Intersubjectivity is “the desire to share experience and emotional states with significant others” (Mares et al., 2011, p.13). The baby’s capacity to share an

“intersubjective mindscape” (Stern, 1998, p.83) with another allows them to perceive the intentions of the people around them as well as make visible their own. Babies need the experience of shared attention with their adults in order to develop an autonomous sense of self, or to feel – as Winnicott starkly phrases it – that they can “go on being” (1986, p.34).

My TEY’s ethos of reciprocal encounter is a response to the profound social implications of

Winnicott’s phrase. Furthermore, my works are a response to the co-creative possibilities of young children’s capacity for sharing experience and emotional states, because theatrical meaning making for young children seems to arise in the main from experiences that are

“inter-subjective and participatory” (Quick, 2006, p.152).

Since 2007 I have created, co-created and consulted on the devising of six TEY works: This

[Baby] Life, Nursery and Flower 꽃 for babies aged 4-18 months; Touch & Go for children aged 2 and Our Corka Bubs and Seashore for children aged 3 and younger. My works invite very young audiences into specific, though abstract, worlds, where they meet four performers. Rather than representing fictitious, mythical or non-human characters, “we are ourselves” [Heather, 11/11/19, reflection after events]. In keeping with Hovik and Pérez’ artistic aim of creating “an experience for babies that is not fixed in a pre-composed verbal narrative, nor providing a free playing installation space” (2020, p.101) my works are constructed as a series of images held together by a conceptual thread. This pre-determines a formal order of events because my goal is that audiences are taken on an aesthetic journey.

28 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

This begins by seating families in a delineated audience space, which allows for the initial establishment of a separate performance space; however, I explain to the parents/carers that their children can permeate this notional divide if they wish to. The world of the work provides the sparest of narrative frameworks. This creates “the possibility of meaning”

(Fletcher-Watson, 2016a, p.177, Fletcher-Watson’s emphasis) between the performers and the children and allows room for the children to bring themselves into a relationship with the work through their participation. Heim’s emphasis on what it is to be an audience, rather than on how audiences make meaning, suggests that the responses of the theatre audience are in themselves a performance (2016, p.10). Likewise, the participation of young children in my works contributes to its content through their “empathic, intersubjective and synchronized response to the other in the shared world of the auditorium” (Heim, 2016, p.22).

1.4.2 Creating a Space

Zeedyk maintains, “We often think we have to manage babies [but] all you have to do is create a space” (2016, Starcatchers 10 Years Young). These words speak to the possibility of trusting babies and young children to “negotiate and regulate their relationship” (Fischer-

Lichte, 2009, p.391) with performers (and with each other and with their parents/carers) in a theatre space, assuming the space in question has been carefully prepared for relationship.

This is important for my artistic practice and lies behind the rationale for my research.

29 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

Insight Creating a space

In the midst of some wonderful immersion in TEY, I am struck by an unfortunate

norm; pre-show information is often focused on what children are not permitted to do.

This is delivered as a verbal prohibition, for example, asking them not to move into

the performance space or touch objects. The message is also made clear non-verbally

when, for example, front of house staff can be seen poised during the show to prevent

children from entering the performance space.

This makes sense if the show is being presented ‘end on’, creating a formal

performer-audience divide, but it also makes me realise that for my own TEY I’m more

excited by the possibilities inherent within the idea that “it is the children themselves

who make the convention of the fourth wall ridiculous” (Wartemann, 2009, p.7).

My DCI was motivated by a desire to respond artistically to young children’s normative expression of an “active desire … for control over their circumstances” (Andrew and Fane,

2019, p.45), to how “the children react spontaneously and occasionally noisily”

(Wartemann, 2009, p.7) and to “the element of chance or contingency intrinsic to any encounter” (Bennett, 2010, p.22). I wanted to explore and codify “practices that opened up for child participation in a way that took the perspective of children into account and, at the same time, maintained the artistic qualities of the event” (Nagel and Hovik, 2016, p.151).

Furthermore, by actively (through my practice) and theoretically (through my research) positioning the participation of young children in my TEY works as an aspect of the artistic quality of that TEY work, rather than considering that their participation would undermine it, my research responded to Zeedyk’s comment above. If all we need to do is to “create a space” (2016, Starcatchers 10 Years Young), what is the nature of that space? If young

30 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

children’s “meaning making comes about through and in answer to the world” (Hackett and

Rautio, 2019, p.1019) what is the nature of that world? How can it respond to the responses of the children? How can the way we welcome our audiences, the work of the performers and the spatial configuration of the work eliminate the factors that lead to prohibition and highlight the elements that come together to offer “the nuanced languages of invitation”

(Andersen, cited by Brown, 2017, The PaperBoats blog), not merely to accommodate, but to welcome, the participation of our very young audiences.

The welcoming of young children’s participation in TEY pre-supposes an acceptance of their agency, or the choices that may be available to them (Andrew and Fane, 2019, p.46) within a live performance. I find this exciting, because “agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces” (Bennett,

2010, p.21). Going further, Hickey-Moody harnesses Barad’s new materialist concept of

“intra-action” to proffer a view of agency “not as an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised” (2018, p.2), but as a dynamic exchange “constantly changing, exchanging, and diffracting, blending, mutating, influencing, and working inseparably”

(ibid). Barad herself considers “agency an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements” (Dophijn and van der Tuin, 2012, p.54, in an interview with

Barad), rather than something held as a property of persons or things (ibid). Intra-action

“conceptualizes that it is the action between … that matters” (Dophijn and van der Tuin,

2012, p.14). In Winnicott’s terms this is “the potential space between the individual and the environment … first manifested in play” (1971, p.135), or as Hickey-Moody explains,

‘intra-action’ counteracts and transcends the limits of ‘interaction’ because the latter merely

“necessitates pre-established bodies that then participate in action ‘with’ each other” (2018, p.1). Stern uses a parallel concept in describing adult exchanges with young children, which may play out inter-personally in terms of the relational choices made by each party involved in the relationship, or more intra-personally when adult and baby allow themselves to be

31 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

pleasurably and mutually affected by each other (cited in Weigand, 2012, p.17), creating and re-creating the relationship itself (my emphasis) in the intra-action between adult and child. This is encapsulated for my practice by Felecia’s reflection, “when I’m performing in the show I’m not actually thinking of me as just the individual, I’m thinking of us as the show” [AC 1A, 11/11/19, reflection after events].

Ideas about intra-action and intra-personal responsivity, or – following Barad – “response- ability” (Dophijn and van der Tuin, 2012, p.55, in an interview with Barad), gave coherence to the work of the performers, and to Fletcher-Watson’s “recognition of the roles that very young children can play in a theatre [so that] participation becomes not an interruption of the theatrical moment but vital to its success” (2013, p.19). My DCI was thus predicated on a practice-led exploration of the relationship between the philosophical basis of this participatory aspiration and the practical ways in which it might be artistically realised. I now move to my definition of children’s participation for the purposes of, and as the key to, the trajectory of the research by means of the artistic projects.

1.5 Participation

Participation is the term I have chosen to consider “how spectatorship can be conceived as an act of doing and not a passive lack of doing” (Reason, 2010, p.172). Fischer-Lichte asserts, “there is no such thing as a passive spectator” because “whatever the response might be, it is to be regarded an activity” (2016, p.177). I use the term participation to represent multiple types of activity by early years audiences.

The variable and nuanced nature of participation by babies and young children represents a broad spectrum of spontaneous involvement. Their attending to the work by ‘viewing’ it is

32 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

positioned conceptually at one end of this spectrum, with their active contribution to the performance – most usefully described by me during my own practice and by others

(Fletcher-Watson, 2013; Fischer-Lichte, 2016) as ‘doing’ – positioned at the other. Young and Powers refer to the distinction between absorbed and interactive engagement (2008, p.24). Similarly, a parent research participant referred to her baby’s participation in

Nursery, as ‘watchful’ at one end of the spectrum and ‘physically engaged’ at the other [AC

2, 8/9/18 PDG].

This spectrum is enshrined in the Starcatchers engagement signals, a detailed taxonomy of behaviours developed by researchers to inform their observation of children aged 0-4 during their attendance at one or more of eighteen Starcatchers works developed over the two-year period of the project from 2009 to 2011. Seven signals were identified – from attuned, absorbed and mirroring, to responsive, then interactive, instigative and experimental – travelling the continuum from watching to taking individual action (Dunlop, McNaughton,

Grogan, Martlew and Thomson, 2011, p.25). My use of the term participation in the context of a continuum of viewing and doing is, in itself, a conscious re-framing of an erstwhile objection to young children’s theatre attendance. As Fletcher-Watson describes, “theatre literacy, the process of training children to comprehend dramatic tropes, is often identified as the key purpose of theatre for children” however “this goal appears to justify the argument that very young children should not visit the theatre, as their innate tendencies towards hedonism (in the form of active participation) and … lack of behavioural control, preclude them from separating ‘viewing’ and ‘doing’ (2013, p.17). Fletcher-Watson’s call for true understanding of TEY requires separating the practice from such instrumentally motivated assumptions about the function of theatre in the lives of children (ibid).

I note that I have already used four terms – participation, engagement, attention and involvement – to describe the nature of the children’s responses, and so I will begin with a

33 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

preliminary rationale for prioritising the term participation. I was initially cautious because of its potential for a glib connotation of ‘audience participation’, often understood in performance for children to be an activity involving a single audience member invited to the stage or nothing more collectively ambitious than calling out en masse or clapping to high- energy music. However, the word ambitious is relevant here, because I drew on Reason’s concept of a practitioner’s “ambition in theatre for children,” which is “about transforming a passive audience of consumers into an active audience, not necessarily in terms of direct audience participation but in terms of emotional and intellectual engagement” (2010, p.39).

Fischer-Lichte’s idea that a performance “arises from the interaction of performers and spectators” refers to the process in which performers and audiences affect each other to “co- determine the actions and behaviour of others” (2009, p.391). Heim describes this as “the dynamic experience of co-creation that only occurs in live theatre” (2016, p.145). Heim’s proposal that “audiences play a role in the theatre” suggests that “this is not a conscious choice but it occurs because theatre is a live encounter between two troupes” (2016, p.24) – the performers and the audience. The Danish Teatercentrum individualises the theatrical exchange still further in articulating its vision that “every child must feel – both during and after the show – that if I hadn’t been there, the show would have been different” (Reason,

2010, p.41, citing Manscher and Jankovic).

Heim’s suggestion that the responses of the theatre audience contribute to the performance

(2016, p.10) is in keeping with Reason’s neologism “audiencing” (2010, p.172). For

Reason this refers to the intense watching, gazing and staring undertaken by children as they witness live performance. For audiences of young children this is particularly true because

“children will do what they feel is best for them” [Hick, AC 1A, 10/10/18], their non- acculturated perspective being free of having “been trained in how to perform the role of audience through watching others perform as audience members” (Heim, 2016, p.24).

34 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

Wartemann notes that an essential challenge for TEY is that children “do not focus their attention on specific events on stage … because of pre-established conventions [but] are attentive and focused on certain events on stage for only as long as those events are able to capture their interest” (2009, p.13). Fletcher-Watson adds to the discussion by observing,

“TEY artists frequently extend the role of the child spectator beyond active interpretation to participation in the action” (2016, p.47). The term participation then seems to most usefully capture the spectrum of behaviours encompassing viewing and doing.

Many TYA and TEY practitioners favour the word engagement. Usefully implicit within the idea of engagement is the potential for its opposite, disengagement, or at least retreat.

One of my concerns was to consider how possible it is dramaturgically to mitigate this, however TEY “performers acknowledge children’s right to be present, and more importantly, to withdraw when they wish” (Fletcher-Watson, 2016b, p.9). Furthermore,

“behaviours of re-engagement” (ibid) can have an important function within the theatrical exchange, arguably akin to the intersubjective concept of “rupture and repair” (Cooper,

Hoffmann, Marvin, and Powell, 2019, Circle of Security©) used by attachment theorists to describe the ebb and flow of parent-child interactions.

1.6 Contribution to Knowledge

My DCI contributes to knowledge by making explicit the responses of the children to my works and the responses of the performers to the live presence of the children. I have codified this and offer it as my own language of practice – “not a Manifesto on how to make theatre, dance or music for early years, nor a Charter that set of rules (sic) to create the

‘perfect’ show” (n.d., http://mapping-project.eu) – but as a contribution to TEY practitioner knowledge infrastructure. This contribution joins forces with Heim’s “fresh reading of the audience from the perspective of the audience members themselves” (2016, p.10).

35 I See You Seeing Me • Introduction

1.7 Industry Rationale

My work aims more broadly to benefit Australian TEY, contributing to the status of very young audiences, positioning TEY in the minds of ticket-purchasing families as a valuable activity for the youngest of children and contributing to the deeper and more systematic inclusion of TEY in Australian cultural policy provision. For Australian TEY, there is as yet no critical mass of activity and no solid entity able to “function as an accumulating knowledge base, as an investigative centre of practice” (Radvan, 2012, p.4). My research is a response to this knowledge and experience gap.

The artistic field most likely to address this gap is Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA), which enjoys a high level of networking in Australia through the work of Theatre Network

Australia (TNA). TNA’s status as the Australian member centre of ASSITEJ, the

International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People, supports the field to be

“a participating member of a global community of practice” (Radvan, 2012, p.4). In many ways TEY has emerged philosophically as a sub-category of TYA (Fletcher-Watson, 2016a, p.3). The fields grapple with a number of mutual challenges and share strong principles of practice, in particular a commitment to responding to the link between “our perception of the abilities and nature of young people as an audience and of our ambitions for that audience” (Reason, 2010, p.36).

The following contextual review proffers brief backgrounds to TYA and TEY, and industry perspectives comparing the dynamics at work within both fields to explore their philosophical alignment. The chapter also moves to a discussion of factors representing a contrast between the fields, showing how TEY has developed distinct features of its own.

36 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

Chapter Two: Contextual Review

2.1 Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) and Theatre for Early Years (TEY)

This chapter locates my research within the professional field of Theatre for Early Years

(TEY), described as “a sub-category of Theatre for Young Audiences” (Fletcher-Watson,

2016a, p.3). Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) is an industry-facing term, generally not used by audiences, but widely used by practitioners, programmers and funders “to denote professional children’s theatre, specifically theatre performed by adult actors for child audiences” (Bedard, 2009, p.22), although – as this chapter later aims to show – developments in the practice are beginning to trouble such definitive delineations.

TYA itself is a sub-category of youth arts or young people and the arts practice, this broader field encompassing visual and screen-based art forms, literature and spoken word, fashion, gaming and design. I chart aspects of the inter-related histories of youth arts broadly and TYA in particular in order to contextualise the development of TEY as an outcome of a philosophical trajectory reflecting “TYA’s transformation from a theatre that was primarily a didactic theatre of integration propaganda” concerned with the moral and social shaping of children, to one that is becoming “a dialectical theatre of ideas” (Lorenz, 2002, p.96), drawing on the multiple perspectives and lived experiences of children and young people themselves.

Changing social constructs of the child and childhood were instrumental in this shift, as practitioners moved towards considering children’s intellectual, social, imaginative and aesthetic capacities as central to their work, with implications for the nature and form of the work itself (Lorenz, 2002; Radvan, 2012; Fischer-Lichte, 2016). I compare and contrast aspects of TYA and TEY in this context.

37 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

Underpinning this is a constellation of motivating factors for artists in the field, emanating from a range of frames of reference for working with and for children, and industry challenges, in particular the quest for legitimation and resources. These are all inter-linked and perhaps best summarised by Reason’s observation that “discussion about adult theatre is almost always discussion about aesthetics, art and theatre. Discussion about theatre for children is rarely so straightforward” (2010, p.4).

Globally, TYA, or ‘children’s theatre’ as it would have been termed by audiences and artists at the time, emerged at least as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, beginning an era which “lavished unprecedented emphasis on the creation of drama and theatre that fully belong to children and young people” (Swortzell, 1990, p.xxiv). In a highly specific statement,

Schonmann notes that “1903 is considered to be the ‘official’ year from which we count its establishment” (2006, p.3), perhaps because of the founding in New York City in the same year of the Children’s Educational Theatre. Mark Twain served on its board, writing in 1908:

“It is my conviction that the children’s theatre is one of the very, very great inventions of the twentieth century; and that its vast educational value – now but dimly perceived and but vaguely understood – will presently come to be recognized” (Envisioning the Future of TYA,

2020, p.20). A comprehensive history of TYA is well beyond the scope of this review, however as Lorenz summarises, the practice has moved from being “a tool of enculturation” to responding to young audiences as “having different kinds of experiences and knowledge … exploring the world through their … points of view” (Lorenz, 2010, p.97). Nonetheless, “from a historiographical perspective, a complex interaction of social, cultural, aesthetic, and ideological forces has affected the narrative construct of the field of Theatre for Young

Audiences” (van de Water, 2010, p.111) which continues to play out in contemporary practice around the world.

TEY is perhaps more readily charted, because it is considered an emergent form (Osten, 2009;

38 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

Goldman, 2011; Fletcher-Watson, 2016a; Hovik and Pérez, 2020). TEY is often described in pioneering language evocative of forging new territory. For example, Birmingham Repertory

Theatre’s 2007 ‘Let’s Pretend’ Early Years Creative Forum marked a decade of TEY practice in England by reflecting on progress since a 1989 remark made by the then Drama Officer of the Arts Council of England, who had said: “If Theatre for Young People in general is an undervalued area, then theatre for the under 5’s is like Antarctica – uncharted, rarely visited, and with a singular lack of local resources” (Ball, Belloli, Burn and Wynne-Wilson, 2007).

Practitioners in the first few years of the emergence of Australian TEY used similarly trail- blazing language. In 2008 Tony Mack described TEY as “the last frontier” (Chance, 2008, p.23). TEY practitioners pride themselves on the specialist nature of their work, operating from a deep sense that TEY is a “world” which is encountered over time rather than understood immediately (Fletcher-Watson, 2016 a., p.158). As one of my company members puts it: “It’s such a defined age group, so it feels like you can really get in and totally know that world” [Noonan, AC 1A, 7/9/18].

TEY’s earliest practitioners operated in several sites of practice, primarily in Scandinavia,

Southern Europe and the UK. An example of early European practice was the 1998 – 2002

Norwegian pilot project, Klangfugl, which initiated the creation and evaluation of theatre for children aged 0 – 3. The success of this project allowed it to evolve into Glitterbird (2003 –

2006), a more ambitious European Union-funded project, involving artistic partners in seven countries (Osten, 2008; Novák, 2008; Hovik, 2018).

Similar multi-partner projects continue to be developed. These have included SceSam –

Interactive Dramaturgies in performing arts for children (2012 – 2016, Norway), Artists, Art and Early Childhood (2017 – 2019, led by Starcatchers, Scotland, Compagnie ACTA, France, and 2 Turven Hoog, Netherlands), the activities of the Small size Performing Arts for Early

Years network, culminating in the Wide Eyes Festival (2014 – 2018, involving a partnership of

39 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

seventeen companies, festivals and venues), and the current Small size project Mapping – A

Map on the Aesthetics of Performing Arts for Early Years (December 2018 – November

2022), led by La Baracca, Italy, and involving 18 partners from 17 European countries. TEY artists working in the Northern hemisphere enjoy the support of a range of professional networks, including Small size – the European Network for the Diffusion of the Performing

Arts for Early Years, Starcatchers – Scotland’s national early years arts organisation, and

Scottish early years practitioner support network, Patter. These variously scaled but highly focused professional networks contribute to early years practice through everything from informal peer artistic support to financial investment in the development of new works, festivals, professional development, symposia and research projects, all dedicated to very young audiences.

Outside Europe, TEY has seen several centres of activity develop at varying stages. In the

Asia-Pacific, momentum has developed over the last ten to twelve years, with early years works now featuring somewhat regularly in festival programs in Japan, South Korea,

Singapore, China and Australia and in arts venues, in particular Shanghai’s The A.S.K (Art

Space for Kids) and Singapore’s The ArtGround. The City of Melbourne’s ArtPlay is particularly committed to the youngest of audiences; for example, in the March 2019 call for proposals for funding through its New Ideas Lab program, projects with and for babies were a stated priority. In the USA the field is considered one of the “future-facing trends in American

TYA” (Shmidt-Chapman and Halpern, 2020, p.7) and is known as Theatre for the Very Young

(TVY). Examples of practice include the work of The Alliance Theatre, Atlanta, Georgia and

Brooklyn-based Spellbound Theatre. TEY in South Asia is in its earliest stages, a pioneer in the field of presenting and producing work being Kolkata-based ThinkArts.

The Ecology of Australian TEY

The ecology of Australian TEY is extremely small. A mapping exercise undertaken on 16

40 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

October 2019 by delegates attending a session dedicated to TEY at Converge, Theatre Network

Australia’s national Theatre for Young Audiences symposium, identified that the Australian field comprises only a handful of artists. Some are dedicated to the field, while others create

TEY within a broader TYA practice. Most operate within lean, independent administrative structures and a precarious context of infrequent, small-scale project funding. They include

Victorian companies Drop Bear Theatre and Sarah Austin, Tasmania’s Small Stories Project developed by Kirsty Grierson and Leigh Tesch and my own company, Sally Chance Dance

(SA). Jennifer Andersen represented Pocketfool Theatre (Victoria) at the symposium, however the company is currently not operating.

Australian TYA features several multi-year funded companies, including Adelaide-based

Windmill Theatre, which present works for younger children within busy annual programs catering for a broader age range. Most active in this context is Melbourne-based Polyglot

Theatre. The works of South Australia’s long-established Patch Theatre, and independent practitioner Dave Brown’s The PaperBoats, cover the upper end of the early years, targeting the age ranges 4 – 8 and 3 – 8 years respectively. Imaginary Theatre (Queensland) reaches a similar age group, operating on project funding.

The curators of Australia’s major children’s arts festivals – the biennial DreamBIG Festival presented by the Adelaide Festival Centre and the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s Out of the Box, Brisbane, and the annual Awesome Festival, Perth – support TEY and understand that

“any festival worth its salt considers it obvious to include a production for children under the age of three in its programme” (Florschütz and Kölling, 2009, p.158). Programmers at

Australia’s cultural venues are similarly motivated, using their festivals (for example, the

Adelaide Festival Centre’s OzAsia Festival) and family programs (for example, the Arts

Centre Melbourne’s Kids & Families program) to present TEY.

41 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

The ways in which practitioners approach their work for the field is diverse and complex, however the scale of development of TEY globally is well illustrated by perspectives such as those from the Let’s Pretend Forum, which compared current thinking with the climate in 1989 when theatre for babies would have been “unthinkable” (Ball et al. 2007). Similarly, before the genesis of Australian TEY, the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s Out of the Box, with its then target age range of 4 – 8 years, was considered Australia’s festival of early childhood.

Polyglot Theatre’s Sue Giles was one of four TEY colleagues, who contextualised my research with their professional perspectives from the industry (see chapter four). Sue describes the development and realisation of How High the Sky, her 2012 work for pre-walking babies, as a catalyst, highlighting its importance as a spur for all her discoveries since then, by establishing an artistic focus across all Polyglot’s target age ranges prioritising the relationship between adult and child [Giles, AC 1B, 20/11/18]. This points to practitioners’ commitment in both

TEY and TYA to the development of their practice as a direct response to the expressed perspectives of children, often in consultation with them. This is arguably a feature of

Australian practice because, as creator and compiler of the Lowdown Archive (2010), Tony

Mack, explains “Australian youth arts … constantly responds to changes in youth culture and the world, and is informed by our growing knowledge of the development of children”.

As inter-related fields, the dynamics of TYA and TEY have much in common. The term

‘theatre’ in both fields is synonymous with the term ‘performance’, referring to “a live performance event encompassing a range of styles and forms including clowning, comedy and dance-theatre” (Andersen, 2017, p.7). Circus, opera and puppetry are also represented.

Performances in both fields, devised as part of company, arts organisation, arts venue and festival programs, take place in theatres, including theatricalised/designed site-specific settings and where children are to be found in community settings, such as libraries, and in schools.

TYA and TEY have thus always been – and continue to be – caught up in the discourses of the

42 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

diverse fields of education, early years/child development, arts literacies and the “cultural habitus” of families (Reason, 2010, p.17), a concept proffered by Reason, drawing on Pierre

Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ as “family inheritance” (cited in Reason, 2010, p.23). Even if

TYA and TEY resolutely foreground children’s aesthetic capacities the field tends to be contextualised, consciously or otherwise, within broader ideas about children and childhood – from their perceived need to be protected, educated and socialised, to their cultural citizenship and rights as audiences, agents and participants.

Bedard’s “TYA performative”, meaning the entire context of TYA from the representation of its themes and characters, to where it takes place, to who attends and the way educational materials or post-show talks are often provided as part of the experience, is “nested and shaped precariously within and variously inscribed by the culturally constructed adult-child binary

[and]… ideological tensions between art and education” (2012, p.24). Reason sees these as examples of “overlapping frames of reference” evoking, for example, “discourses of education as much as aesthetics” (2010, p.3), while Bedard notes that “these discourses offer frames through which the activity is viewed and by which the meaning of the activity is inscribed”

(2012, p.24). It seems that these multiple lenses arise because the target audience is children.

2.2 Overlapping Frames of Reference

Arguably the most ubiquitous of these frames is education, whether this refers to systemic factors, such as linking the arts to the curriculum and the location of performances in schools, or the more general paradigm of children’s learning. As Radvan notes, “the gravitational pull of this discourse is sufficiently powerful that any children’s theatre drawn into it is framed (and constrained) by the pedagogical values and benefits it is judged to deliver” (2012, p.34). For

Reason “almost all children’s activity, rightly or wrongly, tends to be considered at least partly through the prism of education” (2010, p.13).

43 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

Dance practitioner Guy Dartnell echoes this complexity in his description of an encounter in an early years education setting where a baby makes one tap on a table. For the educator, normal practice is to maximise this as a learning moment, encouraging the baby to repeat the action, with a view to taking it further, whereas Dartnell feels that the tap has an aesthetic perfection in the single moment of its execution. Dartnell acknowledges that neither perspective is wrong; both types of exchange are influenced by an ideology playing out in the particular approach taken by the adult. However, his point is that the educational perspective, positioning the baby on the receiving end of adult expertise, is more likely to be considered “the natural exchange between experienced adult and inexperienced child” (2009, p.2).

Education is of course a rich field with its own evolution of philosophies and practices, as well as several theorists, including John Dewey, Elliot W. Eisner and Dorothy Heathcote, whose philosophical influences have extended well beyond the classroom into discourses of arts practice more broadly. Furthermore, adults working with children as educators or as artists, or in fields combining both frames of reference, such as teaching artistry, may operate within complementary ideologies, particularly if they are adopted with “a heightened awareness of dominant belief systems that influence and construct the field” (van de Water, 2003, p.110) and as a means of avoiding “taken-for-granted images of the child” (Olssen, 2009, p.7).

Parker-Starbuck sees theatre in itself “as a teaching place” (2014, p.129). She illustrates this by describing her attendance at theatre works created for adult audiences in the company of her own child, noting as a result a range of potential adult roles in this context, ranging from spectator to parent to pedagogue. The shared experience with her daughter became in her terms “a space for exchange”, creating a context for “a particular conversation [that] could, would or should follow” (2014, p.125).

For Parker-Starbuck the terms ‘teaching’ and ‘pedagogy’ refer simply to the ways in which adults open up the world to children, whether their role is as parent or educator. The educator

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in the room with Guy Dartnell and the baby making his or her tap on the table may adopt the

“discourse of developmental psychology in which the child already has its position and predetermined development … where learning is seen as a question of transmission and reproductive imitation” (ibid) or they may draw on more contemporary practices of co- construction and co-creation with children, taking for example the educational stance pioneered by Loris Malaguzzi in the pre-schools of Reggio Emilia. This draws on “the metaphor of education as relationship” (Edwards, 1995, p.1, Edwards’ emphasis). Malaguzzi sees children as “powerful, rich in resources, competent and social” (ibid). Within this frame the child’s “learn[ing] by bodily logic, potential and the joining of forces … (Olsson, 2009, pp.4-5) arises “through rich encounters with the world [which] happens instinctively and does not need to be made intentional or overt” (Reason, 2010, p.3). After all, as Grove points out:

“When it comes to language we don’t start from instruction … we surround a child with humanity and wait for him or her to catch on” (2005, p.45).

In a deft link between learning and broader ideas about creativity, Olsson notes:

When children learn … everything is thrown up in the air, nothing is wrong … sense and

nonsense walk together hand in hand … Answers and solutions are never really interesting

… The important thing is to construct a problem … This is a creative response.

2009, p.5

If the majority of contemporary TYA practitioners are anxious to distance their practice from the education paradigm, being more inclined to see the goals of their work in the ‘intrinsic’ artistic terms (Johanson and Glow, 2011, p.60) that would have caused profound distrust among practitioners working in the 1970s and early 1980s, TYA nonetheless owes many of its practices to Theatre in Education (TIE), a model of theatre practice prevalent from the 1970s through to the 1990s. In 1980 TIE attracted 84% of youth performing arts funding from the

Australia Council and performed to hundreds of thousands of young people each year. Though

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acknowledging the legacy of TIE in the form of examples of TYA works, such as La Boite

Theatre’s 1997 production of Nick Enright’s Blackrock, which combined high quality aesthetic values with strong social issues, the Lowdown Archive notes that the field became fraught with increasing criticism as the 1980s progressed. Commentators felt that the representation of the issues was at the expense of the artistic quality of the work and that young audiences were positioned as being merely on the receiving end of an instructional process (Mack, 2010).

As Radvan states, “positioning children is so important that if a theatre company gets this wrong, everything unravels into unengaging cliché. Get it right and it can start building on the strong base of an authentic relationship with the audience” (2012, p.121). However, TIE’s socio-cultural premise of access for all led to “a methodology that had a philosophy of practice

– a vision of theatre as a system of knowing” in its exploration of social, moral and contemporary political issues (Giles, 2018, p.21). TIE arguably created, or at least influenced, a generation of practitioners “shaped by a praxis, allowing contextual debates about childhood and pedagogy to inform their work and vice versa” (Johanson and Glow, 2011, p.62). The

“sense of common creative purpose [which] flourished in these ensembles” (Andersen, 2017, p.158) created a legacy in the fields of TYA, TEY, teaching artistry, education and community-based practice, linking theatre with ideas.

As youth arts practice became more collaborative, motivated by significant ownership of the work by young people themselves (Mack, 2010), a view developed that effective TYA requires practitioners to “re-define the relationship with their audiences in terms of the need to value children’s critical choices” (Johanson and Glow, 2011, p.63). Such a view promoted dialogue with young audiences, positioning children and young people as “artists and cultural contributors in their own right with the capacity to change cultural form and content” (Mclean and Richer, 2001, p.1), in a context in which they functioned as their own cultural groups, with

“no desire to be fixed in adult notions of childhood” (Osten, 2005, p .4).

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Broader social ideas about childhood often imply ideas about what childhood is not, in particular about “childhood as a state of lacking” (Gheaus, 2015, p.1). Senior notes that the

Victorian era began a “fascination with childhood as a separate and antagonistic category to adulthood” (2018b, p.26). Interestingly, she also describes how a trend in this era of children’s participation, in which “children acting like, playing or otherwise impersonating adults in performance”, has come full circle in contemporary practice, albeit with children’s higher level of agency within the process of preparing the work than was the case in historical eras. Senior cites Mammalian Diving Reflex’s 2006 work Haircuts by Children where “adults are invited to interpret the child performer in relation to their adult ‘equivalent’” (2018b, pp.26-27). A further example is Kabinet K’s Übung (2001), “a performance that involved six 8- to 15-year- olds imitating the actions of adult actors in a film projected behind them” (Hopfinger, 2018, p.65). Events such as Young at Art’s Baby Rave (2005), which invites children aged 4 years and younger into an “ambient ‘club’ atmosphere” indicate that TEY has its own versions of this phenomenon (n.d., https://www.youngatart.co.uk/projects/baby-rave).

The link between the development of TYA and the ways in which practitioners perceive the notion of childhood itself is encapsulated by Radvan who notes: “In making theatre for, and on behalf of children, we explicitly or implicitly theorise children, that is, we have a constructed view of what a child is and what childhood is” (2012, p.32). In considering the implications for practitioners on the way they approach their work Radvan highlights the need for constant delicacy when theorising children and childhood:

For us as performance makers, whose perceptions of children and childhood are almost

certainly distorted by memory, by nostalgia and by the socializing forces that both produced

us and that we now in turn perpetuate, the territory we must traverse is a contradictory and

fissured one.

2012, p.32

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Radvan’s call for the necessity for artists in the field to operate reflexively in order to guard against the possibility that “children’s theatre can easily become less about children and more about how childhood is constructed by adults” (2012, p.38) is a fundamental issue in TYA praxis because un-reflective approaches to constructing theatre worlds about and for children risk positioning children as passive consumers of an adult construct, which fails to maximise and ultimately devalues “other ‘childlike’ qualities, such as spontaneity, intuition, playfulness, fantasy, and associative thinking’ (van de Water, 2010, p.112). Other practitioners share this view. Suzanne Osten notes for example: “If we fall prey to sentimentality, then we defraud ourselves of our artistic freedom” (2005, p.4).

Underpinning this stance is a rejection of the idea that the children are the passive recipients of theatre, working instead within a construct of children that understands “that the child had to be factored into the theatre experience … as an active, thinking, feeling participant, a co-maker of meaning” (Lorenz, 2002, p.102). Thus TYA has allowed itself to be “marked by the eyes of children” (Guidi, 2018, p.69, in an interview with Ventrucci), with explicit consideration of how and from what context the children’s responses emanate. This recognition of the completeness throughout their early lives of a child’s being ensures “that productions are suitable and rewarding for… audiences at that particular moment in their lives” (Reason, 2010, p.30). Gattenhof and Radvan call for work which “positions [children], as intelligent, imaginative and sophisticated ‘readers’ of … symbol and action” (2009, p.216), while Escolme describes work which “assumes that a child is an interpreter and a maker of meanings of tales whose motifs and first conditions of production are partly analogous partly other to their own experience” (2006, p.173). This shift of perspective requires practitioners “to create a dramaturgy that address[es] those needs” (Lorenz, 2002, p.102).

In keeping with their TYA colleagues, TEY practitioners take an ontological stance, positioning their audiences as ‘beings’ rather than ‘becomings’ (Taube, 2009; Johanson and

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Glow, 2011; Fletcher-Watson, 2016a) and operating from a construct of very young children in which “childhood is being seen as valuable in its own right, not merely a preparation for adulthood, and children are considered to be active agents in the making of their own lives even from birth” (Young and Powers, 2008, p.7).

One of TEY’s first tasks was to explore the fundamental capacity of such young children to be an audience. Osten evokes an audience of babies through the lens of her work, Babydrama,

(2005), as follows:

Present. Here and now … Free from conventions …. Receptive without bias or

prejudice. Clearly awake: eyes wide open. Responsive in body, soul and with the

senses. Responds in honesty. The ideal audience is a baby!

2008, p.1

In this way, questions about artistic quality need to revolve for practitioners around how our work is a response to “our perception of the abilities and nature of young people as an audience” (2010, p.38), maintaining what Schonmann describes as a “curiosity to search for new forms of artistic performance suitable for the youngest audiences” (2006, p.17).

Contemporary practice is increasingly – and excitingly – disturbing old distinctions between approaches to practice traditionally termed ‘theatre with children’ or ‘theatre for children,’ youth arts, youth theatre and so on. The TYA work of Chiara Guidi blurs the boundaries between ‘with’ and ‘for’ children, creating a “form of theatre for and with children” termed

“children’s art theatre” (Guidi, 2018, p.68, interviewed by Ventrucci). Giles notes a branch of contemporary TYA represented by companies whose view of children and young people as social contributors and artistic instigators, is explicitly “playing with the tension around the idea of agency and responsibility” (2018, p.63) with the purpose of “reveal(ing) the child or young person to the adult gaze as a challenge to their understanding” (2018, p.64). The work

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of young people for adult audiences turns on its head the literal notion of theatre for young audiences.

Melbourne-based St Martins Youth Arts operates in this territory. The company’s mission is to produce bold and disruptive theatre made with young people aged from 5 to 18 for adult audiences (n.d., stmartinsyouth.com.au). From a practitioner perspective, Guidi also refers to the adult gaze. Her Errant Method, or “system of relations … between children, actors and educators in the field of the performing arts” arose because “performance after performance, faced with an audience made up of children, the adult’s gaze continued to probe itself” asking

“how can one find afresh, incessantly the originary condition of the gaze? … Can theatre, like childhood, produce a judgement regarding the world, which … goes beyond the expressive potentiality of words?” (Guidi, 2018, p.68, interviewed by Ventrucci).

At first glance, Guidi seems motivated less by advocating for the cultural rights of children and more by the implications of the presence of children for theatrical form, however the Errant

Method makes its own bid for the cultural autonomy and status of children because it “inverts the dynamics habitually used in teaching, and goes from the known to the unknown” (ibid).

Gentler examples render the adult-child binary irrelevant in meeting the cultural lives of families, rather than those specifically of children. Johanson and Glow note that “socialization is one of the keys to achieving an ‘aesthetic experience’, and that, especially for young children, families are the appropriate context in which this might happen” (2011, p.66).

TYA work Cerita Anak [Child’s Story] (2015-2017) by Polyglot Theatre (Australia) and

Papermoon Puppet Theatre (Indonesia) creates a cast out of the audiences of families attending the show, involving adults and children, some as young as 2 or 3 years. Three actors guide the families’ unrehearsed performance, within a playful dramaturgical structure of carefully calibrated action and images. The families are at once performers and audiences for each

50 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

other. ‘Socialisation’ in this context is a profound aspect of a shared artistic experience among family members, rather than an instrumental goal concerned merely with promoting certain desirable child behaviours.

Such inter-generational theatre can have a powerful role in bridging unhelpful binaries dividing young from adult audiences (Bedard, 2012, p.24), because it creates “a dialectical experience for its audiences by collapsing the boundaries that have traditionally delineated the idea of the child as distinct and different from adults, debunking the myth of childhood as the not-yet-ness of adulthood” (Lorenz, 2002, p.107). Cerita Anak heightens this through the presence of a secondary audience, consisting mostly of adults, who sit behind a screen to watch the story play out unseen from within the world of the work. Director Sue Giles likens the role of this audience to bird-watchers – outside the action, quietly observational [notes from attendance at

Cerita Anak, 2/11/18, OzAsia Festival, Adelaide]. From a practical perspective, the secondary audience accommodates other adult family members attending the show, while ensuring that audience numbers are managed in a way that maintains the dramaturgical integrity of the performance.

2.3 The Presence of Adults

The presence of adults in the world of Cerita Anak with their children is clearly an important aspect of the work. The vast majority of young audience members experience works in the company of adults, typically educators, parents or other family members. However, for some

TYA practitioners, the experience of parents/carers and/or educators within the theatrical experience is a significantly lower priority.

On rare occasions the presence of adults is removed entirely. I can think of two examples of children experiencing performance unaccompanied by family members or educators. The first

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is Chiara Guidi’s 1995 – 1998 Scuola Sperimentale di Teatro Infantile, a theatre experience specifically devised with and for children. This closed group of thirty children came into the project aged eight years, concluding the project three years later aged 11, having explored a weekly process of theatre making in which they were at once the audience and the creators.

The children’s parents were explicitly excluded from the theatre space, there were no showings of outcomes, and Chiara herself had no contact with parents, the administration and duty of care aspects of the project being undertaken by other company members. [Journal notes from my attendance at ‘The Art of Play,’ a 2010 master class led by Chiara Guidi and hosted by the

Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW].

The second example, though for ethical reasons much more fleetingly experienced by the children, is arguably no less radical because of taking place in a TEY context. Polyglot

Theatre’s “How High the Sky (2012) features a striking sequence where all adults withdraw to observe from a distance, leaving the stage solely to babies” (Fletcher-Watson, 2013, p.19).

Even when they are present, adults are positioned in most TYA as external to the theatre work, at best scaffolding the children’s experiences, at worst representing a barrier to the experience of the child audience members. Giles describes adults as the “gatekeepers” of children’s access to and experience of theatre, both as decision-makers to attend in the first place and as arbiters of the appropriateness or otherwise of the content of the work (2018, p.13 and p.41).

TEY however considers that the parent/carer has a critical role as a partner in the babies’ experiences. Equality of participation between babies and their parents/carers is a feature of

TEY proffered by Fletcher-Watson’s proposed dramaturgy of equality (2016a, p.174). For

Fletcher-Watson the notion of equality applies fundamentally to the possibility of form and content, conferring comparable levels of sophistication to TEY and adult theatre in relation to their target audiences. However, the deceptive simplicity of parent/carer-child involvement

52 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

plays out in practice along a wide spectrum of participation. At one end of the spectrum parents are asked to take a straightforward support role by simply being present in the space, looking out for their child’s security, but otherwise not involved. At the other, parents/carers are invited into active play and co-participation with their children. In-between, parents/carers may be “independent spectator of the performance, spectators of their own children, and guide to their child’s sense of engagement and security” (Miles and Nicholson, 2019, p.281).

The roles played by adult carers therefore appear to represent a significant difference between practices in TYA and TEY.

2.4 The Shared Quest for Legitimation

Despite a shared ethos of emphasising the aesthetic drivers of TYA and TEY, and perhaps because of our society’s tendency to perceive the characteristics of childhood in deficit terms as “those things that are not yet part of the state of adulthood” (Lorenz, 2010, p.98), practitioners from both fields have felt the need to draw on their broad knowledge of childhood as a means of supporting the legitimation of their performance practice from perspectives other than aesthetic ones.

Some, if not most, practitioners pride themselves on their understandings of fields beyond the arts. Noting that TYA risks being compromised artistically if it attempts to align itself too closely to a pedagogical paradigm, Radvan nonetheless makes the observation that “the close association with education gave children’s theatre makers credibility” (2012, p.34). Fletcher-

Watson suggests that an equivalent bid for legitimation in TEY “is to recognise the careful tailoring of performances to particular developmental milestones” (2016a, p.31).

Giles deplores how the TYA “sector’s very skill in articulating instrumental benefits [of theatre] has undermined its capacity to articulate its distinct artistic features” (2018, p.25),

53 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

however this has been keenly felt to be necessary in a context in which, in terms of resources and recognition, as well as the dynamics of practice, TYA perceives itself in comparison with adult theatre. Citing Tony Reekie’s wry description of TYA as “the Cinderella sector” (2016a, p.3), Fletcher-Watson wonders whether “TEY is the Cinderella of the Cinderella sector, marginalised or ignored even by other artists making work for children, and struggling with profile, legitimacy, institutional support, funding” (ibid). For Australian TYA “value, worth, merit, significance are words that smash up against the barriers to acknowledgement and recognition” (Giles, 2018, p.13). European TEY has faced similar questions about its artistic merit and a general struggle to articulate its aesthetic legitimacy (Florschütz and Kölling, 2009;

Taube, 2009), as has Australian TEY.

Polyglot Theatre pro-actively broached the subject alongside its 2012 Melbourne Festival season of How High the Sky, through an industry forum, with the intentionally provocative title

“Theatre for Babies – What’s the Point?” The forum was supported with an Artshub article with the same title, in which the artists and forum speakers discussed a range of topics from babies’ cultural rights to their capacity for experiencing abstract image-based performance, to challenge the notion that:

Naysayers insist that theatre for infants is a waste of resources, arguing ‘They won’t

remember any of it’, ‘It’s just child care’, or ‘If you put the baby in front of the washing

machine, they’d find it equally engaging’.

Dawkins, 2012, p.1

It seems that one of the ongoing tasks of the TEY practitioner is to contest such deficit perceptions of babies. As one of the practitioners at the forefront of the field in the 1980s, La

Baracca’s Roberto Frabetti, was among the first to tackle this issue through the art form of theatre itself. Frabetti used his practitioner experience to reframe very young children’s behavioural choices within the theatrical space, suggesting that they indicated an aesthetic

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sensibility. He relates for example how, within a two-day residency in a child centre, the children’s responses to him showed their clear understanding of the distinction between the informality of the first day, where he was a play-collaborator and the heightened quality of the second day, where he entered the exchange more formally as a performer (2009, p.142).

One of the speakers at the Polyglot forum was Rhona Mattheson, director of Starcatchers, which piloted the development of Scottish TEY by harnessing new knowledge from social and educational movements promoting “revised conceptions of babies and toddlers” (Young and

Powers, 2008, p.7) to challenge prejudicial orthodoxies assuming a lack of agency and interactive capacity in pre-verbal children. Like Starcatchers, many practitioners have explicitly invited partnership with early years specialists, consulting with them as part of the process of making work, observing trial runs of new material with audiences and situating creative developments within child centres in order to allow for consultation with adults with early years expertise, and with children themselves. Windmill Theatre’s work The Green

Sheep (2005) began as ‘In the Beginning’, an artist residency in collaboration with practicing and pre-service educators and children in child centres in Adelaide (Fowler, 2009, p.114). La

Baracca – Testoni Ragazzi, Italy, made performance works for children under three years, which emerged from consultation in Bologna’s nidi, or child centres (Frabetti, 2009, p.143).

Consultation and collaboration in TEY has extended into other disciplines. For example,

Suzanne Osten’s long-term collaborator and co-creator of Babydrama (2005) was psychoanalyst Anne Sofie Bárány. In what he calls the “Swedish experiment” Höjer documents how Osten and Bárány co-presented widely about the project (2009, p.89).

Such experimentation may have begun in the absence for TEY practitioners of much experience with very young audiences and with the simple goal of ensuring safe and ethical practice with a relatively unknown audience through consultation with credible experts, but many of the people consulted have become powerful advocates for the field. Höjer notes that

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“Bárány … is tough with those who question the very idea of theatre for babies; those critics who call ‘Babydrama’ superfluous, those arguing that babies lack the necessary understanding,” quoting her as follows:

Babies understand much more spoken language than they can produce themselves …. We

are dealing with a kind of ‘baby-apartheid’; we push them all into one category. Babies’

individualities differ just as much as adults’ personalities do.

2009, p.89

Collaborators from other disciplines have also been artistic collaborators. Osten notes, “In bringing forth text and dramaturgy together with Ann-Sofie Bárány, psychoanalyst and writer

… my research gets its form” (2008, p.3). This points to ways in which non-aesthetic considerations can contribute to the creation of useful aesthetic frameworks. A concept underpinning my own work is the Circle of Security©, an interactive protocol co-originated during the 1990s by Glen Cooper, Kent Hoffmann and Bert Powell, with Bob Marvin, as a parent education and psychotherapy intervention in troubled adult-baby relationships. The

Circle of Security© is now used around the world in perinatal infant mental health and early years education settings, as well as within normative parent-child relationships, as a relational map. The Circle of Security© refers to the rhythm of a baby moving out into the world to explore, then returning to the secure base ideally provided by their primary carer, before moving out again. The emotional implications of this process for both baby and parent/carer are the key to working with the circle.

My work, Nursery, is configured in a circle so that “the images and choreographed sections in the performance work reflect this constant ebb and flow, the deeply human experience of voyaging out and coming home, and this is echoed in the responses of the babies using their adults to explore the performance in the same way” (McLean and Chance, 2019, p.303). In chapter five I describe my inclusion of ‘circle’ as a codified aspect of the observable embodied

56 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

responses to Nursery and Seashore of the young children in my research groups.

Young notes that “if the arts reflect a society and what it values, then the preoccupation of funders, managers and policy-makers with proving the ‘worth’ of arts experiences for very young children in terms of its future benefits reflects a disappointingly impoverished view of young children” (2000, p.46). Despite a level of frustration brought about by the constant effort required to counterbalance such notions, it seems that practitioners ultimately pride themselves on how TYA/TEY “demands of its practitioners experience and comprehension far more specialized and sensitive than that required by the adult theatre” (Swortzell, 1990, p.xiv).

TYA practitioners’ deep knowledge of their audiences’ social, emotional and educational worlds supports one of TYA’s strongest principles of practice, which positions consideration of the children’s responses at the heart of the entire process of creating and presenting work.

This is shared by TEY. Practitioners consider it one of the strengths of their practice that

“fundamental agreement about what theatre is cannot simply be assumed in advance. It must be established, made tangible, and negotiated over and over again” (Wartemann, 2009, p.10) through constant reflection and consultation with their very young audiences. This links to

Fletcher-Watson’s concept of “proving ‘what works’ with testing,” (2016a, pp.174-177), one of five key areas he proffers within his dramaturgy of equality, designed to govern artistic decisions made in the course of creating new TEY. Wartemann agrees, proffering the example of Helios Theater’s ‘Experimentierfeld’ lab as a way of showing how “the artists … understand the encounter with the children as an opportunity and a challenge to test their understanding of theatre and to lead to a discussion of it” (2009, p.10).

The next chapter describes how TEY has developed distinct features of its own. I review literature from performance studies, dramaturgy and reception studies and draw on the fields of

57 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Two: Contextual Review

somatics and developmental psychology insofar as they relate to performers and audiences to show how babies’ relational knowing (Stern, 2010, p.111) creates the conditions for their ability to experience performance. TEY practitioner perspectives, assembled through archival study of publications such as the Small size papers, are also valuable sources of anecdotal knowledge in the field.

58 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Three: Literature Review

Chapter Three: Literature Review

The following chapter reviews literature from performance studies, dramaturgy and reception studies in TYA/TEY. Literature drawing on elements of somatics and developmental psychology, as they pertain to embodied experience, intersubjectivity and performance, are also interrogated to show that TEY is distinguished by three features.

The first is that TEY tends to be abstract in form, de-privileging verbal language in favour of visual, sonic, embodied and other sensory factors, including the art of play. As Fletcher-

Watson notes, “playing is key to the entire genre of Theatre for Early Years” (2016a, p.41).

The second feature extends from the first and can be described as the relational quality of the work, which creates the conditions for a relationship between the performers and the audience

“characterised by contingency” (Fischer-Lichte, 2016, p.164). Thirdly, and extending from the second factor, TEY considers necessary the attendance of a secure adult (parent or carer) with each young audience member. The presence of parents/carers adds in varying ways to the relational exchange. The review finishes with the concept perhaps best summarised as the

“dramaturgy of the audience” (Wartemann, 2009; Radvan, 2012), which leads into a description of my methodological choices in the context of Radvan’s question: “If audiences are to be positioned as active participators ... then we should ask if it is possible to investigate the crafting of that participation” (Radvan, 2012, p.110).

3.1 Privileging the Non-Verbal

A feature of TEY is its preference for abstract images and non- or minimally verbal performance forms. The field is not, of course, confined to this approach. One of the world’s very first TEY works, Unga Klara’s Babydrama, was a script-based work written and

59 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Three: Literature Review

performed for a pre-verbal audience (Osten, 2009, p.5). Furthermore, the broader field of contemporary TYA no longer necessarily relies on writers, nowadays featuring multi- disciplinary or non-verbal works, alongside linear and narrative approaches (Giles, 2018, p.26).

However, TEY actively privileges non-verbal forms. Starcatchers Director Rhona Mattheson unpacks the reasons for TEY’s choices of form in terms which centre on the capacities of babies, maximising, rather than merely accommodating, their early or pre-linguistic skills:

[Babies] are amazing ... They are incredibly clever and can be challenged creatively. They

are not afraid of abstract work – abstract work links to how very young children play, so I

think they can cope with it in a way that a three- or four-year-old (or an adult) can’t.

Dawkins, 2012, p.2

Fletcher-Watson notes, “visual theatre replaces text as the main performative modality”

(2016a, p.5). Goldfinger states, “there are no defined characters, little to no text, no lineal plot, no fable” (2011, p.297), while Giles refers to TEY’s emphasis on “sensory forms, dance and immersive installation overriding script-based productions” (2018, p.16).

Some TEY practitioners describe their choice of forms of performance in terms that seem to have the goal of over-turning orthodox hierarchies of artistic form, so that “theatre for the youngest … is not reduced to the language of words” (Taube, 2009, p.20-21). Taube goes on to assert, “pictures, tones, sounds, movements, materiality and the body are emancipated means of expression in the theatre for the youngest” (2009, p.21). By ‘emancipated’ Taube may simply be referring to how such non-verbal forms are able to respond to the uninhibited nature of the audience or he may be alluding to a certain dramaturgical freedom inherent within

TEY’s emergent status (Osten, 2009; Goldman, 2011; Fletcher-Watson, 2016a; Hovik and

Pérez, 2020). Relevant here is “abandoning tradition”, an element of Fletcher-Watson’s dramaturgy of equality (2016a p.143), one of the five key areas proffered as a framework to govern artistic decisions made in the creation of new TEY. In this context, abandoning

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tradition also refers to the generation within TEY’s images of “the possibility of meaning”

(2016a, p, 177, Fletcher-Watson’s emphasis), by which he means an image open to multiple interpretations and even to questions, rather than being part of a specific or pre-conceived narrative arc.

The tone of the assertions made above by Taube may also stem from TEY’s bid for legitimation, and differentiation from both TYA and adult theatre, representing a challenge to

“older forms of children’s theatre which reject participation” (Fletcher-Watson, 2016a p.145).

TEY artists involved in Fletcher-Watson’s study described the invigorating experience of

“taking risks, upsetting hierarchies, challenging orthodoxies and subverting their training”

(ibid). Their stance also speaks again to the deep commitment among TEY practitioners to position their audiences not simply as having simplified needs because of their extremely young age, but also as having specific abilities as audience members.

Osten’s initial concept of Babydrama as “a kind of visceral happening” (2005, p.3) links to ideas about how very young children bring embodied skills, multi-modal sensory awareness and corporeal communication (Osten, 2008; Mclean and Chance, 2019) to their experience of live performance. London-based Oily Cart’s Tim Webb observes, “the wonderful thing about being a six-month old baby is that you can just glory in whatever’s coming along in sensory terms” (2012, p.74). Audience experiences of dance are relevant here. Reason and Reynolds conceptualise these as being based in “kinesthetic empathy “ (2010, p.49), providing useful language for a consideration of very young audiences and their pre-verbal responses. Taube also describes TEY in terms that are subtle and embodied. He notes for example, that “the rhythm of the players and the spectators is connected by the breath” (2009, p.24) and that TEY is a meeting point between audiences and performers in which “the spectator opens himself to a presence of another being” (2009, p.20) by “perceiving with all senses” (2009, p.18) through a “physicalness of perception” (2009, p.19).

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These link closely to Fischer-Lichte’s notion that performance takes place “in and through the process of the bodily co-presence” of performers and spectators (2016, p.164). These ideas link to the field of somatics. Somatic practices reveal how “our own journey to life is present at every cellular level in our bodies” (Osten, 2008, p.2) and explore “sensing encounters between body and breathing, body and ground, body and body and between body and site”

(Claid, 2016, p.124). Loughlin refers to the somatic partnership between mother and baby in which “the new infant senses the world through the mother’s intuitive, sensitive, physical attention to the infant soma – touching skin, singing softly, holding the infant securely” (2009, p.2). Claid extends such interpersonal encounters to the exchange between performer and audience, albeit without the intimacy of mother-infant relationships, “inviting an understanding

… through a sense of separateness and relatedness … experienced by giving somatic attention to one’s body in the environment” (pp.115-116). For Claid, performance is therefore by definition relational, not for spectacle, but for “ethical face-to-face interaction” and about

“meeting you from this self supported space” (pp.125-126).

Early in my TEY practice I developed a performative relational exchange I termed ‘matching’.

Matching arose as a forum for babies to communicate through their movement. The term came from the Circle of Security©, in which an aspect of the relational map offered to parents in the voice of the child was: “Connect with me by matching my voice, face and movement” (Cooper et al., 2019). I drew on the word ‘matching’ to describe the intensive and intuitive process in which my performers met the audience of babies by joining in the stop and start of their movement and sounds, led by the baby. Matching is a deceptively simple activity and a playful skill, which takes time to develop and requires empathy, sensitivity and physicality. I use the word ‘matching’, as opposed to mirroring or copying, because it implies that the performers have a deeper task than simply replicating the external movement of a baby's

‘doing’, instead responding to the ‘being-ness’ of the baby’s actions as a manifestation of their inner world. For matching to be a meeting point, it is essential that the baby understands the

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transaction, gives the adult performer their assent to play and has complete control over the exchange. This includes the opportunity to decline to be involved and to finish when they decide to. Matching could last for seconds or for many minutes.

Over the course of my DCI projects Nursery and Seashore the performers’ reflective practice began to reveal their hitherto tacit performer knowledge, leading to the relational exchange of our practice becoming more nuanced. In this context our practice of matching was re- positioned as an aspect of the babies’ range of initiatives (see section 5.4.1) and re- conceptualised for the performers as an aspect of our broader framework of performer responsivity (see section 5.7.1).

Matching is a playful activity, contextualised performatively. Similarly, the TEY work Oogly

Boogly (2003), in which “a group of performers simply follow and amplify the babies’ movements or stillnesses (Dartnell, 2009, p.2) is described by its co-creator as “a game for the babies” (ibid). This speaks to the power and importance in TEY of play and so a brief excursion into Caillois’ taxonomy of play is useful here.

Play – Ludus and Paidia

Caillois’ taxonomy of play identifies four categories he terms agon – competition (rule bound, skill-based, leading to a winner), alea – chance (where the player has no means of exerting skill or actively intervening in the game), mimicry – simulation (make believe) and ilinx (vertigo), positioning each along a qualitative continuum with “tumultuous and exuberant” païdic play at one end (2006, p.144) and ludus – play based on “calculation and contrivance” (ibid) – at the other. “Theater and spectacles in general” appear under mimicry at the ludus end of the spectrum, whereas a pertinent example of ilinx at the paidia end of the spectrum is nominated by

Caillois as “children whirling” (2006, p.148). Though noting that paidia is motivated by happy

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exuberance, Caillois also observes that it is readily carried to excess, and that its “impromptu and unruly character remains its essential if not unique reason for being” (2006, p.141).

Caillois chose the term paidia because its etymological root is the word for child, the implication being that children are naturally rowdy with an “elementary need for disturbance and tumult” which he links to a child’s multi-sensory “impulse to touch, grasp, taste, smell, and then drop any accessible object” (2006, p.141). Though Caillois’ description plays straight into stereotypical ideas about children as a destructive force, it does nonetheless speak to the care with which my TEY attempts to pre-empt the kinds of responses that Nagel and Hovik term “the risk of chaos” (2016, p.159). In contrast, Caillois’ term ludus refers to play which is more disciplined, requiring or leading to the acquisition of a special skill. He concludes his discussion by showing how paidia and ludus link, ludus “disciplining the paidia to give the fundamental categories of play their purity and excellence” (p.145). The concepts of ludus and paidia are explicitly harnessed in chapter five as a means of analysing elements of the creative practice projects, Nursery and Seashore.

Noting that “paidia is the natural state of being for babies, so productions that grant agency to the very young open up their carefully-crafted aesthetic to risk, volatility and potential destruction”, Fletcher-Watson recognises the “child’s right to push beyond adult limitations”

(2013, p.24), “writing their own theatrical texts with their bodies and actions, reflecting lived experience of perhaps only a few months through the language of play” (2013, p.27). This is an exciting construct of the young child’s individual agency, however a child’s sense of being a separate self forms, in Winnicott’s terms, within the relationship between “the child and someone” (1971, p.130). Winnicott considered that “cultural experience begins with creative living first manifested in play” and that “cultural experience is located in the potential space between the individual and the environment” (1971, p.135, Winnicott’s emphasis), or “the social matrix of psyche” … emerging “out of the domain of interpersonal relations” (Barnes,

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n.d). This brings us to the idea of TEY as a relational exchange.

3.2 TEY as a Relational Exchange

Dissanayake proposes that “artification,” a neologism she coined for the process of making art, has its origins in the interpersonal neurobiology of mother-infant interaction (2017, p.149), the nuanced temporal nature of which is described by Malloch as a “narrative of gestures” (2005, p.17), where “the affect of a vocal and/or bodily gesture is attuned to by another” carrying

“emotional meaning for both participants” (2005, p.19). As a result, “dance and music are particular cultural substantiations of this need to share sympathetically with others” (Malloch,

2005, p.25), suggesting that dance as a communicative performing art form has its origins in the ways in which babies interact playfully with their adults. Malloch describes this as a

“shaping of time” together (ibid) while Stern’s term “vitality contours” also refers to the shaping of the time and space between adult and baby, creating a dialogue that shares the quality of the feeling between them by reflecting each other.

In her analysis of quotidian adult-baby interactions, described by Stern as “an elaborate dance choreographed by nature” (2002, p.3), Dissanayake makes a link between the things adults do to engage babies and the kinds of compositional techniques that a performing artist might apply to their material (2017, p.153). She calls these “operations” and lists them as follows: simplification, repetition, exaggeration (with the goal of making something more conspicuous) and elaboration or dynamic variation. Going further, Dissanayake mentions that repetition also makes possible a fifth operation, manipulation of expectation to bring about the pleasure of surprise (ibid). In many ways, surprise as the driver of, or contributor to, the arc of a TEY work is the equivalent of dramatic disturbance in theatre forms for older audiences. Loughlin notes that the anticipation inherent within familiar baby games, such as peek-a-boo, “may prepare the infant for unpredictability” (2009, p.4). Dissanayake adds:

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Refining or regularising and repeating fundamental forms – that is spatiotemporal patterning

and elaborating – are innate and early parts of the human repertoire. Indeed, patterning and

elaborating, recurrence and variation occur in other modalities of movement, including

vocalization, as precursors of what will become dance, song, poetry.

2000, p.182

Stern also suggests that the time-based art forms originate in the rhythms, resonances and emotional tone of adult-baby intersubjective templates and “move us by the expressions of vitality that resonate in us” making up “the matrix of experiencing other people and feeling their vitality” (2010, p.4). Dance, for example, “sweeps us up at moments and then releases us, only to sweep us up again quickly just downstream” (2010, p.6). These dynamic forms of vitality are a composite human experience, starting with movement and integrating with four theoretically separate experiences of time, force, space and directionality or intention (2010, pp. 3-4). Stern calls this a “fundamental dynamic pentad,” concluding elegantly that it “applies to the inanimate world as we observe it, to interpersonal relationships as we live them, and to the products of culture as we experience them” (2010, pp.6-7). Stern also notes, “without vitality forms there could not be the exquisite fine-tuning of interpersonal interactions, nor creative artistic interpretations” (2010, p.51).

The suggestion that theatrical attunement has its origins in the playful interactions between babies and their adults underpins how undeniably pleasurable the unity of a shared focus can be. Perhaps it also explains why ensemble unison in the time-based art forms, is such a powerful performative skill to witness. In 2017, Longman reported on research that had used a

West End show to find that during theatre performances, theatregoers’ hearts beat at the same time, slowing and quickening in unison, and that people close to one another continue to enjoy this cardiac companionability through the interval and beyond. People whose bodies have synchronised in this way are more likely to bond.

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Translating the private adult-baby dialogue to the formal theatrical exchange points to ideas about the theatre experience’s quality as an “affective ecology engaged in feeling theatre”

(Welton, 2012, p.83), placing audiences and performers in a shared realm of feeling. Fischer-

Lichte refers to the “emotional community” (2009, p.394) created by theatre. The performers’ work induces changes in the audience members’ physiological, affective, energetic and motor states. In turn, and indeed in tune, the performers respond with modifications to their own performance (ibid). In the same way, Reason refers to how the social nature of theatre can be thought of as intersubjective because “it is a space where proximity … means that we become acutely aware of the existence of others” (2012, p.138).

According to Welton, spectating is a “practice which must shape or attune itself according to its circumstances” (2012, p.4), where “seeing itself becomes a matter of feeling” (2012, p.18).

Heim states, “audience members respond to performances because of their empathic connection with what transpires on stage” (2016, p.20). She adds, “audience members respond to each other’s rhythms”, and concludes, “the empathic, intersubjective and synchronized response to the other in the shared world of the auditorium becomes the lived experience of the audience performance. Empathy is an integral part of the audience’s expressive, shared performance” (ibid). Perhaps it is their expertise at responding to qualities of feeling that underpins babies’ capacity to participate in live performance.

Stern refers to babies’ capacity to perceive qualities of feeling as “implicit relational knowing”

(2010, p.111). According to Stern, the baby “gathers the swirl of what is happening … into units that are dominated by feelings. The feelings are an amalgam of affect, thought, sensation, and perception” that Stern and Bruschweiler-Stern term “think-feel” (1998, pp.161-

162) and on which the baby focuses their entire sense of being. Gopnik refers to this all- encompassing way in which babies attend to the world around them as “lantern consciousness”, describing this as “a vivid panoramic illumination of the everyday,” as

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opposed to an adult’s more usual “spotlight consciousness” (2009, p.129).

Practitioner Anecdote Qualities of feeling, April 2018

The Gold Coast Festival 2018 season of Nursery generated a new approach to the

company’s practice of matching. Hitherto, the dancers, Stephen and Felecia, had

matched the babies’ movement while Heather, the musician, had matched the babies’

sounds. This time, we explored the vocal matching of a baby’s embodied action,

rather than confining our vocal matching to babies’ vocalisations. As a baby lifted

her seed (see section 5.2.4) our voices rose with an aaaah sound; as she dropped the

seed our voices made a descending glottal sound, helping to conclude the baby’s

initiative.

The goal of this match corresponded to one of the overall aims of our work, which

is to respond performatively to a baby’s initiative, making visible and audible their

contribution to the work and attuning to the baby. In this way, performers and very

young audience members are “attuned by the performance … towards a particular

quality of ‘feeling’” (Welton, 2012 p.4). This type of practice creates meeting points

between the performers and the children, and links closely to Stern’s ideas about

how “intersubjective mindscapes” (1998, p.83) are generated between babies and

adults. The adult could faithfully imitate the baby’s actions or sounds, but this

would lack the shared feeling, which plays out externally in an action, as well as

internally as a feeling. Instead, attuned adults create carefully selected and –

following Dissanayake – elaborated imitations (2017, p.153), for example

substituting a facial expression for the baby’s vocal expression (Stern, 1998, p.106).

Gopnik notes that adults may enter a state of lantern consciousness as an aspect of participation in an aesthetic experience. Similarly, and with resonances of the concept of “think-feel” (Stern

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and Bruschweiler-Stern, 1998, pp.161-162), Grove suggests that when as adults we experience an artwork “we act not as divided beings but as ‘bodyminds’ in which (or in whom) the senses are fundamentally constitutive of consciousness” (2005, p.44). Stern and Bruschweiler-Stern also suggest that adults approximate infant experience within the heightened activity of viewing or participating in art forms (1998, p.162).

This implicit positioning of babies as experts in the art of being an audience excites and motivates TEY practitioners. The colleagues I interviewed all referred to babies’ capacity for intense focus – their “seriousness of attention” [Giles, AC 1B, 20/11/18], their “sustained curiosity” [Noonan, AC 1A, 7/9/18], the way “they take in their world visually” [Jost, AC 1B,

20/11/18] and how “they’re not separate (from the journey of the show) they’re in it with us”

[Frahn, AC 1A, 5/10/18]. Nonetheless, noting again that a baby’s agency is only possible within the security of a strong primary attachment relationship, I now attend to the complexity within the actual TEY space of the role and presence of the parents/carers accompanying their children.

3.3 TEY Audiences and their Parents/Carers

TEY takes an ethical, practical and artistic perspective to consider that the presence of the parent/carer is a necessary and important aspect of, if not a pre-requisite for, young children’s experience of live performance. Fletcher-Watson’s most relevant dramaturgical element in relation to this is “sharing experiences” (2016a, p.176). In practice, the deceptive simplicity of this partnership plays out along a wide spectrum of participation. At one end of the spectrum parents/carers are asked to take a straightforward support role for their child’s experience by simply being present in the space, and not directly involved unless their child needs practical or emotional help. Oogly Boogly (2003) is an example of this because the goal of the work is to invite the babies’ “intelligent independence” and “tiny little expressive wisdoms” (Dartnell,

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2009, p.3). Oogly Boogly further positions parents/carers as “independent spectators [and] spectators of their own children” (Miles and Nicholson, 2019, p.281) because “what takes place is simultaneously a game for the babies and a performance for the adults” (Dartnell, 2009 p.2). Dartnell does not suggest a game-performance binary, noting, “it’s as interesting for the baby as it is for the adult” (2009, p.3), however the goal is that parents/carers “successfully stay ‘hands off’ for the duration” of the show (ibid).

At the other end of the spectrum, parents/carers are explicitly invited into active play and co- participation. Melbourne-based Drop Bear Theatre and The Seam’s collaboration Rain, (2014) for pre-walking babies, is an example of this. A short section of formally presented performance is book-ended by a beautifully extended enrolment, followed by open-ended sensory play in the theatrical environment, each dependent on the input of parents/carers. The importance of parent/carer involvement stems from the relational theatre making ethos of the companies’ collaborative practice, which responds to the question: “What would a space look like that holds the parent/child relationship at its centre and leaves space for a moment of transformation in that relationship?” [Sarah Lockwood, Artistic Director, e-mail, 17/10/19].

Travelling between these extremities involves parents/carers in a series of roles as catalysts and as witnesses to their child’s experience.

3.3.1 Parents/Carers as Catalysts

Reason’s work on children’s experience of live theatre considers its impact after the theatrical event and urges the extension of “the imaginative and intellectual afterlife of their experiences”

(2010, p.114), asserting “that the memory of a performance should be valued in terms not of accurate recall but of transformative reconstruction” (ibid). Reason believes that adults have a responsibility to “contextualise, enhance and frame the experience” (2010, pp.116-117).

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Children’s capacity to notice feeling tones (Stern, 1998, p.13) and read adult emotion and intention means that they often use their adults’ affective responses to experiences as a guide to their own. For Webb this pre-supposes engaging parents/carers’ relaxed interest. He observes,

“if the adults’ shoulders are all hunched with tension or they’re yawning with boredom it’s going to have an effect on the kids” [because] “the children will be paying those adults a lot of attention … so you have to carry everybody with you” (2012, p.73). Giles agrees, because

“this is a vulnerable audience that places their trust in the adults around them, whether on stage or beside them” (2018, p.43).

Young states “enquiring into the nature of the experience for the participating babies and toddlers has to be linked with detailed analysis of the ways in which the adult carers participated and were supported in participating” (2004, p.18). As Fischer-Lichte comments:

“different situations are regarded as challenging by different spectators, and there might be various responses” (2016, p.177) and so a process of “support for caregivers to discover their own participatory thresholds” (Fletcher-Watson, 2016a, p18) is a necessary aspect of welcoming families to TEY.

A pre-show introduction is considered a TEY norm, which pays attention to this need. The process has been described as explaining “the rules of engagement” (Fletcher-Watson, 2015, p.31) for parents/carers, or “easing in, easing out” (Young, 2004, p.25). This is handled in a variety of ways from the practical, for example straightforward announcements about what to expect, to the aesthetic, for example, information provided in keeping with the tone of the show, such as the cheery announcement made before UK company Peut-Être’s work

Shh…Bang! discouraging parental shushing (Ates, 2019). The information may be conveyed performatively, appealing immediately to the children’s imaginative capacities. For example, a time-honoured strategy for bringing an audience of young children into a theatre, and the one adopted by Compagnie ONAVIO’s 2018 work Pas de Loup, is that a company member or

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costumed character from the show arrives in the foyer and asks the children to follow them into the theatre on tip-toe so as not to disturb someone inside who is asleep [reflective practice journal, 6/2/18].

Introductions can be useful and well handled, especially when they take the form of a carefully devised “initiation” (Dewey, 1934, p.41) or enrolment section (see chapter five). The feeling that an introduction is needed emanates from several factors. TEY’s emergent status (Osten,

2009; Goldman, 2011; Fletcher-Watson, 2016a; Hovik and Pérez, 2020) means that its practitioners are still pioneering their work in a context in which parents/carers are not necessarily clear about what to expect. This might require an explanation as to what TEY is not (not a playgroup, for example). In contrast, the enrolment process may need to reassure the adults that the work may not necessarily require the kinds of formal behavioural protocols,

“such as sitting still and quietly in order to decipher the semiotics of theatre” (Fletcher-Watson,

2015, p.26), that they may be used to or perceive as necessary when attending the theatre.

The intimacy of much TEY means that practitioners invest in welcoming families in a personal way, taking very seriously the trust journey embarked on by the very young audience members, for whom entering a new space is likely to feel insecure. This transaction is summarised by the Starcatchers Live Arts/Arts Alive Project Summary Report, which identified a five-point scale of young children’s engagement moving from apprehensive and tentative, to attuned, secure and confident (Dunlop et al., 2011, p.15). TEY’s introductory protocols are felt to offer helpful ways for parents/carers to support their child, and themselves, to enter the actual space, and then the work, at their own pace.

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3.3.2 Parents/Carers as Witnesses

Claid’s sense of a “three way dynamic of relationship: separateness, relatedness and in- between-ness” (2016, p.116) creates what she describes as “a gap of dialogic creativity” (2016, p.123). In TEY this gap is arguably the very space that allows for the babies’/children’s participation because three-way relational dynamics are inherent within TEY in the form of a

“triangular relationship between the adults, the show and the children” (Desfosses, 2009, p.103). Within this dynamic the adults are audience members, but also witness their children’s participation in the work. This performance within the performance arises from the contingent nature of the performance itself. By definition this unfolds spontaneously each time the work is presented.

When parents/carers have the opportunity to view their baby’s participation in a TEY work it is quite usual for them to be surprised by the quality of their baby’s response. McLean and

Chance quote a parent’s response to her baby’s experience of Nursery at the Queensland

Performing Arts Centre’s 2014 Out of the Box Festival:

My son … is 12 months old and … loves music and vibrations, so I suspected he’d enjoy a

tailored dance program, but nothing prepared me for the depth of his experience. He was

transfixed, thoroughly immersed in the show and participated when he felt it was right to do so.

2019, p.313

The performative quality of the children’s uncensored responses adds a layer to the live performance, which Hadley describes as “the performativity of spectatorship” in which “the spectator becomes co-performer or co-author” (2014, p.146). The parents/carers may themselves be a part of this by virtue of their physical proximity, often seated at floor level with their baby. The quality of their energetic presence, manifesting in how they attend to their children’s experience of the TEY work, is also a significant factor. Heim notes that adult

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audiences may “have been trained in how to perform the role of audience through watching others perform as audience members, through practice, through a list of theatre etiquette rules and through acculturation from modes of watching entertainment on screens” (2016, p.24).

Adult expectations of audience behaviour transpose into TEY in varying ways. In the context of her 2004 case study ‘It’s a bit like flying’, Young describes how:

For a few, particularly parents who were concerned to manage their children to conform to

what they perceived to be the demands of theatre – to sit still, to watch, to absorb – the

freedom of behaviour anticipated and allowed for in the performance was either a welcome

release from concern or a source of consternation.

2004, p.18

In response to theatre etiquette’s restraints on adult audiences, Heim argues “that in contemporary theatre, there are many precautions embodied in theatre etiquette that unnaturally imprison the audience performer” (2016, p.37). This is often for good reasons, for example “they may feel that a demonstrative response would inconvenience others by drawing attention away from the stage or compromise hearing” (2016, p.36). In curious contrast, I have often noted how adults attending TEY apply this awareness to their children’s behaviours without necessarily applying it to their own. The premiere performance of Nursery at the

Queensland Performing Arts Centre was extremely challenging because “some of the adult audience had not accepted the invitation into the Circle of Security, demonstrated by their continuing to talk amongst themselves” (McLean and Chance, 2019, p.310).

The question of how to make explicit the rules of engagement of the show, and realise them as aesthetic offers, is an ongoing quandary of practice for TEY. One response to this question is the concept of an “audience-focused model” (Fletcher-Watson, 2016a, p.174). In this context

Young’s emphasis is on:

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Structured opportunities offering potential for playful, improvised interaction between adult

carers and children, accommodation of a wide range of behaviours on the part of both

children and adults, careful structuring of the space, both to support participation and to

allow for different levels of involvement and careful structuring of the time and sequence –

easing in, easing out, length of time for play episodes and overall event.

2004, p.25

Citing Klotz [1976], Wartemann summarises this approach as the “dramaturgy of the audience” (2009, p.8), an approach suggesting that “if audiences are to be positioned as active participators ... then we should ask if it is possible to investigate the crafting of that participation” (Radvan, 2012, p.110) for both parents/carers and their children.

3.4 The Dramaturgy of the Audience

Young’s case study proposes a dramaturgy accommodating the behavioural choices of children aged two years and younger (2004, p.25). Some sixteen years since the publication of Young’s case study, a specific focus on children under the age of two is still a rare occurrence, both in scholarly discourse and in actual works made for this age group, perhaps because for this target audience the “risk of chaos” (Nagel and Hovik, 2016, p.159) within the theatrical exchange creates an undeniable frisson, especially for the adults present. The SceSam working model of interactive dramaturgies in performing arts for children tackles this issue from a practice perspective, with a tabulated set of implications of various dramaturgical forms for the relationship between performers and children (ibid). The model arose from an artistic research project “that examined interactivity as an artistic strategy in performing arts projects for children aged 0-12” (Nagel and Hovik, 2016, p.149) aiming to provide common ground for intentional dramaturgical discussions.

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Practitioner Anecdote The risk of chaos, February 2014

The show is This [Baby] Life at the New Victory Theatre in New York City. The

audience (of babies aged 4 – 18 months and their adults) is at capacity and all is going

well. A baby begins to express his joy with a highly vocal sitting bounce. His sound

gets louder and longer, his bounce moving along the floor towards the performative

action, his voice matching the rhythm of the action. It’s a perfect example of a baby’s

expressive power, emanating from a deep embodied pleasure. The baby starts to craft

his initiative, developing the relationship for him between the sound and the action. I

have no doubt that it’s a response to This [Baby] Life, but it has a huge impact on the

feeling tone (Stern, 1998, p.13) of that moment of the show.

The baby’s ‘doing’ interrupts the other babies’ ‘viewings’. Some begin to cry.

There are three competing sonic worlds – Heather’s soaring professional vocals and

the baby’s loud, happy sound, contrasting with his peers’ audible distress. There is a

serious edge in the room as we wonder where things might be going. To be honest,

we’re all quite relieved when the moment ebbs away.

As the front of house manager says afterwards: That was a perfect storm.

The SceSam model proffers a spectrum of dramaturgies ranging from ‘closed’ through to

‘open’ forms, each designed to generate one of several categories of children’s desired response, and each with implications for the function of the performers. For example, closed dramatic and narrative forms create a ‘fourth wall’ and are designed to encourage imaginative internal responses from the children and discourage their input, except when invited to help or give verbal advice. At the other end of the spectrum, open inviting dialogue and improvising forms are designed to involve the children in collaborative action in the “stage universe”

(Nagel and Hovik, 2016, p.159) and to activate their play skills. This more open-ended form is

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seen as experimental or immersive, but also akin to process drama, with the performers operating as drama pedagogues in a context in which any sense of a separate audience has essentially been eliminated. The authors note, “most performances will combine several categories” (2016, p.158). They also acknowledge, “the dichotomy of open/closed will always be possible to deconstruct” because of concepts such as Fischer-Lichte’s feedback loop (cited by Nagel and Hovik, 2016, p.159) and Wartemann’s “interplay” (2009, p.6) between performer and spectator.

Fischer-Lichte’s “feedback loop” (cited by Nagel and Hovik, 2016, p.159) and Wartemann’s

“interplay” (2009, p.6) between performer and spectator, perhaps paradoxically, open up the

‘fourth wall’, even if this is not the intention of the work. Furthermore, even in the most open of interactive forms Nagel and Hovik note the need for “closure” when guiding the children’s activities and attention (ibid). However, the aim of the model was to “examine what kind of activities are enabled or even encouraged by the aesthetics and probe the ‘mechanisms’ reinforcing the choice to engage in or avoid a particular activity” (Fischer-Lichte, 2016, p.177).

In Nagel and Hovik’s terms my preference is to find dramaturgical forms at the ‘open’ end of the SceSam project’s spectrum because my goal is to explore how the participation of young children in my work contributes to it through their “empathic, intersubjective and synchronized response to the other in the shared world of the auditorium” (Heim, 2016, p.22). Hovik’s own

TEY practice is based on the artistic idea of making “an experience for babies that is not fixed in a pre-composed verbal narrative, nor providing a free playing installation space” (Hovik and

Pérez, 2020, p.101). With a similar theatrical context in mind, I now move to describing the methodological choices I made to uncover the relationship between “choice of dramaturgical form [and] how the children and the performers relate to each other” (Nagel and Hovik, 2016, p.158) within my own TEY.

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3.5 Towards Methodology

My investigation into the structural and relational factors underpinning and enabling the relationship between invitation and participation in TEY was given coherence by the live presence of children. I invited young children aged three years and younger, and their parents/carers, to attend two types of theatrical encounter – performances (projects one and two) and a Family Dance Lab (project two). In this way, I used live performance as my primary research instrument, “handling materials in practice” (Bolt, 2009, p.29) in order to develop new knowledge about the practice. This takes us to the methodological components of the study.

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Chapter Four: Methodology

4.1 Introduction

The methodological basis of my investigation into the relationship between invitation and participation in TEY was practice-led research (PLR). This approach convened babies and very young children, parents/carers, and performers, in two types of theatrical experience – performances (projects one and two) and a Family Dance Lab (project two).

I begin by articulating the primacy of my practice in this research. Bolt’s sense of how “we come to know the world theoretically only after we have come to understand it through handling” (2009, p.31), which she terms the ‘imbrication’ or overlapping of artistic practice with theory, was the methodological driver of the research. I then describe my rationale for the use of the two works – Nursery and Seashore – as research instruments, in which the artistic practices discovered through the research, and the works themselves, were outputs. The chapter goes on to unpack the reasons for, and uses of, qualitative methodological practices. I positioned my research as ethnographic, using “a judicious mix of observation, interviewing and archival study” (Angrosino, 2007, p.53), because ethnographic research “can be conducted wherever people interact … in communities of interest” (Angrosino, 2007, p.27). The observational work of the projects was the primary research instrument, centred on the events of the Labs and performances. Angrosino defines observation as “the act of perceiving the activities and interrelationships of people in the field setting through the five senses of the researcher” (2007, p.37). Throughout, I drew on my own observations, on those of my collaborating artists and on those of the families involved as research participants. As the projects progressed my observational work drilled into Pink’s concept of “an emplaced ethnography that attends to the question of experience by accounting for the relationships

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between bodies, minds, and the materiality and sensoriality of the environment” (2015, p.28).

The thread of my own observational work was underpinned by reflective practice. I also invited the artists involved as my company members to undertake their own reflective practice, linked to their observational work.

Angrosino’s description of qualitative interview practices as a “process of directing a conversation so as to collect information” (2007, p.42) played out in three types of conversation – semi-structured interviews, Planned Discussion Groups and “reflective conversations” (Ghaye, 2010, p.3). These involved three groups of research participants. Each group had varying levels of impact on the research, depending on whether their input arose through participation in the practice (company members and parents/carers), or through an invitation from me to provide insight into their own languages of practice (TEY colleagues).

The high impact input of the company members and parents/carers arose because of the practice-led nature of the research and their experiential involvement within it. My conversations with TEY colleagues had less direct an impact. Nonetheless, their input generously and usefully contextualised my research within the broader TEY field.

Figure 4.1 (overleaf) provides a methodological overview, organised as a timeline. The ensuing section describes the work of the research groups in detail.

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Overview 2018 2019 Who Source Method Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec SC Industry/Professional Archival/Contextual Review SC Scholarly/Academic Literature Review

SC TEY Practice Nursery Practice-led Research

SC TEY Practice Practice-led Research Seashore SC Lab/Performance Observational Practice

SC Conference/Festival Reflective Practice

SC Informed Experiential Reflective Practice

SC Lab/Performance Videography

Company Informed Experiential Reflective Practice

Company Lab/Performance Observational Practice

Company Professional Semi-structured Interviews Testimony Parents/Carers Experiential Observational Practice

Parents/Carers Experiential Planned Discussion Groups TEY Industry Testimony Semi-structured Interviews Colleagues

*SC=Sally Chance Figure 4.1: Timeline

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4.2 Research Participants

The research involved three categories of participant. For the purposes of the university’s ethics process (QUT Ethics, Approval Number: 1800000396), I initially identified and described the groups simply as adult cohorts one and two to distinguish between TEY colleagues and the parents/carers accompanying their children to Nursery and Seashore. As the projects developed I realised that I needed to divide the first cohort into two sub-sections to reflect the nature of the participation of the people involved. I continue throughout the document to distinguish the groups as follows.

Adult Cohort 1A (AC 1A) consisted of the artists in my company – Stephen, Felecia and

Heather. I wanted to invite their informed views from the background of our work together and their observation and reflection on the practice aspects of the research, in which they played a critical and constant part. I interviewed each artist, asking them to discuss their experience of performing the works and to describe their responses to children’s participation.

The artists also gave their consent to take part in several forms of company reflective practice, which contributed to the projects’ emergent languages of practice and created a context for putting these new languages into action within the research. The company’s reflective work took place in anticipation of events, in the midst of action and after events (Boud, 2001, pp.12

– 14), by means of our performances (projects one and two), Lab work (project two) and occasional further reflective conversations by e-mail and in person. My experience of the cumulative impact on the research of the interviews and reflective conversations held with the company members after each performance and Lab event, revealed to me how in conversation

– and over time – knowledge is not merely conveyed but “brought into being” (King and

Horrocks, 2010, p.17).

Adult Cohort 1B (AC 1B) consisted of four TEY colleagues involved as creators of/performers

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in TEY works. Sue Giles, artistic director of Polyglot Theatre (Victoria), Lauren Jost, artistic director of Spellbound Theatre (Brooklyn, USA) and Small Stories (Tasmania) collaborators,

Kirsty Grierson and Leigh Tesch, took part in qualitative interviews, semi-structured to unpack the languages of practice used by them to describe children’s participation in their works. The discussion focused on one example of their work, which I had viewed live or online prior to the interview. This very small cohort was pragmatically assembled in terms of opportunity and availability and is by no means representative of the complete field.

Adult Cohort 2 (AC 2) consisted of Adelaide-based families with babies and young children.

The nomenclature of this cohort arose through the ethics process in response to the role of the adult parents/carers as observers of their child’s experience of Nursery and/or Seashore, and as the providers of a secure experience for the children; however the children themselves were understood to be equal members of this group. Kraftl considers that children’s activities in participatory research processes “operate relationally through engagement with each other and in solidarity with adults” (2013, p.15). The children were certainly engaged with each other, however I suggest that for my projects a more accurate description of the relational nature of the work would be that the adults (parents/carers, as well as artists) operated in solidarity with the children, positioning them at the heart of the cohort and of the work.

The work of this cohort was entirely linked to the practice aspects of the projects. For project one the children were aged 18 months and younger. For project two the children were aged 3 years and younger. A total of twenty families took part in the research, with eight taking part in both projects. I warmly acknowledge the generous commitment of time, intellectual and emotional effort, and energy brought to the research by the families.

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4.3 The Projects

4.3.1 Project One – Nursery

Nursery was an extant work, which developed through and for the research in a professional season at Festival 2018 and in the Adelaide series, a research process in three live theatrical encounters (‘shows’), set up to be a “laboratory-like and relatively sequestered environment”

(Stock, 2010, p.8). Audiences for the Adelaide series had been invited to attend as a research group, rather than being a ticket-purchasing audience, as a means of creating an optimal environment in which to respond to Heim’s statement about the experiential nature of live performance: “What better way to understand the audience experience than asking audience members about their experience” (2016, p.7).

On the basis that such young audience members could not speak directly to their experience,

Nursery harnessed the involvement of the parents/carers who attended one or all of the three shows, with their own baby. This cohort provided observational data about the nature of the participation of their babies, all aged 18 months and younger. Parent/carer observations, and the meaning they inferred from them, were explored in Planned Discussion Groups (PDGs) after each show. I was initially cautious about this methodological choice, because I felt that my own observations of the children would have appropriate validity, however, given that my artistic works can never side step the importance of the parent-child relationships, I decided that my scholarly work also needed to attend to them. My own observations of the same live theatrical encounters were triangulated with those of the parents/carers and artists. My observational work involved me in re-visiting each show many times, as a whole and in sections, using video footage. I then assembled all the observational data, using thematic analysis to develop a working taxonomy of babies’ responses to Nursery, as a window into their experience of the show. I drew on King and Horrocks’ definition of themes as the

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“recurrent and distinctive features of participants’ accounts, characterising particular perceptions and/or experiences which the researcher sees as relevant to the research question”

(2010, p.150). The main work of Nursery was therefore an examination of the babies’ participation, and the factors within the show that invited, supported or interrupted their participation. The babies’ responses and the resulting taxonomy of participatory categories are described in detail in chapter five.

I used Nursery as the basis for my 2018 practice-led research with Adelaide-based families for three reasons:

1. Nursery was in my company’s repertoire with a professional season as part of Festival

2018, the cultural event associated with the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

2. Nursery already had a touring history and so the company’s familiarity with the

original performance material maximised our ability, within the limited rehearsal time

available, to consider structural and dramaturgical changes to it in response to

observational data generated by each presentation.

3. The life of the work had allowed us to meet a range of ‘ordinary’ theatre-going

audiences all over Australia, whose responses we could hold in mind. This mitigated a

potential bias in the Adelaide-based research group whose very willingness to take part

in the research process suggested parents/carers whose strong support for TEY may

have interrupted their critical reflection.

4.3.2 Project Two – Seashore

Seashore was a new performance work, developed between March and May 2019 through a weekly one-hour Family Dance Lab, culminating in performances as part of South Australia’s

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DreamBIG Children’s Festival. The Lab involved seventeen families with children aged three years and younger. Families had opted in to a performance project, rather than a research process. Distinguishing the arts project from the research project created some complexity in terms of information sharing and procedures of consent/assent, however a careful process of recruitment from the performance project group resulted in all families agreeing to take part additionally in the research.

I used Seashore as the basis for my continued practice-led research for four reasons:

1. Seashore allowed me to test my taxonomy of TEY participation (project one output)

with fragments of new material presented as short performance sections at the start of

each weekly Lab. I used the performance sections as closely observed “slices,

metonymically revealing the rest of practice” (Bolton, 2018, p.16). This material

therefore had considerably more agility as a relational exchange with the children than

was possible within Nursery as an already complete show.

2. Further to Fletcher-Watson’s recommendation that “the voices of the children should

be heard in any research which affects them” (2016a, p.210), the co-creative elements

of the Lab allowed the children to speak directly for themselves through the

multimodality of their gestural, movement-based and … playful responses (Hackett

and Rautio, 2019, p.1023) and by means of their social, emotional and creative

responses to the Lab and performance events. In this sense, Seashore linked

“discussions of arts practice and the sensory ways of knowing that are implied through

them” (Pink, 2015, p.23).

3. The weekly sharing of new performative fragments allowed me to analyse the work of

the performers with immense clarity, most especially when our work ‘failed’ by

disengaging the children and/or their parents/carers.

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4. The festival context of Seashore’s presentation gave the company a defined timeframe

and “industry conditions” (Stock, 2010, p.8) for the delivery of the project.

4.4 Practice-led Research

Radvan defines practice-led research (PLR) as a process “that involves the methodical application of selected methodologies of creative practice to creative problems, with the

‘findings’ embodied in the creative practice itself, and explicated in an accompanying exegetical report” (2012, p.9). PLR is therefore one of several practices within the broader field of creative practice research, which positions the development of a creative artefact alongside a written, theoretical component as a fundamental requirement of the methodology

(Candy, 2006; Smith and Dean, 2009; Bolt, 2009; Stock, 2010; Hamilton et al., 2014).

Bolt’s “double articulation” of arts practice and scholarly research encapsulates how “theory emerges from a reflexive practice at the same time that practice is informed by theory” (2009, pp.28-33). In this way, the exegetical written component functions, as Bolt describes, in

“dialogical relation” to the artefact to play “a critical and complementary role in revealing the work of art” producing “movement in thought itself” (ibid). Relevant here is Carter’s concept of ‘material thinking’, which, “occurs in the making of art … when the artist dares to ask … what is the material of thought?” (2004, p.xi). Similarly, Bolt refers to “the ‘work’ that art does,” which she defines not as the artefact “that we have come to call an artwork [but] the

‘movement’ in understanding, thought, material practice, affect or discourse that occurs through the vehicle of the artwork” (2014, p.93).

PLR formed the basis for the research design, which applied an iterative process to the development of projects one and two. It was critical to the research that it be practice-led because the exercise of gathering the performers with an audience of young children and their

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parents/carers created “experiential starting points from which further practice follows”

(Haseman, 2009, p.36). Citing Biggs and Büchler [2009], Hamilton et al. state, “creative production may generate the question, be instrumental in the response to the question, or form an integral part of the communication of the outcome” (2014, p.27). The coherence of my research evolved in this way, the development and presentation of the works functioning as sources of questions and sub-questions and as the primary instruments for gathering observational data in order to answer the questions. Furthermore, as outputs of the research, new languages of practice within the artefacts of Nursery and Seashore could only be put to the test in the presence of live audiences. Smith and Dean’s concept of the iterative cyclical web

(2009, p.20) was applicable to the ways in which the research and artistic imperatives of

Nursery and Seashore functioned methodologically. I generated observational data through creative practice (project one – Nursery), codifying the data into new theory (taxonomy of children’s responses to the artistic work), which I then applied to new creative work (project two – Seashore). As the new creative work developed, further observational data was generated, which I codified into new performative technique (framework of performer responses to children’s responses). Chapter five describes the findings in detail.

4.5 Reflective Practice

The research was committed to, and underpinned by, reflective practice. Through reflective practice I gave my critical attention to the values, professional principles, mechanisms, relationships and assumptions underpinning the creative work, using these to explore the relationship between the theory and practice informing the projects (Bolton, 2018, p.xxiii).

Finlay notes that in the act of reflective practice “professionals … draw on both practical experience and theory as they think on their feet and improvise … act both intuitively and creatively [and] revise, modify and refine their expertise” (2008, p.4). This process was familiar to me as a routine aspect of my professional practice and so it was necessary to go

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further in order to move beyond practice to practice-led research. As my reflective practice journal notes: “Reflections aren’t the same as notes but notes and alterations may arise from my reflections” [9/4/18]. Such alterations underpinned the works’ successive iterations within their function as research instruments. Extending Donald Schön’s influential concept, developed in the early 80s, of reflection in and on action, Boud’s three occasions of reflection

– in anticipation of events, in the midst of action and after events (2001, pp.12 – 14) – became an effective pathway towards maximising two aspects of the reflective practice process:

1. Developing my own reflexivity – “a key concept giving momentum to the idea of

reflective practice involving both personal reflection and social critique” (Finlay,

2008, p.6), and;

2. Involving the artists and families as reflective practitioners, in “reflective

conversations” (Ghaye, 2010, p.3) and “mutual collaboration” (Finlay, 2008, p.7).

4.6 Towards Reflexivity

Through analysis of the underlying knowledge afforded by my professional background, the goal of my reflective practice was “to draw out learning and new knowledge from the experience” of the research journey (Thompson and Pascal, 2012, p.311). I took “the point of view of someone who is trying to learn from … complex and unruly experience” (Boud, 2001, p.11), moving towards increased reflexivity, in which I reflected “critically on the impact of

[my] own background” (Finlay, 2008, p.6). For example, the Insight overleaf arose through questions I asked myself about my sense of control or otherwise in my TEY spaces.

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Insight Don’t “spoil” my show!

I enjoy it when the children view my work with a conventional audience-like stillness, as they often do. When they contribute performatively, for example, by taking up space between two adult performers, the theatrical pleasure extends to everyone present because a very visible exchange has occurred. It’s harder to respond to some types of participation though, most especially when a child becomes interested in something other than the show. Young children are also extremely interested in each other. When they share an aspect of the show this works wonderfully. When the show is “partly overshadowed by the social interaction of the children with each other on stage” (Hovik, 2018, The Red Shoes Project Re-visited) there is a competing image, complete with parent anxiety, as the children negotiate each other’s intentions.

When I began as a TEY practitioner my response to this had a tendency deep down to be ‘don’t spoil my show’. As my capacity for reflexivity developed, I slowly learned to have the humility to respond to all responses, if only on reflection after the show, because we can never ‘control’ the children’s responses, and nor would we want to. The company’s reflective conversations also opened my eyes to my colleagues’ responses. To my surprise, the things that bothered me didn’t necessarily bother them at all. Now my response is about how we can maximise the performer-child encounter, asking: ‘how can we welcome this child’s response?’

Performer Matt Kelly describes children’s immediate vocal and embodied responses to his work as ‘reviews’. As he noted in his response to Sue Giles’ Platform Paper 54 published by Currency House: “It took me a while to learn to be grateful for the almost constant reviews that we get performing for children. In valuing their contribution … I learned how to make our shows better” (2018, http://www.currencyhouse.org.au/node/257, Kelly’s emphasis.

***

My professional life as a creator of TEY provided my primary reflective lens, but I also drew

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deeply on two other perspectives – the first as a dance play practitioner in the field of perinatal infant mental health and the second as a parent attending TEY with my own child.

Underpinning these perspectives was the philosophical motivation for my dance practice, in which I drew on my thirty years’ experience in dance as a socially engaged practice. The next section discusses these perspectives, each of which allowed me to consider how my professional and personal trajectories framed my observations.

4.6.1 Socially Engaged Dance Practice

My training in Community Dance and Movement Studies at the Laban Centre, London, took place in the 1980s, an era in which dance as a socially engaged art form was being systematically offered through local authorities across the UK.

I am interested – No. 3 “in who gets to dance.” Lerman, 2011

In the mid-eighties I was a languages undergraduate in the UK. I had danced

throughout my life, and at university had found classes organised at the student union

for fun and recreation. Then I came across a book called ‘No Handicap to Dance’, by

Gina Levete, representing SHAPE, an organisation dedicated to involving people with

a disability in dance. The book drew me in and my life pathway altered there and then.

Dance for such a profound social purpose, motivated by access, equality and

opportunity, made so much sense. Over the next couple of years I found my way

through training and practice into the professional field of community dance.

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Community dance training at the Laban Centre emphasised the use of dance as an expressive point of connection for people of all ages and backgrounds. This contributed to my belief that

“the arts in the community and art form development are non-hierarchically positioned along a continuum of practice which explores the cultural lives of specific populations and how they take part in the arts” and that “when the art form evolves under the influence of that population as creator or as audience exciting possibilities emerge” (McLean and Chance, 2019, p.306).

Carter refers to the “social effect” of art works, urging that artists account for the work not in terms of its internal logic but “as … a structure for re-inventing human relations” (2004, p.10).

My first job, with UK company Ludus Dance, placed me in a professional context where the goal was to consider the extent to which dance had the potential to bring about social change. I travelled with Ludus to South Australia’s 1989 children’s arts festival and a little over ten years later, having made the personal and professional leap of faith involved in migrating to

Australia, became the artistic director of the same festival, where my role was to consider the cultural lives of children from a perspective that paid equal attention to them as viewers of the arts and as creators of the arts – as audiences and as artists themselves.

In the intervening ten years I founded Restless Dance Theatre, which sought in its early days simply to offer young people with a disability access to dance participation. This rapidly became a much more nuanced journey of discovery about where the art form could be taken in a disability cultural context. My years at Restless became about validating the cultural lives of a marginalised social group, whose attitude to their art had an impact on the fabric of dance making in Australia. My early years work is similarly motivated because it is about processes of collaboration and co-creation with a specific population to discover new performance forms.

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4.6.2 Dance in Perinatal Infant Mental Health

My earliest TEY collaborators, functioning simply as trial audiences, were families involved with the Acorn Program (a project originally of the Women’s and Children’s Hospital,

Adelaide, and now managed by Anglicare SA, funded by the Hopscotch Foundation). Acorn operates within the field of perinatal infant mental health, supporting the attachment relationship between mothers and their children aged three years and younger, where the mother has identified that the relationship has been compromised by her diagnosed mental health struggle. Attachment is the journey of the special relationship between parent and baby, emotionally processed in the very early years. My work with the Acorn program supports the relationship through an activity termed dance play. Dance play helps emotional processing because it is immediate, relational and non-verbal, which gives equal status to the experience of both mother and child, and responds to the notion inherent within perinatal infant mental health that emotional wellbeing begins in infancy.

I use the word ‘dance’ for two reasons. The first speaks to the children’s use of movement as a pre-verbal language; the second refers symbolically to the ‘dance’ of the mother-child relationship itself. Dance play is the key to supporting the children’s developing sense of self within a relationship that may have already been impacted, or at least interrupted, by the mother’s mental health struggle. Having the opportunity to develop dance play practices within the field of perinatal infant mental health opened the door to my understandings of how babies navigate their new world within relationship, whether the relationship is playing out normatively or otherwise.

The Acorn model draws on the Circle of Security© [CoS] (Cooper et al., 2019), a conceptual framework mapping the child’s constant exploration out into the world and back to the secure base of their parent/carer. The CoS supports parental awareness not only of their child’s

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attachment behaviours but also of the impact on the relationship of the way they themselves were parented. To many new parents, the success of the attachment process may seem counter-intuitive or even paradoxical. In essence, the stronger the baby’s sense of a secure parental/carer base the greater their capacity for expressing their own self-hood and agency through exploration away from their carer, returning to their secure base as needed.

I discovered that this has two critical implications for the creation and presentation of TEY:

1. The consideration that performative material can be relational.

2. The important role of parents/carers within the theatrical exchange.

Over time, I have noticed that the responses to live TEY of babies whose own mental health has been impacted by the mental health struggle of their mother can differ markedly from those of normatively secure babies. While a discussion of this is beyond the scope of this study, in practice my company applies these understandings to welcoming audience members from all backgrounds and life experiences.

4.6.3 Attending TEY as a Parent

At the time of the birth of my own child in 2004 there was a nascent field of Australian TEY.

During 2003 I had taken part as a dancer in ‘In the Beginning’, the consultation process with children of the pioneering TEY work that became Windmill Theatre’s The Green Sheep. This work’s premiere season was part of the festival I curated in 2005, and I attended as a parent in the company of my child. The consultation’s artistic questions had been very generally centred on the nature of the engagement with a dancer of a group of children.

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My experience of the completed work in the company of my child began with practical and rather stressful questions – ‘Where do I park my pram/put my bags? What is my child allowed to touch? How do I respond when he wants to ask questions and make remarks during the show? Are my parenting skills (or worse, lack of skills) on public display?’

This experience generated profound awareness for me of the potential vulnerability of parents/carers within the relatively unknown experience of live TEY and of the necessity of providing audiences with “sufficient scaffolding to ensure that they know what is required of them at each moment” (Winter, 2014, p.88), through clear and reassuring information of a practical and artistic nature.

My observation from my own practice has been that parents/carers are very willing to attend performances created especially for their children, even if attending the theatre is not part of their “cultural habitus” (Reason, extending Pierre Bourdieu’s 1990 concept of habitus, 2010, p.24). This may simply be “because dads and mums [are] delighted to be able to do something else with their children other than going down to the playground” (Flörschutz, 2009, p.158) or may point to the more complex motivations Reason describes as “what adults want of children” (2010, p.18).

These include ideas about theatre being good for children’s social and educational development. A parent involved with project one responded to the question ‘what motivated you to bring your child to a live performance?’ with the idea that it is “good for kids to go through the show process, sitting and being engaged visually by something other than the TV”

[AC 2, PDG 8/9/18]. Young’s conversations with parents also reveal a tendency to consider how “arts occasions are a useful vehicle for enhancing general attributes rather than recognising the intrinsic value of arts experience” (2004, p.21). Other parents in Young’s study valued the quality of the experience, nominating their appreciation of “something

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skilfully and artistically well done” and the “pleasure [which] arose vicariously through their enjoyment of the children’s participation” (Young, 2004, p.23). As a tacit understanding of the

“family inheritance” (Reason, 2010, p.24) of my own middle class, theatre-attending cultural and social background similar ideas were certainly a factor in my entering the professional field of TYA and in my motivation for attending TEY with my child.

Young wonders “how far … professional artists in any early years arts work can move from fully modelling, encouraging and hoping to influence the way adults interact with very young children … and fundamentally, whether they should” (2004, p.22), cautioning artists against

“implicitly framing their expectations of participation around dominant models of parenting”

(ibid). In response as both researcher and artist to this note of caution, my research adhered carefully to the ethical considerations of working with parents/carers and very young children and to my commitment to developing a reflexive response to my observations of the ways in which their relationships played out in the performances and Labs. The company’s reflective practice “after events” (Boud, 2001, pp.12 – 14) allowed us “the unparalleled privilege of entering empathetically into the imagined life of another” (Bolton, 2018, p.143) by considering the precise nature of the experience of the children and their adults.

Reflective Practice Journaling

For Boud, “the journal is both the place where the events and experiences are recorded and the forum by which they are processed and re-formed” (2001, p.11). I developed reflective practice journals for both projects. This was a useful entry point into reflecting artistically and generating practice-led questions. It took a long time for my reflective practice to become “a state of mind, an ongoing attitude to life and work” (Bolton, 2018, p.1). The following insight from my personal reflective practice journal grapples with the relationship between my espoused values as a practitioner and my values in practice (Bolton, 2018, p.27).

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Insight “Mentoring from a helpful observer” (Bolton, 2018, p.156)

Bolton’s reflective practice exercise invited me to think of a puzzling or

unsatisfactory event, choose an object in the room where the event was held and

write a narrative from its perspective. I chose the second Planned Discussion Group

for families attending Nursery on 6 October 2018. I’d struggled with my own multi-

tasking during the PDG and felt that the session revealed the need not only for a re-

organisation of the logistics but a re-think of my handling of them, in order to take

them beyond ‘feedback’ and into planned discussion. I wrote from the imaginary

perspective of the white board in the meeting room:

‘I readied myself for the arrival of the group. Little ones, with kind, softly

spoken adults, toys, dialogue, play. The parents, proffering snacks, negotiating their

child‘s needs; one very busy woman, dashing back and forth with biscuits, fruit and

water. Gradually paper, pens, notebooks and talk takes over from the food. I hear

two conversations – children’s voices and formal talk. I see split attention – mothers

and one father trying to focus on the discussion but attending to their children too.

I notice several dominant voices, the busy woman in particular. She also

exclaims a lot and begins to tickle my surfaces with coloured words and arrows. I

wonder why someone else isn’t doing this. She can’t possibly invite discussion,

listen, record and move the discussion forwards all at once. I know that she

espouses a process of talking and listening, as well as silence as a value, but she

clearly isn’t turning this into a value in practice’.

Subsequent PDGs took account of this observation.

***

Over time I adopted other types of journaling practices. I distilled my reflections into haiku, jotted in books, drew maps and sketches (see figure 4.2) and asked questions of myself and of

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the company “as a device for working with events and experiences in order to extract meaning from them” (Boud, 2001, p.9).

Figure 4.2: Three little heads, Reflective practice journal, 12 April 2018

4.7 Qualitative Methodology

My objective of exploring and describing the phenomena of Nursery and Seashore as a means of contributing to new knowledge about the practice of TEY required the use of qualitative research instruments. On the basis that “human life is fundamentally dialogical and polyvocal”

(Angrosino, 2007, p.13), and that “knowledge is constructed jointly in interaction by the researcher and the researched” (Grbich, 2013, p.7), a relativist and social constructivist epistemological stance underpinned my investigation into how young children experienced

Nursery and Seashore, generating new knowledge relevant to performers and young audiences within the shared experience of performers and their young audiences. I drew on ethnographic

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methods (see table 4.1) to explore qualitatively “the children’s lived experiences of theatre”

(Reason, 2010, p.46) with the goal of “uncovering the meaning of [this] phenomenon for those involved” (Merriam and Tisdell, 2016, p.5). Table 4.1 lists Angrosino’s ethnographic methods

(2007, p.15) in the left hand column, linking its relevance to my research on the right.

Ethnographic Methods Relevance To My Research

Field-based (conducted in “specific settings” I had a high level of artistic control over the settings [Angrosino, 2007, p.56], rather than in into which I invited families (for example, actively laboratories where the researcher controls positioning Seashore sessions as a Lab differentiated the elements of the behaviours to be it from the social setting of a playgroup). However, I observed or measured) had no control over the responses of the participants, my observations of which drove the research.

Personalized (conducted by researchers who I adopted a “participant-as-observer” researcher role are … both participants in and observers of (using Gold’s 1958 typology, cited in Angrosino, 2007, the lives under study) p.55), because I needed to be “fully integrated into the life of the group under study” (ibid).

Multi-factorial (conducted through the use of Observation was my primary method, with two or more data collection techniques…in interviews/company reflective practice supporting order to triangulate on a conclusion, which many of my own observations, and archival study of may be said to be strengthened by the literature and industry documentation, such as the multiple ways in which it was reached Small size papers, providing further context.

A long-term commitment (conducted by Nursery was scheduled on three occasions and researchers who intend to interact with the Seashore in nine weekly Labs and seven formal people they are studying for an extended performances. A total of 20 families took part across period of time – although the exact period both projects, with eight taking part in both. may vary anywhere from several weeks to a year or more

Inductive (conducted in such a way as to use The works were the sources of questions/sub- an accumulation of descriptive detail to build questions and the primary instruments for gathering towards general patterns or explanatory data in order to answer the questions. New languages theories rather than structured to test of practice could only be put to the test in the presence hypotheses derived from existing theories or of a live audience. models)

Dialogic (conducted by researchers whose Each run of Nursery was followed up with a Planned conclusions and interpretations can be Discussion Group (PDG) facilitating dialogue. Each commented upon by those under study even Seashore Lab finished with an invitation to respond to as they are being formed) an “on your way out question”. A special run of the completed work was followed by a PDG for families.

Holistic (conducted so as to yield the fullest The context of the study invited the fullest possible possible portrait of the group under study) picture of the families’ responses to TEY.

Table 4.1: Ethnographic Methods

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4.7.1 Observation

Notwithstanding Angrosino’s note of methodological caution that “participant observation is not itself a data collection technique, but rather the role adopted by an ethnographer to facilitate … her collection of data” (2007, p.35), presentations of Nursery and the Seashore

Family Lab and performances involved everyone taking part in rich practices of observation:

1. My observations of the children’s experiences of the show, of the parents/carers in

their roles as observers and of the performers (within the live performances, but

more usefully using multiple viewings of video footage).

2. The observations of the parents/carers of their own child’s experience of the show.

3. The performers’ observations, recorded in a reflective process after each event.

Extending Schön’s influential concept of “reflection in and on action,” Boud’s three occasions of reflection – in anticipation of events, in the midst of action and after events (2001, pp.12-14)

– allowed me to invite all three types of reflection.

Parents/Carers

For the parents/carers involved in AC1 this played out as follows:

In anticipation of events I introduced the session by inviting parents/carers to take part in a short reflection, using quick ‘post it’ jottings, asking: ‘How do you think your child might respond to today’s show/Lab?’. Responses to this question provided a pre-show, qualitative prediction. From an ethical perspective they also confirmed parents/carers’ consent for their child to take part in the session and their child’s assent to do so. Each introduction reassured parents/carers that if their child would prefer not to take part in the session the family was

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welcome to leave the space temporarily, returning later, or to abandon the session completely if needed. Later sessions asked the cohort to note images or resonances from their previous experience of the show/Lab.

In the midst of action (project one) I invited the parents/carers to engage in a process of observation of their baby. On the basis that electronic devices or paper and pens were troublesome to manage with a child, each parent/carer was offered a large-scale post it, stuck to the floor behind the soft mat on which they were invited to sit with their baby. They were briefed beforehand and invited to jot words and images in response to specific observational tasks as they observed their child’s responses. For project two, I refined my use of the large- scale post its, inviting responses under specific headings linked to the framework, “who reacts when, how and upon what” (Zagorski cited in Sauter, 2002, p.116). The presence of highly mobile children in project two made it necessary for parents/carers to jot their observations on any available post it from several stuck high on the walls, however in practice this was advantageous because it allowed me to flag the exact nature of the observational task in columns on the page. The visual representation below of the observation notes shows how this functioned.

Today at Seashore

Name [you/your child] Responded to… By [action] [performer? sound? image?]

Child Steve and Felecia’s dance – rolling Saying: ‘rolling’ and then waves copying the rolling action on the floor

Figure 4.3: Parent/carer ‘post it’ observation notes, 28 May 2019

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After events I held Planned Discussion Groups (PDGs) lasting 45-60 minutes. These took place immediately after each of the three runs of Nursery (8/9/18, 6/10/18 and 1/12/18) and after a mid-season studio run of Seashore (28/5/19). As O’Reilly identifies, a PDG is usually conducted in the field [the rehearsal/performance venue] and can involve any number of people in “a naturally occurring group [parents/carers of babies and young children], who have a relation to the topic [a willingness to attend Nursery/be involved in Seashore] because they are already part of the context of [the] ethnographic research” (2005, p.135). Participants considered their ‘post it’ notes from ‘in the midst of action’ as a basis for an inductive discussion about the nature of their child’s participation in the event (show/Lab).

I was interested in the broad range of parent/carer observations and so I was not concerned about reaching a consensus with them on the quality of the TEY, but rather about gathering their interpretations of their own child’s responses. A basic goal of project one was to identify whether the interpretations of parents/carers of their children’s responses to Nursery provided useful observational data. I found that fundamentally they did, because each baby had one observer, leading quickly to a quantity of detailed codifiable data, which I could triangulate with my observations and those of the company members, and my archival study of literature and industry documentation. However, the Nursery cohort found it hard to go beyond the exercise of nominating their child’s responses, for example my invitation to parents/carers to try to link a response to the specific performance moment that might have caused the response proved much more challenging.

Furthermore, as the research progressed into project two I became aware that the results of my apparently simple request of parents/carers to make observations about their child, had the potential to be loaded with the layers of the parents’ expectations of their children and of the activity itself. I had already had some experience of this from the Festival 2018 season of

Nursery, during which I noted a conversation with a parent who had attended the show for a

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second time with her two children, saying that she hoped her youngest child would ‘get more out of it’ and ‘be more engaged’ [reflective practice journal, 11/4/18]. This suggested a level of disappointment in her child’s initial responses, prompting me to wonder what engagement would look like for this parent.

Initially I perceived the parent/carer observational tasks as ‘neutral’ – asking them simply to tell me what their child was doing in response to the shows, whereas Mares et al. refer to a

“psychodynamic understanding” of parent-child interactions where “the infant carries a number of meanings in the mind of the parent” (2011, p.310). This was reflected in another example from the third Nursery PDG, when a parent asked me to rate how her son had responded during the show, prompting my realisation that she had considered the performance an educational or socialising experience for her child [reflective practice journal, 1/12/18]. For this parent the show made meaning for her child in relation to the kinds of instrumental uses of theatre noted by Reason in his “overlapping frames of reference” evoking “discourses of education as much as aesthetics” (2010, p.3). As Bolton says after noting the distinction between life stories and life histories, in which the latter is the former “plus appropriate and challenging data from a wide range of sources” (2018, p.15, Bolton’s emphasis), “the enmeshment of culture and environment is total: no one is objective” (ibid).

Company Members

The company members were involved in their own detailed observational work and reflective practice, using Boud’s three occasions of reflection. For project one, each show was preceded one afternoon beforehand by a four-hour rehearsal, in which we trialled new material in response to observational data generated in the previous session. Given that our primary question was about the relationship between the material and its effectiveness as a participatory invitation or otherwise, we relied on the actual presence of audiences the following day as the

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only way of testing our ideas in the midst of action. The performers made note collectively of their observations using the prompts ‘I noticed’ and ‘I wondered’, “adopted as a way to facilitate reflection” (Finlay, 2008, p.8) and to make explicit our tacit language of practice.

During project two, the company adopted Ghaye’s four questions “for appreciative reflection and appreciative action” (2010, pp.4-5), asking:

What’s successful right now? (Appreciate)

What do we need to change? (Imagine)

How do we do this? (Design)

Who takes action and with what consequences? (Act)

We applied this schema to the first four stages of Bolton’s five stages of reflective/reflexive writing (2018, pp.159-170):

1. Six Minutes’ Writing designed to help the performers to develop their own

discipline of writing, whilst remaining open to the notion that something may

surface within the six minutes that “demands to be written” (Bolton, 2018, p.161).

2. The Incident/Narrative or Story designed to “let your writing hand do the thinking”

(Bolton, 2018, p.162).

3. Read and respond, at every opportunity, asking ‘why’.

4. Share pertinent reflections.

The calls to action at the heart of Ghaye’s framework supported the company’s commitment to both reflection and practice. The artists’ observations and reflections are quoted throughout chapter five which discusses the creative works driving the research.

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My Own Observations

My own observations took place in the midst of action, and after events using videography, which afforded me the opportunity to write up the detail of the live events using multiple viewings. My observational texts aimed to be “thick descriptions” (Angrosino, 2007, p.16, citing Geertz [1973]), presenting “details, context, emotions, and the nuances of social relationships in order to evoke the ‘feeling’ of a scene and not just its surface attributes” (ibid).

Video footage allowed me to make observations in considerably more detail than was possible in the live setting. In the midst of action I noted the events and feeling tone (Stern, 1998, p.13) of each live encounter and held them vividly in my memory as a context for my work with the video material, however I was frequently struck by how the footage revealed the nuance and complexity of the transactions.

The acquisition of useful footage was in itself a complex exercise, ideally requiring at least a two-camera set-up, with one static camera viewing the entire performance space and the second hand-held by an operator capable not only of handling the technical requirements of the equipment but also of understanding the rationale for the exercise of capturing the intra- activity in the performance space. A third camera would have been ideal as a means of recording the audience zone, the responses of audience members – child and adult – whilst in this zone and the movement of children between the performance space and the audience zone.

I did not consider the efficacy of three cameras in time to make use of this extra perspective, however my resources allowed me to buy in the required expertise for two cameras to capture two shows in the Adelaide series of Nursery and a mid-season run of Seashore in our Lab venue. The videographer made a valiant effort within limited time to understand my need to witness the relationship between the work of the performers and the responses of the children.

He also facilitated the trial of a potentially useful methodological approach in which I invited the dancers, Stephen and Felecia, to commentate aloud on their thought processes “in the midst

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of action” (Boud, 2001, pp.12-14) as they performed the ‘thongs’ section from Seashore in the

Lab run of the show (28/5/19) with the performing families. Stephen and Felecia wore head set microphones, allowing the footage to capture their voices.

The exercise of transcribing each commentary while viewing the footage provided an interesting insight into Stephen and Felecia’s experience of being in the show and a window into their decision-making processes, revealing in particular how the child-centred nature of their choices served to “privilege the interaction of resources and observe the emerging performance” (Knapton, 2008, p.5) in the interests of achieving artistic encounter. We only had one opportunity to try this process, and so we did not take it further as a research tool, however with access to the appropriate technical equipment, this could become a future approach to training for TEY practitioners, making visible the interplay between their set material and the participation of children.

On all other occasions I used one static camera. Access to footage, even of varying quality, and even when it lacked the heightened intensity of an actual performance, allowed “the accumulated data [to be] reviewed repeatedly [by me] so that the themes and issues began to emerge from a process of cross-comparison and reflective analysis” (Young, 2004, p.16).

The footage provided visual material that was critical to the progress of my observational practice. In the act of hand writing detailed texts describing the footage, I derived nuanced vicarious sensations, for example when writing up the ‘thongs’ section of Seashore I felt as I wrote “a build of speed and excitement as the children became emboldened to enter the performance space” [observational text, 11/10/19].

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Insight Slowing Down to See (Reflective Practice Journal, November 2019)

I come to realise that writing up observational texts using video footage is a

lengthy exercise. I describe a seven-minute section of Seashore, double-check the

text while watching the footage again, then cross check the new text with footage

from both cameras. Camera B reveals a parallel universe, with new details made

visible, challenged or verified from the other side of the space.

I begin to feel that the time it takes to do the initial writing, focusing on one

section, moment by moment, allows the felt experience of the children to arise in my

own perception, because the detail of the “temporal contour” (Stern, 2010, p.4) for

each child’s experience seems to emerge in my awareness through the slow act of

hand writing.

Sometimes I’m concerned for the efficacy of these observations in their

application to the ‘real world’ of TEY because the speed with which each moment

passes in real time means that the company has to make lightning-fast decisions. I

wonder how we can put my findings to practical use. Then I remember that Daniel

N. Stern was among the first to film and codify quotidian mother-infant interactions.

His observations revealed not only that babies have the capacity for dialogue, but

also the importance of these exchanges in terms of the “affect attunement” (2010,

p.41) required for healthy relationship. Stern generated groundbreaking theories

about the implications of his observations for human development because he

slowed down to see.

***

The use of footage also allowed me to enter the sensory multi-modality of a single baby’s perspective and track this child’s journey through the show by writing a detailed description of their experience, as I perceived it. This allowed my own awareness to shift profoundly from

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the visual parameter of the footage to a deeper sense of the baby’s body “as a source of knowledge and subsequently of agency” (Pink, 2015, p.26). For example, by closely observing footage of Kit, aged 13 months, attending Nursery on 8 September 2018, I noticed tiny details such as the differing sonic qualities of the performers’ out-breath, the proximity, ebb and flow of other children and Kit’s own kinetic experiences, such as how his weight fell and how and when he felt motivated to move towards and away from the action. (See section 5.4.1 for this description and footage).

A further example of how I gained a “sense of intermingled movement and sensory overlapping that characterises infant experiences” (Dissanayake, 2000, p.6) came about when I noticed how initiatives (see chapter five) were crafted to devise for the child “the patterned course of an experience” (ibid). For example, when observing the trajectory of an initiative of

Ramona, aged 15 months, I gained a vicarious sense, through her breath and gaze, of her feeling of having completed her initiative before returning, satisfied, to her mother. (See section 5.7.2 for a detailed analysis of children’s initiatives and a description of this performative moment).

I transcribed several hand-written ethnographic texts and coded them in various ways. One approach used the colours shown in table 4.2 (overleaf). The colours helped me to disentangle multiple elements involved simultaneously in each performative exchange and provided visual maps of clusters of factors involved moment by moment in the presentation of a live show.

This became a helpful way to observe “who reacts when, how and upon what” (Sauter, 2002, p.116, citing Zagorski). Appendix B.1 provides an example of a section of colour-coded text.

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Code Names Code Descriptions

Circle » or Circle « Refers to normative child actions on the Circle of Security©. Children move away from the secure base of their primary carer to investigate an element of the show. They then move back again for endorsement/comfort. Often they want to share the fruits of their investigation.

Performer Choices Describes the decisions made by the performers in the midst of their prepared material. This includes categories from the framework of responsivity (frame, balance, track, contrast).

Set Material Describes the actions performed by the company as part of the prepared material of the show.

Initiative Describes the choices children make in a co-creative relationship with the performers and the show, contributing performatively to the show.

Gaze Describes a child’s capacity to view performance as an interested observer and to children’s close examination of a performer, object or situation

Parent Choice Parent choices of action for and with their child, before, during, because of and after the show.

Table 4.2: Observational texts – colour codes

Throughout the research, each encounter led to new knowledge revealed because of and by means of the practice, shedding light on propositions from inside the creative process (Barrett,

2009; Nagel and Hovik, 2016). Hamilton et al. state, “creative production may generate the question, be instrumental in the response to the question, or form an integral part of the communication of the outcome” (2014, p.27). The next chapter describes how the two creative works at the heart of the projects functioned in all three of these ways.

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Chapter Five: Creative Works

5.1 Introduction

The performance works leading the research were Nursery (project one, 2018) and Seashore

(project two, 2019).

Project one took a practice-led approach to investigate, analyse and articulate how audiences of babies participated in Nursery, a live, professionally presented TEY performance for audiences aged 4 – 18 months, in the company of their parents/carers. Nursery was originally commissioned by the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s 2014 Out of the Box Festival with funding from Arts South Australia and the Australia Council for the Arts. A professional season as part of Festival 2018 in Queensland launched the process for my use of this work as a research instrument and artistic artefact, developed through this season and, later in the year, through three independent presentations I describe as the Adelaide series.

Project two was also practice-led, using Seashore, a performance project which invited children aged three years and younger, and their parents/carers, to co-create and perform a new work, in collaboration with my company. Seashore was funded by Arts South Australia and

South Australia’s biennial children’s cultural festival, DreamBIG, during which it premiered.

This chapter charts both projects, describing how they unfolded successively and iteratively.

Sections 5.2 to 5.5 describe project one, Nursery, in the light of observational data supplied by adult cohort 2 (parents/carers), my own observational data and the reflections of the performers about the nature of the babies’ responses to the show. An emergent taxonomy of child participation provides an analysis and output of project one, and is the entry point for project

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two, Seashore. Seashore is described in sections 5.7 to 5.10. I discuss how this project brought my company members and me closer to our goal of maximising our work as a performative encounter, underpinned by the primary output of project two – a framework of performer responses to the children’s participation. In this context, I analyse the work of the show, the work of the performers and the work of parents/carers.

5.2 Project One – Nursery

Project one took a practice-led approach to investigate, analyse and articulate how audiences of babies participated in Nursery, a live, professionally-presented TEY performance, developed by my company for audiences aged 4 – 18 months, in the company of their adults. A professional season as part of Festival 2018, the cultural program associated with the Gold

Coast Commonwealth Games, launched the process for my use of this work as a research instrument, developing later in the year through three iterative presentations I describe as the

Adelaide series.

Each presentation in the series involved the performers in reflective practice and observation and was followed by a Planned Discussion Group (PDG) for parents/carers. This allowed

Nursery to be the primary instrument for gathering observational data as well as project one’s artistic artefact, having developed through, and as an output of, the research process. The goal was to consider how the dramaturgy of the work flows from the nature of its engagement with its audience (Young, 2004; Radvan, 2012; Fletcher-Watson, 2016a).

Each iteration of Nursery modified elements of the structure and dramaturgy of the work to create a meeting point between performers and very young audience members, facilitating – or otherwise – the babies’ participation. This was on the basis that my definition of participation represents a broad spectrum of behaviours of involvement, from ‘viewing’ to ‘doing’, hence

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the question underpinning the process:

What are the structural, spatial and relational factors in Nursery that invite the

babies’ participation?

Nursery is a 35-40 minute dance theatre work, accommodating up to twenty children aged 4 –

18 months. Each child attends with at least one parent/carer. Nursery was a commission of the

Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s Out of the Box Festival, and was originally collaboratively devised by dancers Stephen Noonan and Ade Suharto, and musician/composer

Heather Frahn. The work premiered at the June 2014 Out of the Box Festival.

Video Clip 1

Archival footage of the original full length work is available at www.insitearts.com.au/projects/nursery

Video descriptor: the footage provides the complete work, presented in September 2014, at the City of Melbourne’s children’s cultural venue, ArtPlay.

5.2.2 The Company

For the majority of its touring life, Nursery’s performers have been my long term company members, dancers Stephen and Felecia, and musician/composer, Heather. The sonic environment, composed and performed by Heather, involves live and pre-recorded elements.

The pre-recorded sections of music support the live score, which uses Heather’s vocals, a set of high pitched chime bars, two percussive finger bells, a xylophone akin in sound to a gamelan, a shaker made of seed pods, used percussively and as an image of watering, and an udu drum.

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Heather’s vocal work is critical to the communicative power of Nursery. She sings compositions using short texts by South Australian author and poet, Janeen Brian. In this context, Stern’s concept of “feeling tone” (1998, p.13) is relevant, because the babies understand Janeen’s words in a feeling rather than in a literal way. The words, heightened further through the medium of song, work towards what Fletcher-Watson describes as “the possibility of meaning” (2016a, p, 177). There is a strong belief within the company that

“Heather’s voice grounds the show” [company reflection after events, 8/9/18] and is “the backbone of the work” [Hick, AC 1A, 10/10/18].

Having co-devised and directed the work I was also involved in its presentation. This role is described within the company as the ‘4th performer’, who has the role of creating “the environmental function … [of] … holding” (Winnicott, 1971, p.150) everyone present – babies, parents/carers and performers. Winnicottian ‘holding’ means to create a mutual sense of security. The holding role pays attention to the need to support parents/carers in order to position them effectively to support their babies. The creation of a shared sense of security is the 4th performer’s most important function, so that the work can fulfil its aim of being an encounter between audience and performers. The role involves two types of task:

1. Logistical tasks – greeting and seating the audience, supporting and reassuring

parents/carers with practical information (such as pram parking) and managing the

post-show window.

2. Artistic tasks – being involved in some performative aspects of the work, setting

the “feeling tone” (Stern, 1998, p.13) of the experience, and being a bridge between

audience and performers/performance within the aesthetic parameters of the show

(as opposed to the practical work of front of house staff or ushers).

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5.2.3 Content

The work is set in a garden, taking the twin meanings of the word ‘nursery’ as a place for the care of plants and as a special room for the care of babies, to create images of nurture and play.

The watering of plants in the nursery/garden links to the work’s conceptual aim of being “a kind of secular baptism in which the message welcome to the world is expressed musically, kinetically and through spare, poetic text” (McLean and Chance, 2019, p.303).

5.2.4 Target Age Range

The target age range intentionally encompasses two distinct developmental stages identified by

Clarke and Dawson (1998, pp.221–223), stage one described as the ‘being’ stage from birth to six months of age and stage two, described as the ‘doing’ stage from 6 to 18 months. The first stage underpins all subsequent development and is about being supported simply and joyfully to ‘be’, hence the welcome to the world message underpinning every image in the work.

In describing how the individual must reach being before doing Winnicott states, “‘I am’ must precede ‘I do’, otherwise ‘I do’ has no meaning for the individual” (1971, p.176). The baby’s developmental task is to go forwards into life by accepting touch and creating emotional bonds through reliably responsive adult attention, primarily through the face, in particular “long eye to eye contact” (Stern, 1998, p.47). Stern also describes such eye contact as “mutual gaze”

(1998, p.49). While it would not be appropriate for the performers to gaze at length at their very young audience members, this concept underpins our ethos of ‘I see you seeing me’ within theatrical encounter. Stephen describes this further: “I see the child look with intent and curiosity upon my dance and the child sees me looking back at them in a way that they are being acknowledged and experienced in that moment in time by me and the dance” [AC 1A, reflection by e-mail, 7/11/19].

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Stern identifies the second half of the birth – 6-month window as the baby’s “immediate social world” (1998, p.45). Clarke and Dawson’s second stage is about babies being supported to trust the world as a place of safety and wonder as their exploration becomes more active.

Curiosity and nascent independence are a feature of this stage, hence the inclusion in Nursery of a vocalised refrain you curious and the theatricalised use of the game peek-a-boo, lending rhythm and a thrilling element of surprise to the game of mutual gaze. Young and Powers give interesting weight to games such as peek-a-boo describing them as “dramatic narratives” to show that “emotional expression in babies is neither chaotic nor simply a reflex response, but is anticipated” (2008, p.13).

Stern suggests that at around twelve months the baby enters the “world of mindscapes” (1998, p.83), discovering the power of the state of intersubjectivity, in which two people make mutually known the complex, interior worlds of their intentions, desires, feelings, attention, thoughts and memories (ibid). A pre-requisite for the baby’s acquisition of this skill is “the parents’ capacity to ‘mentalise’ their inner world and the inner world of their infant” (Mares et al., 2011 p.31), highlighting again the contingent communicative nature of a baby’s world. At around the end of their first year “the infant comes to distinguish himself from others and begins to develop an idea of ‘me’ and ‘you’” (Mares et al., 2011, p.14), hence the inclusion in

Nursery of the song ‘You and Me’ with words by Janeen Brian and composition by Heather

Frahn. The interdependence and emotional implications of the two concepts ‘you’ and ‘me’, developed through attachment, the “enduring affective relationship with a particular preferred individual … from whom the infant seeks security and comfort” (Mares et al., 2011, p.15), are highlighted by the words of the song, which continue: Shadow’s gone, here we are.

5.2.5 Design

The design, by Wendy Todd, consists of a circular floor mat, with external and internal circles.

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These gently delineate audience and performance zones, though this boundary is deliberately permeable. Parents/carers sit in a consistent place in the audience circle, providing a “secure base” (Cooper et al., 2019) from which their children can explore the show and to which they can securely return. The design includes three asymmetrical mounds and represents a garden, where “things are growing and the adults present are both nurturing and playful” (McLean and

Chance, 2019, p.303).

Image courtesy of ArtPlay, Melbourne

“Birth and growth are represented by art works described by their creator, visual artist Hiromi

Tango, as chromosomes, [some] stitched into the floor mat and [others] danced with by the performers” (McLean and Chance, 2019, p.303).

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Image Mick Richards, courtesy of Awesome Festival, Perth

Other designed objects include a child-height garden armature, an unevenly shaped ball and

‘seeds’ dispersed from inside the large ball by the action of rolling it along the floor.

Babies and seeds – Image courtesy of ArtPlay, Melbourne

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5.2.6 Structure

The original work was structured in six sections:

1. The Nursery – A dance of welcome (music played live using xylophone, chimes,

seed pods and vocals):

Vocal welcome (song): you are here in our circle, you are here

Pre-show verbal information for parents/carers

Introductory sensory invitations “tune up” the audience: Can you hear the birds in our garden? [Audience pays attention to recorded soundscape of birds singing] Can you see the people in our garden? [Audience pays attention to the performers and each other] Can you hear music? [Live music begins]

The people in the garden – two custodians of the Nursery – dancers Stephen and Felecia start to travel. Heather, a musician/singer plays music. The xylophone and the seed pods are introduced as a live sonic component of the work and as an image of watering a particularly special plant/creature, initially held like a baby in the arms of Stephen and Felecia. This object was made by Hiromi Tango and consists of her chromosomes, stitched together to represent a living being

This being, known as the ‘humanoid’ by the company, is watered and starts to grow several times, each time releasing back to floor level with an audible out breath, before emerging completely, suggestive of being born. The song swells into its full text: You are here in our circle. Hands to hold you. Sun to warm you. Moon to guide you. Wind to bring you stars. The creature flexes and breathes, before being adored, played with, washed and cared for.

2. Round and round the garden – A dance of play (music played live using

percussive finger bells):

Heather sings a de-constructed version of the rhyme: round and round the garden,

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one step, two steps

The dancers explore the perimeters of the spaces, taking one step, two steps on to small mounds incorporated into the floor mat

A refrain builds from tickle, to tickle you, to tickle you under there, inviting families to have a shared moment of playful action. The rhyme is likely to be familiar to babies growing up with the canon of Western Nursery rhymes. For families unfamiliar with the rhyme the words and others’ participation may function as an invitation.

3. You curious – Meeting through matching (pre-recorded music supports vocal

improvisation using the words: you curious):

The dancers create a framework for matching (see chapter 3) within a ‘menu’ of actions (brisk forwards crawl, sit with a sudden quality and a floor level whole- body swing backwards and forwards)

The matching invitation is also extended via frames made by the body for peeking through, for example looking at a baby under one arm.

4. You and Me – A dance of intersubjectivity (the seed pods are played live,

accompanying a song):

Travelling pathways move forwards and backwards from the centre point of the circle inviting a game

The pathways become interspersed with images of peek-a-boo, accompanied by a sung text: You and me, I see you, you see me, shadow’s gone, here we are.

5. Watering and Growing – Creating play out of the work of the garden (pre-

recorded music supports live music played using seed pods and udu drum, with the

addition of the children’s shakers):

The custodians playfully create images of watering and growing using the rise and

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fall of their own bodies

The play culminates in the arrival of a red ball, which disperses new seeds for the garden

These drop, scatter and shake

When the children investigate them, some of them make sounds

The music calms for the serious business of the garden – a new humanoid is about to be born.

6. The Ending – The mission of the garden is calmly accomplished (music played

live bookends the soundscape using xylophone, chimes, seed pods and vocals):

The ball becomes a cradle, rocked and held

Everyone gathers for the arrival of a new baby humanoid, which is born, grows, flexes and breathes, bookending the show.

5.3 Investigate

In relation to my research, Nursery’s initial iteration was prepared for a professional season at

Festival 2018, the cultural program associated with the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

This was followed by the Adelaide series, presented on 8 September, 6 October and 1

December 2019 for an invited group of families with children aged 4 – 18 months.

5.3.1 Festival 2018

A six-show season of Nursery was presented as part of Festival 2018 and began my practice of generating observational data, recording baby and parent/carer responses and generating questions in a reflective practice journal. This exercise created the foundations for working

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reflectively later in the study during the Adelaide series beginning in September 2018.

5.3.2 The Adelaide Series

The Festival 2018 iteration of Nursery was presented to the research group of Adelaide-based families on 8 September 2018 and was immediately followed by a PDG inviting their observations of their child’s trajectory of engagement or disengagement through the show.

Subsequent iterations of Nursery, on 6 October and 1 December 2018, responded to the observational work of the previous presentation. They were also followed by PDGs.

The cohort involved a total of eleven parents/carers (ten mothers and one father), twelve babies and two older pre-school-aged siblings. The babies covered the target age range of 4 months to

18 months. Various professions – early years educators, dance/music artists, a social worker/counsellor, business administrators/managers and an engineering academic – were represented among the adults. The numbers attending were smaller than the work is able to accommodate, which was initially a concern, however the facilitation of the PDGs was made smoother as a result, given factors such as the size of the meeting room and the number of supporters required to care for the babies while their parents/carers were involved with the qualitative discussion of the group. The numbers attending also helped the organisation of logistics such as morning tea, provision of toys and managing the performance in a venue

(Restless Dance Studio, Adelaide) without the benefit of services, such as front of house, which would be provided within a formal season.

5.4 Analyse

Audience research from reception studies in the broader field of TYA offers a number of approaches to considering child audience responses, from how young audiences respond to

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theatrical illusion (Reason, 2008), to investigations of children’s aesthetic values (Klein and

Schonmann, 2009) and ways in which children construct meaning for themselves from the various technical and performative factors involved in live performance (Weddell, 2003).

Weddell’s typology of child-audience members – technicians, narrators, dramatists, mystics and spectators (2003, pp.135-166) – defines a set of behavioural responses to live TYA emanating from children’s responses to the environment of the theatre and the content of the work. The categories identified by Weddell, through detailed observation of primary school- aged children, may still be applicable to pre-verbal children; however, they are arguably predicated upon theatre structures termed closed dramatic or narrative form (Nagel and Hovik,

2016, p.159). Though reliant on performers’ skilled ability to establish and maintain full artistic control of the work through listening to and being aware of the young audience (ibid) such works do not prioritise responsive encounter.

In contrast, TEY research has focused on broader categories of young children’s immediate and embodied responses. Examples of this work include Young and Powers’ engagement types – absorbed and interactive (Starcatchers See Theatre, Play Theatre research report, 2008, p.24) and Dunlop et al’s Engagement Signals (Starcatchers Live Arts/Arts Alive research report, 2011, p.15), which describe a spectrum of responses from attuned and absorbed through mirroring and responsive to interactive, instigative and experimental.

My project one research had the goal of working towards identifying response categories that would underpin and rationalise the iterative process of Nursery. My analysis of the live shows and footage of Nursery resulted in my own taxonomy of participation, drawn from a thematic analysis of babies’ observed responses to the shows.

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5.4.1 Taxonomy of Participation

I gathered response/action sub-themes observed by me, Nursery’s performers and the parents/carers in AC 2, whose words appear in table 5.1 below as sub-themes, from which I drew out themes, which led to four over-arching categories of babies’ actions.

Category Theme Sub-Themes

Gaze Watching Tracking, observing, analysing, attentive, watched dancers, music got attention, stood with singer and watched, watching intently, gazing and staring at performers, pointing, following movements with her gaze

Initiative Child-led offers Copied dancers, interacted with performers, joining in an image, close observation led to joining in an action [growing with the rain], attending to sounds, “I want a go”, swayed, responding to images/sounds

Sharing Sharing the show Joint exploration (with other babies) of an object, very interested in other children’s activities, looked at other children

Circle The Circle of Security© Moving towards the action, then looking back to secure (CoS) adult base; emotional journey from unsure to relaxed and connected; walked around space and through space; crawled towards; crawled out, looked back; moved in and out, checking back (circle in action); looking back at me; stay in safe space, then broke out of safe space; cry out to mum.

Table 5.1: Taxonomy of participation

The Characteristics of Each Category

Gaze

Intense gazing seems to characterise the TEY audience. Reason’s neologism “audiencing”

(2012, p.172) describes the pleasure (and permission) for audiences of watching, gazing, witnessing and staring. The choice of where to place their gaze is one of the earliest a baby can make. The baby has total control over this choice and so gazing is the baby’s first experience

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of agency. All of the artists in adult cohort 1 referred in some way to the power of the baby’s gaze, noting the seriousness of their attention, that they are ready to receive, are captivated and take everything in [Giles, 20/11/18; Frahn, 5/10/18; Jost, 20/11/18; Hick, 10/10/18].

Parents/carers’ nominated the words “focused, fascinated, intrigued, immersed, awe” [AC 2,

PDG 8/9/18] to describe their children’s gaze responses.

Video Clip 2

View footage of children using gaze to participate in Nursery by clicking or pasting the link into your web browser: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9rBx3_VoDlM&feature=youtu.be

Video descriptor: the video highlights the gaze responses of three children aged 15 months (standing close to the performative action), 12 months (kneeling within the performance space) and 17 months (gazing from the security of the audience circle).

Initiative

Babies’ responses linked to the category initiative moved along the basic viewing-doing spectrum described in section 1.5 towards ‘active contribution’, revealing the complexity of their participation through three layers of initiative:

1. The most overt aspect of the category came about through the company’s practice

of matching. Matching is a discrete section of Nursery involving the performers in

meeting the babies by joining in with their movement and sounds in a baby-led

dialogue. Matching created a shared locus of attention around the baby/babies

being matched and therefore was witnessed by most if not all audience members.

A parent noted, “what the babies see gives them permission to do” [AC 2, PDG

8/9/18]. On behalf of her baby, this parent proposed the train of thought that

matching adds to the invitational and relational quality of the work, as follows:

“Someone is interacting with me therefore I can interact with other people” [ibid].

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2. The second layer of the category was observable as babies’ impulses to make overt

invitations to the adult performers, by trying out or joining in with their movement.

This kind of initiative can be subtle, or small-scale, perhaps playing out one to one.

Video Clip 3

View Kit participating in Nursery with his initiatives by clicking or pasting the link into your web browser: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VrrxX-J9vQQ&feature=youtu.be

Video descriptor: Kit (13 months) is the baby in the bottom left of the screen, sitting initially with his mother. The following ethnographic text [observation notes, 17/10/18, from the 8 September show] describes Kit’s experience. His initiatives, observable as his impulse to communicate with and join in with Stephen, are in italics.

‘Kit is watching Stephen play the watering and growing game. He wants to be involved and feels his body weight move him away from his mother and forwards towards the action.

‘He lands on his hands just as Stephen does the same. Kit’s balance restored, he lifts his head towards the sound. He points to the pods and with his voice invites Stephen to notice that he’s noticed the pods. Stephen takes up the invitation and moves in front of Kit, crouching down to play the game. Kit’s hand and gaze track the rise of the pods and the rise of Stephen’s body. Kit’s gesture is sudden. Stephen’s is smooth. Both suspend at the top of their shapes and release together, Kit half way, Stephen all the way, with his audible out-breath. Kit checks in with his mother, crawls forwards a little, looks at another baby, balances on all fours and re-positions himself in front of his mother, looking at Stephen.

‘Stephen comes back, which Kit notices and seems prepared for. Kit looks at the pods, Stephen looks at Kit. They both look at the pods, in an “I see what you see” moment. Kit lifts his chin as Stephen moves back into his crouch in a moment of synchronicity. Kit points, still looking at the pods, Stephen smiles.’

3. The third observable layer of initiative revealed the babies’ capacity for original

input into the performative material.

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Video Clip 4

View Harper determining Nursery’s ending by clicking or pasting the link into your web browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRLK9sNknH8&feature=youtu.be

Video descriptor: the video shows how Harper (15 months) assembles two elements of the show (a prop/object – hand held seed, and a sonic element – the audible out-breath sound) and an original action (lifting and lowering her seed in tandem with her breath) to determine an order of events leading to the end of the show. Further “thick description” (Angrosino, 2007, p.177, citing Geertz, [1973]) below [observation notes, 5/10/18, from the 8 September show] details the ways in which Harper makes choices to which the performers respond. Her choices extend the final image by some moments and determine the precise way in which the show ended on that occasion:

‘Harper moves slowly towards the final tableau with the ‘baby’ chromosomes. She stands right in front of the ball and watches Stephen reaching in. She looks up at the watering seed pods, looks at Stephen, up at the “baby” then down at the ball. She executes some small steps.

‘She lifts the seed and breathes in. We all join in as she lowers it, breathing out. In silence she lifts her seed again and lowers it as we breathe. And again she initiates the lifting of her seed, dropping her arm suddenly. Then she shakes it fairly hard. We delight. I give Stephen a seed because Harper is looking at him. He offers her back her initiative, lifting the seed and breathing in. She joins in. She shakes it and turns away back towards her mother.’

Sharing

The babies were clearly interested in each other and in each other’s navigation of the show.

This type of action has the potential to offer the performers the possibility of generating a baby-led image, or to be a challenge, because of its tendency to create a competing image or even to tip the babies into disengagement as the act of sharing becomes troublesome.

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Video Clip 5

View Harriet and Kit sharing an element of Nursery by clicking or pasting the link into your web browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfuQHIOvzbQ&feature=youtu.be

Video descriptor: Harriet (17 months) and Kit (13 months) are investigating one of the mounds (left of screen). Both are interested in one of the chromosomes stitched into the floor mat. Their attention also shifts constantly from the sonic environment of the show to each other and back to the show. A short negotiation threatens to compete with the performative material, however both children refer to their mothers for help, which resolves the situation. Harriet returns to her mother, which allows Kit to move closer to the dancers.

The relational ebb and flow of the Circle of Security© [CoS] (Cooper et al., 2019) was observable throughout the shows in the form of the babies moving away from their parent/carer to explore an aspect of the show and then ‘checking back’ with their primary carer either with their gaze, or by returning to them. Figure 5.1 (overleaf) provides a visual representation of

Kit’s ‘check-back’ moments on the Circle of Security© within a hand written description of his journey through a section of Nursery, shown with the letters CoS and red arrows in the left hand margin. The gradual decrease in the frequency of the arrows makes visible how Kit’s trust journey plays out from his initial apprehension to his increased confidence, according to the five point scale of TEY engagement identified by Dunlop et al. (2011, p.15).

A fifth category of response to Nursery indicated disengagement. Disengagement manifested as retreat – looking or moving away temporarily from the performative action, as distraction – engaging with other babies in a way that was removed from the world of the show (as opposed to the category ‘sharing’) and as rupture – discomfort and distress (fussing or crying.) The latter arose primarily from factors within the baby, usually unpleasant physiological sensations, such as teething, tired-ness or hunger. The factors within the work that led to disengagement were the observational focus for parents/carers of the second show on 6 October 2018.

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Figure 5.1: Observation notes, 8 September 2018

The final iteration on 1 December 2018 invited parents/carers to nominate moments in the show observable as a meeting point between the work and/or the performers and the children.

I move now towards describing how the babies’ participation in Nursery, as interpreted by their parents/carers, my responses to their interpretations and my own observations of the babies’ responses, contributed to successive iterations of the work.

5.4.2 The Iterative Process of Developing Nursery

Each show, reflection after events (performers) and PDG (parents/carers) generated observations and questions. The following section describes how observations/questions and responses functioned in a dialogue. Table 5.2 transcribes the observations of the first performance in the Adelaide series, showing how I categorised this observational data and fed it directly into rehearsal for the next show as an artistic, relational or dramaturgical response.

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Observation Response

The parent/carer role

Some parents/carers had (un-asked) questions Devise an “initiation” (Dewey, 1934, p.41) by during the show: “Is it OK to enter the mat? How creating an enrolling area/process separate to much would this interrupt the performers? How do I the performance space for the clearer provision navigate the fact that my baby needs me?” of information for parents/carers

All wanted more parent involvement, for example Devise explicit invitations for parent/carer being brought in closer at the end of the show participation

The arc of the show

The PDG discussed the nature of the ending from Maintain a conclusive sense of ending, however the perspective of the babies. A parent responded add an object towards the end of the section to my notion that the arc of the work might need to watering and growing to allow for open-ended bring the children down energetically with the play with parents/carers before the final image. provocation is this necessary?

Table 5.2: Iterative process – Reflective practice journal, 8 September 2018

Response – Initiation/Enrolment

I first used a separate enrolment space as part of my work Touch & Go (2016) for children aged 2. This is common TEY practice, described as “easing in, easing out” (Young, 2004, p.25) and “an antechamber to the main event” which lets “people become comfortable, find their bearings and settle down” (Webb, 2012, p.74). Adopting this practice for Touch & Go allowed me to provide information to parents once everyone had gathered but before taking audiences into the aesthetic environment of the show. With reference to the experience for babies attending Nursery, McLean and Chance describe how “the Nursery space alters from the quotidian day world to the theatrical illusory world gradually” (2019, p.311). However, it became clear during the Adelaide series that, as catalysts for their babies of the experience of

TEY, the parents/carers needed to make the same shift and required explicit support to do so.

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For each of my works, the two priority messages for parents/carers are firstly, that the show is a performance, rather than a playgroup, and therefore has a heightened rather than a day-to-day quality, and secondly, that the children are welcome to move as they wish between audience and performance zones. The first is designed to counteract parent/carer conversation that is social in nature and therefore unrelated to the show; the second is to provide permission for the parents/carers to allow their children to explore. In this context my initial thought for Nursery was paradoxical. I decided to use the enrolment as a means of “purposefully framing [the] production to capture … the social aspects of the performance event” (Whitmore, 1994, pp. 59-

60), investing in the show becoming more of a social occasion, enabling the management of social moments as they arose within the show. In this way, having created an “emotional community” (Fischer-Lichte, 2016, p.394) by means of the enrolment, the shift from quotidian to theatrical worlds before the show was a journey for the parents/carers as much as for the babies.

The second iteration of Nursery on 6 October 2018 trialled a six-stage enrolment process, represented by figure 5.2.

Arrival Preparation Gathering Welcome Play Procession

Figure 5.2: The six stages of enrolment

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Arrival

The logistics of arriving in the venue

Preparation

Take shoes off (parents/carers and babies) and listen to composed pre-show music

Gathering

The performers arrive casually in the enrolling space. Conversation gives way to an invitation to sit in a circle, performers and families together

Welcome

Vocal welcome (sung by Sally and Heather) and two core messages for parents/carers

(Nursery is a performance for babies, about babies and – if they wish – with your babies, so do please let them explore if they want to)

Play

A game of pass-the-parcel generates relaxed, noisy energy. The parcel is wrapped in unbleached baking paper, which becomes strewn in the space and available for the babies to investigate. The last person to unwrap the parcel is Stephen or Felecia. The gift inside is revealed to be the ‘humanoid’ (see section 5.2.6) in its ball-shaped cradle

Procession

Sally and Heather stand to create an arch with their arms. Stephen and Felecia pass through it, with the humanoid, and leave for the performance space. The audience is invited to stand too and form a procession. (During the enrolment on 6 October one parent rose on impulse to standing, saying afterwards [AC 2, PDG 6/10/18] that the invitation was implicit within the image of the arch.) Heather leads the procession to the performance space where Stephen and Felecia are now making an arch. Everyone passes through and settles in to the garden.

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The performers observed, “by going through the formalities and preparatory stuff the audience felt that the event had a significance” so that “by the time they entered the second space they felt fully enrolled” [company reflection after events, 6/10/18]. The PDG confirmed the value to Nursery of investing time during the enrolment in supporting the parents/carers, who observed how physical and emotional safety within the show emanated from the pre-show information. Other ideas – “all being mums; enjoyment, watching other children; I could say hi to you if we met somewhere else” [PDG 6/10/18] – suggested that the enrolment process had supported the creation of an “emotional community” (Fischer-Lichte, 2016, p.394), which in turn supported the delivery of the show.

Response – Parent Participation/Open-Ended Play

In response to the goal, determined at the show/PDG on 8 September 2018, of adding a playful object towards the end of the section watering and growing to allow for open-ended parent- child play, the object introduced was the same brown unbleached baking paper which had appeared as part of pass-the-parcel in the enrolment. The paper returned later in the show as a representation of mulch for the seeds in the garden, and as a source of sound (drum, throw, tear, scrunch). The performers introduced the paper, led the play and then withdrew slightly to allow a play window for the audience before presenting the final tableau of four performers and the “baby” humanoid as rehearsed, complete with the descending chimes of the end of the music. When placed in sequence, these elements successfully supported a gradual shift towards a collective sense of conclusion. A parent may have legitimately queried the need for the work itself to be responsible for bringing the children down energetically [AC 2, PDG

8/9/18] – see page 144 – however in Dewey’s terms the formal conditions of aesthetic experience require this shift, leaving audiences with a sense of whole-ness, having built the work through “continuity, cumulation, conservation, tension and anticipation” (1934, p.143) to culminate not merely in the ending of the experience but its “consummation” (1934, p.37).

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Importantly, this still leaves room for the children’s personal aesthetic experiences, arriving at their own micro-consummations in their own time.

The 6 October PDG also discussed disengaging factors, attempting to link the babies’ retreat responses to specific moments in the show (table 5.3):

Observation Response

Disengaging Factors

Whole section D – You and Me Reconsider the duration of some sections, especially the open-ended play invitations Lasted too long Create dynamic contrast between sections

Chime, talking, silence Consider how younger babies need longer to settle in

Maximise the compelling power of the ‘new’

Table 5.3: Iterative process – Reflective practice journal, 6 October 2018

The third and final presentation of Nursery on 1/12/18 minimised the above disengaging factors with some success. One parent observed that her child “re-engaged every time there was a change whether from movement/music to silence/stillness or from the silences/stillness back to the movement/music” [AC 2, PDG 1/12/18]. She also noted that this “gives the babies time to re-engage and to process” [ibid].

5.5 Articulate

In keeping with the developmental tasks of being and doing (Clarke and Dawson, 1998, pp.221–223) for the show’s target age group, I position ‘being’ as a response as valuable as

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‘doing’ within the theatrical encounter. I therefore proffer two states of being experienced by babies during Nursery, linking these to the categories and themes in my preliminary taxonomy of participation (table 5.4):

State of Being Category Theme

Reverie Gaze Watching

Dynamic Focus Initiative Child-led offers

Table 5.4: States of being

Reverie

“Sheen, glaze (and) reverie” were three words proffered by a parent to describe his child’s experience of Nursery [AC 2, PDG 8/9/18]. Fischer-Lichte’s tentative definition of the art of spectatorship is “the capacity to perceive attentively and involve all the senses … at times requiring the relinquishment of focused attention in order to get lost in a kind of reverie – to engage in the process of what is happening” (2016, p.178). Observable responses in a baby’s state of reverie include their intense gaze while sitting straight-backed, leaning back on a parent/carer or lying down in the space. Often s/he rejects offers of touch or other input from the parent/carer with a gesture or a shrug so as not to take his/her eyes from the action, an observation also made by a parent [“couldn’t be distracted” – AC 2, PDG 8/9/18] and by

Dunlop et al. in their definition of absorbed engagement as “intense attention for a period and ignores any distraction” (2011, p.25).

Dynamic Focus

The baby in dynamic focus manifests actions in a balance between the use of their own body, the use of their parent/carer and the attention they give the work itself through the performers.

The baby demonstrates a specific physical orientation in which his/her body and/or head faces

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the performative action. The dynamically focused baby responds according to his/her own agency. They are positioned for initiative. Younger babies move their gaze and alter their facial expressions. Older, more mobile babies move to and from the action as they wish to.

Some babies join in, matching actions, shapes and dance phrases or offering their own.

From this state, the baby is also able to turn their attention to other children (sharing) or to their parent/carer (circle). They may point to an object, performer or instrument to confirm that their adult sees what they see or invite their adult into the action.

5.6 Towards Project Two

Where project one codified the responses of the very young audience members, project two considered the two-way nature of the encounter expressed in the title of this research and inherent within the company ethos of ‘I see you seeing me’, where the ‘I’ may be the child or the performer. Project two, Seashore, re-integrated the performers into the frame of inquiry.

Their multi-faceted work of responding to the children was underpinned by the question:

How can the work of the performers maximise Seashore as an encounter?

Young children demand the kind of response referred to by Lerman when she wrote: “I had to focus on the people I was performing for. I couldn’t pull the modern dance stare or the inner- directed movement gaze. They demanded a relationship with the dancer. I found this intriguing, challenging and difficult. And I felt it a worthwhile problem to solve” (2011, p.10).

Seashore entered this ‘worthwhile problem’ by establishing a weekly encounter between the company and a group of young children. This created the opportunity for multiple meeting points between the children, their parents/carers and the performers and hence extended opportunities for observing the relationship between the structure and presentation of the work

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and the children’s participation, especially in relation to how the dramaturgical structures supported the intention of the performers.

The following section describes Seashore – the project, the performance and the ways in which observation led to theory, which was put to work in the course of the project. I proffer an emergent framework of performer responsivity, which describes four ways – frame, balance, track and contrast – in which the performers, including me as the 4th performer, integrate children’s participation into the devised material of the show as a critical aspect of the materials of its construction within our live delivery of it. The framework arose as a performer response to project one’s taxonomy of children’s participation and as a practical response to the observational work of project two. I describe how the observational work of Seashore also created a context for refining the taxonomy of children’s participation, conceptually developing the categories ‘initiative’ and ‘circle’, (first described in section 5.4.1) in recursive dialogue with the emergent performer framework. I move to a deeper definition of ‘initiative’ as children’s co-creative contribution to the work. I also re-position ‘circle’ as a dynamic, intentional aspect of the children’s participation, rather than simply being a manifestation of normative early years attachment. The work of the performers and of parents/carers is intrinsic to the relationship between invitation and children’s participation in Seashore. The section concludes with an analysis of this work.

5.7 Project Two – Seashore

Project two continued with a practice-led approach to investigating and analysing how babies and – for this project – older children up to the age of three years, participated in a new TEY work, Seashore.

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Video Clip 6

View an archival clip [approximately 4 minutes] from Seashore by clicking or pasting the link into your web browser: https://www.insitearts.com.au/projects/seashore

Video descriptor: The clip is from ‘Being the Sea’, the first section of Seashore. It shows how young children enter and leave the performative action according to their own initiatives, and the ways in which the performers respond to the presence of the children within and through their devised choreographic material.

Seashore involved children as co-creators throughout the project. This provided extended opportunities for observing the relationship between the structure and presentation of the work and the children’s participation. The first stage of Seashore invited children and their parents/ carers as audiences, creators and performers into the project through nine weekly one-hour

Family Dance Labs. The second stage took Seashore into production and involved the families in the presentation of a season of the complete 40-minute performance work as part of South

Australia’s biennial children’s cultural festival, DreamBIG, attended by audiences of families with very young children.

The project’s two stages necessitate some clarification of the terms I use to delineate the people involved. During the Labs the company and I simply referred to the ‘group’. In anticipation of and during the production stage we referred to the ‘performing families’, who co-presented the work with the company, and the ‘audience families’, who purchased tickets to attend a performance. When I refer to the sections of Seashore performed together by the company and the performing families I use ‘ensemble’, a term proffered early in the Lab stage [Stephen, reflection after events, 9/4/19], as a response to our sense of the performing families’ abilities as collaborators.

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Where project one codified the responses (gaze, initiative, sharing and circle) of very young audience members to live TEY (Nursery), project two allowed me to move towards a deep analysis of the “responsive actor-spectator dynamic” (Fletcher-Watson, 2016a, p.18) at the heart of my practice. A framework of performer responsivity, using the categories ‘frame’,

‘balance’, ‘track’ and ‘contrast’, codified for the company a range of potential ways of responding to the children’s participation. As inelegant as the word ‘responsivity’ is, it nonetheless speaks usefully to the contingent nature of the child-performer encounter and the complexity of the performers’ choice range within the framework, whereas the alternative –

‘framework of responses’ – arguably suggests a more formulaic response. The following section describes the framework, its origin and function.

5.7.1 Framework of Performer Responsivity

The framework – frame, balance, track and contrast – originated in my thematic analysis of the company members’ semi-structured interviews (figure 5.3 overleaf). This emphasised the complexity of the artists’ skill set and highlighted their commitment to being responsive to the very young audiences, because our TEY is a meeting point of the “two worlds” [Noonan, AC

1A, 7/9/18] of the performers’ set choreographic material and the unknown responses of the children. Stephen’s expression of the richness of “going between those two worlds and existing in those two worlds” [ibid] spoke to the intra-active nature of the work and the need to codify the intra-activity in terms of specific performative skills, which “accommodate the unexpected, re-direct the performative attention to what we value (not anything goes) and acknowledge what’s happening” [AC 1A, thematic analysis of transcripts] – see appendix C.2.

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Descriptive Codes Interpretive Codes Overarching theme

Artists’ professional ethos Artists’ professional knowledge Artists’ dispositions TEY performer skill set Responsive rigour Artists’ responsibilities Specific performative skills

Meeting point Enjoying Uncertainty Dramaturgical choices Space of possibility Two worlds Magic Children’s agency

Figure 5.3: Thematic analysis, AC 1A

The framework arose as a result of ideas about finding ways to maximise the co-creative presence of children and yield to the unexpected elements of their participation, while maintaining performer security and performative coherence for audiences. It first emerged during the company’s Lab work on a draft section of Seashore called ‘thongs’ (referring to the rubber sandals worn at the beach). See section 5.7.9 for details of each section. (NB. In the

UK thongs are known as flip-flops, whereas in parts of Asia they are known as slippers).

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Rather than setting specific choreographic material, the Lab plan for 16 April 2019 prepared the following order of events, using twenty pairs of thongs of various child and adult sizes, as props set out in the space:

1. Jaunty walking, putting the thongs on and taking them off

2. Investing in how the thongs go on (e.g. toe crawl)

3. Investing in how they come off (e.g. jump, flick) = messing up the pairs

4. Tiny pairs of thongs (Felecia: one big toe; Steve: all fours)

5. Competition for one pair = walk off with one thong each

6. Offer children their own thongs

7. Travelling and splitting the pairs using hands, feet

8. Thong rhythms/percussion

9. Pile the thongs like a sandcastle.

The goal was to maintain an open-ended quality, observing how the children responded to the thongs as an invitation to play. A major tension swiftly emerged between the children’s interest (or lack of interest) in the thongs as playful objects and the efforts of the dancers to harness the children’s activities performatively, whilst adhering to the prepared order of events.

As an observer outside the action I wanted the performers to give coherence to the images by matching the children’s activities with the thongs; however when we tried this, coherence was lost because the energy waned and any sense of collective focus in the audience of Lab families disappeared. At times the child being matched simply stopped their activity, because their interest in investigating the object was personal and playful, not performative. Far from creating a meeting point, the performers’ presence seemed to interrupt the encounter.

The framework thus arose as a response to this kind of dilemma, codifying the company’s responsive skills as a means of maximising opportunities for encounter. Each element of the

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framework had the potential to play out at any point in the show, regardless of whether the section of the show involved set performative material or open-ended tasks (see section 5.9.1) and to be a relevant response to the entire range of children’s participatory categories of gaze, initiative, sharing and circle.

Table 5.5 (overleaf) links each performer responsive category and its purpose, with examples of performer responses to children’s actions. Section 5.9.2 provides specific examples, images and video footage of the work of the performers in making use of the framework during

Seashore performances.

The framework also functioned methodologically during the project as an observational lens,

“seeing ‘knowing in practice’ as being an embodied and multisensorial way of knowing that is inextricable from our sensorial and material engagements with the environment” (Pink, 2015, p.40) and, in particular, throwing further light on two of the categories of child responses – initiative and circle – from the project one taxonomy of participation. The next section describes this process of deepening knowledge.

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Category Function Purpose Response

Performers recognise and draw One or both dancers incorporate attention to children’s co-creative the child’s action into their pre- presence using pathways, shape, prepared use of the space, for spatial orientation and proximity. example, by adjusting a pathway Frame Co-creative to travel around the child. The 4th performer may verbally frame a child’s intention, for example: “Do you want to do some jumping?”

Creates a harmonious spatial Performers modify their use of the dramaturgy in relation to the space within their set material, spatial choices of children in the drawing on “a physically and performance or audience spaces. spatially intuitive impulse, which creates balance and dynamic

Balance Co-creative movement in the whole performance space” (Hovik, 2018) May be an adult version of Performers create a children’s initiatives in a different corresponding child-led image space elsewhere in the space

Signals to the child ‘I see what Performers use their own gaze or you see’, thus ‘allowing’ their action (join in, point, travel) to actions. Signals to the audience ‘I sanction the child’s action. have this child on my radar and it’s all part of the show’. Track Logistical Contributes to the company’s May be a collective gaze or ethos of “we don’t ignore empathic vocal response, for anything; acknowledging, without example to a child crying it being a distraction” [Heather, reflection after events, 11/11/19]

Helps manage transitions The musician may make between sections. intentional use of volume or pace

to move towards the transition. th Contrast Logistical Mitigates the effects of children’s Performers (usually the 4 actions which are at risk of performer or the musician via the creating competing images with 4th performer) offer the children an the show alternative; for example, running can gradually be slowed.

Table 5.5: Framework of performer responsivity

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5.7.2 Initiative and Circle

Initiative

As I travelled through Seashore’s Labs, performances and footage I realised that my definition of initiative required further reflective analysis. I wondered whether the observational processes involved in the research were increasing my capacity to “become perceptually open”

(Bennett, 2010, p.14) to the co-creative presence of the children or whether the Labs allowed the company to invest more effectively in creating the conditions for co-creativity, in turn allowing the children to respond intra-actively with initiatives of greater complexity. Project one, Nursery, revealed three layers of initiative offered by babies up to the age of 18 months – matching, impulses to try out or join in with the adult performers’ movement and capacity for original contribution. I interrogated these in the light of the participation of the children aged up to three years involved in Seashore.

Initiatives observable as children’s impulses to try out or join in with the adult performers’ movement played out in the same way in Seashore, though more overtly, perhaps as a result of the older age of the children, whose heightened mobility made their initiatives more visible.

The children’s capacity to take elements from the show, re-combining them as an original contribution, or creating new material, was evident in both projects.

Initiatives arising through the company’s practice of matching took place in Nursery as a discrete section of the show. This was not the case for Seashore, however one Seashore section allowed for the whole ensemble to pause and match an individual child if the child in question initiated the moment. Furthermore, during the Labs the performers observed that attempting to match older children often felt intrusive, perhaps because the child’s focused action was a personal rather than a co-creative experience for them.

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As a result of these observations, and as a means of showing how the concept of initiative refers to young children’s explicit aesthetic intentions in relation to the world of the show, rather than simplistically covering every action offered by every child, I began to define initiatives as involving most or all of the following factors:

1. They begin with a clear embodied impulse.

2. They have a purposeful quality.

3. They are co-creative, responding and contributing intentionally to the world of the

show.

4. Whether short or extended they have an observable arc, or “a temporal contour or

time profile as it begins, flows through, and ends” (Stern, 2010, p.4) as well as “ the

perception or attribution of forces ‘behind’ or ‘within’ the movement … a sense of a

space … defined by the movement … and directionality … [because the] movement

seems to be going somewhere” (ibid) in ways determined by the child.

5. They are satisfying to/have meaning for the child.

I note that I have referred to the children’s intentions and to their intentional contributions to the show. Following ideas that seek to “foreground the role of body, place, affect and atmosphere … over design, intentionality and rationality” (Hackett and Rautio, 2019, p.1020) in young children’s meaning-making, the show itself, its structure, the people and objects in it and the spatial environment it offers become a means of creating “the conditions in which multimodal meaning-making might emerge” (ibid), inviting the children into a process of

“becoming with the world” (ibid) of the show. In this sense the children’s “intentionality is a goal-directedness, or purposefulness, yet this purpose does not have to be defined in advance”

(Hackett and Rautio, 2019, p.1022).

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Relevant here is the spontaneity of children’s initiatives. Though often arising after some intense thought preceding the child’s initial impulse, initiatives are arguably akin to the adult art of improvisation, with its “richly complex discourses that are far from any stereotypical definition of improvisation as a make-do, anything goes, or unprepared phenomenon

(Midgelow, 2019, p.6). This highlights the complexity of children’s initiatives. It also lends nuance to older ideas about TEY’s ideals, which – among others – promote “equality of action” as “granting agency to render all [child] responses valid” (Fletcher-Watson, 2013, p.23), which in turn supports the performers to feel secure in not feeling obliged to draw attention performatively to every child response.

Sauter’s model of the performative event from the point of view of audiences (Sauter [2000], cited in Reason, 2008, p.342) also usefully illuminates the distinction between the children’s initiatives and their actions in the other participatory categories. Reason describes how Sauter differentiates “between the ‘referential’ and the ‘embodied’ experience of theatre. The embodied experience relates to the actual appearance of a performance – that is, what the audience sees on stage .... The referential experience is that which is represented or evoked by the performance or what an audience sees in their imagination” (Reason, 2008, p.342).

For TEY, Sauter’s distinction is more complex. His use of the term ‘embodied’ to refer to the material of the work is pertinent in the TEY context because young children often harness the material they have witnessed in the show’s embodied domain as the impulse for their own initiatives. However, their referential responses manifest in embodied ways, arising from their skills in “physical thinking”, in which they draw on their “somatic sensing [which] bypasses intellectual reasoning leading to instinctual choices” (Midgelow, 2019, p.9). Thus, their initiatives emanate equally from the referential domain of their audience experience, reflecting their impulse and capacity to step beyond the literal presence of people and objects into co- creative participation in the environment of the imaginative world offered to them.

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Circle

A pre-requisite of children’s capacity for initiative is their sense of security in the space, brought about by the presence of their parent/carer. The Circle of Security© (Cooper et al.,

2019) underpins this, hence the inclusion of ‘circle’ in my taxonomy of participation.

However, my understanding of how ‘circle’ played out in live performance also refined during project two, gaining status as an important and dynamic aspect of the children’s agency and participation, rather than simply being a normative manifestation of early years attachment. As

I began to analyse Seashore by immersing myself in footage of the work and writing ethnographic descriptions of what I saw, I began to use circle » or circle «, where circle » indicates moving away from the secure base and circle « indicates moving back again.

The text below from my observational work using footage describes an initiative of Ramona

(15 months) during a performance of Seashore on 1 June 2019. The trajectory of her initiative is detailed in relation to the factors listed on page 147, shown as single words in square brackets, for example [ARC]). The text also shows how her choices, made in a co-creative relationship with the performers, are linked to ‘circle’, describing Ramona’s actions on the

Circle of Security©, using her mother as her secure base.

‘Ramona’s body urges her forwards [IMPULSE], leading with her face and chin (circle »).

She stands for a wobbly moment, then is drawn into the action by the “seabirds” pathways

(circle »). She walks quickly and intentionally forwards [PURPOSEFUL] just as Stephen and

Felecia are travelling in her direction. Felecia lifts her left foot, bird-like, and spreads her elbows, wing-like. Ramona lifts her arms in response and touches her forehead with both hands [CO-CREATIVE] and starts travelling in to the space [PURPOSEFUL].

‘She stands and considers heading back to her mother (circle «). Ramona’s attention is caught

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by Stephen’s gestures (hands and arms rise and lower). The clarity of Stephen’s position allows Ramona to move close [IMPULSE]. She matches Stephen by lifting her arms [CO-

CREATIVE]. In the wholeness of her bodily participation [PURPOSEFUL] she relishes the upward gesture and lifts her head too, which causes her to lose her balance and bump down.

Stephen starts the hand pile game. Felecia joins it.

‘Ramona rises up to standing [IMPULSE]. Felecia continues to frame Ramona by situating the next hand pile image over her head. Stephen joins this image. Ramona reaches up softly to their hands [CO-CREATIVE]. Stephen and Felecia travel away. Ramona decides [ARC] to return to her mother (circle «). She stands and looks over her shoulder at Felecia en route back to her mother, perhaps saying goodbye with an arm action [SATISFYING]. Felecia micro matches her arm action.’

Appendix B.2 provides the full ethnographic text.

5.7.3 Other Uses of the Framework

The deployment of the emergent responsive framework was an important aspect of my own role. The project’s ‘outside eye’, Tanya Voges, noted that the contrast and track responses employ skills that might be considered parental, because they tend to function (although not always) as ways of responding to, or ideally pre-empting, child actions that are not motivated by co-creation, given that an important aspect of the framework is that it attempts to integrate or acknowledge the presence of all the children.

The following example (reflection after events, 23/5/19) describes my choice of contrast:

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‘Ronny enjoys the ‘thongs’ section, gathering piles of thongs and saying ‘my shoes’. His energy is focused on his own private game of ‘build and destroy’. I have just collected up most of the thongs and have a bag-full in my arms ready to pile somewhere in the space. I usually deploy the category ‘balance’, creating the new thong pile in an under-used area of the performance space, but this time I make the pile right in front of Ronny, inviting him into the action. Feedback from my producer, who’d seen the show that day, confirms that ‘as an adult audience member – as soon as you realise that the language of destruction is part of it – you relax because it’s part of the show.’

The framework also provided a language for accommodating child actions unrelated to, or even disengaged from, the show. As Dewey notes: “The material that constitutes a problem has to be converted into a means for its solution” (1934, p.143), even if this is as simple as taking steps to prepare for the eventuality. Before the performance season performing families were reassured with a set of ‘what if’ protocols in response to potentially troublesome responses observed as part of the Lab work. For example, the company resolved to handle the potential for children to run randomly in the space, firstly tacitly by empathising with the children about their understandable excitement in such a big, playful space, then physically by ‘tracking’ then

‘framing’ the running at a point cued by me (the 4th performer). I would then initiate a stop and go game by giving Heather a verbal cue to provide a musical cue, matching the speed of the running with sudden pauses, then marking these down using ‘contrast’ to slow the running.

Gradually Heather and I would bring the game to a close and move back into the sequence of the show.

During the performance season some running was swiftly integrated back into the performative action, and so in practice, this full strategy was not required, however the following clip shows how tracking was deployed in the Lab run of the show.

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Video Clip 7

View footage of the company using ‘track’ to respond to Jackson by clicking or pasting the link into your web browser: https://youtu.be/CtotxIS2P5U

Video descriptor: Jackson decides to start running. His gleeful energy is delightful, but at odds with the soft, sweeping tone of the section. Stephen and I try to meet Jackson by using the sound of the sea in our imaginary shells to blow in his direction, but Felecia, whose solo smooth pieces of glass and shells is in progress tracks Jackson successfully by integrating a pointing gesture into her pre-set gestural phrase. Everyone present knows that we see Jackson and that his action is all part of the show.

Section 5.9.2 discusses how the framework played out in other ways as a critical aspect of the work of the performers. As a research instrument Seashore allowed me to identify the elements of the framework. The project also provided the opportunity to trial the framework in action.

In practice, the framework had a range of functions, mediated by the performers, to support everyone involved in the encounter:

1. For the performers it allowed the ‘doing’ of their performative material to be open

to the ‘being’ of the children within secure parameters.

2. For audience members it helped create visual and performative coherence, and;

3. For the children it created possibilities for intra-action and encounter.

The children’s participatory responses may be highly visible, or subtle, however when they coalesce with the work of the performers, the outcome has the potential to make meaning not just for the child, but also for the entire audience. In this way, the child’s “participation

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becomes not an interruption of the theatrical moment but vital to its success” (Fletcher-Watson,

2013, p.19). Seashore enjoyed many moments of such success and so I move now into a detailed description of its process, the nature and content of the performance work and how it evolved as a dramaturgy of invitation.

5.7.4 The Project

The primary artistic goal of Seashore was the co-creation of a performance work by professional performers and Adelaide-based families with children aged three years and younger. The first stage of Seashore invited children and their parents/carers as audiences, creators and performers into the project, which developed over nine weekly one-hour Family

Dance Labs. The second stage took Seashore into production and involved the families in the presentation of a 40-minute performance work as part of South Australia’s biennial children’s cultural festival, DreamBIG, attended by audiences of families with very young children.

The performative material of the show divided into sections presented by the company –

Stephen, Felecia and Heather, and sections presented by the ensemble of performing families with Stephen, Felecia, Heather and me. The company’s material was devised through a task- based creative process of harvesting images and ideas from texts and discussion and from the children’s offers arising in the Family Dance Labs.

The babies and young children who took part throughout the Seashore project had three distinct roles – audiences, co-creators and performers. Each Family Dance Lab began with a short section (5-10 minutes) of performative material presented by the company. A short welcome/enrolment by me preceded this each week so that the group entered the Lab space as an audience would. After the performance section each Lab session became a workshop in which the children were artistic collaborators and co-creators, alongside their parents/carers.

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During the performance season the children were the performers of the work alongside the company and their parents/carers. At any point the children were at liberty to withdraw their participation, including during the shows.

In this interesting way, Seashore troubled the very notion of the term ‘audience’, suggesting that at times TEY audiences display an “empathic, intersubjective and synchronized response to the other in the shared world of the auditorium” (Heim, 2016, p.22) and at other times are “a make-up of small individuals who are rich in experience and stories and who are looking for opportunities to be engaged” (Winter, 2014, p.2).

5.7.5 Content

The project name was a fragment of the title of a poem, On the Seashore of endless worlds, by

Indian poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore. The poem gave thematic coherence to the project’s exploration of the mutual and separate worlds of children and adults and provided an accessible imaginative world for the Labs. The ocean, under the sea and the beach are familiar, if not ubiquitous, themes in children’s books, playgroups and other early years settings. We decided to confine the emergent imagery to the more nuanced idea of the shore as an in- between world.

Two metaphorical ideas drove early images. The first linked the contrast between the ‘order’ of the land and the ‘chaos’ of the ocean to the notion that having one foot in each represents maximum creative potential, poised like a surfer whose technical skill meets the unpredictable swell of a wave. This was also a metaphor for the work of the performers, who used the order and certainty of their set performative material and the elements of the framework of performer responsivity to meet the unpredictable input of the children. The sections of Seashore

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involving the performing families were layered with an equal level of unpredictability for the parents/carers as they navigated the push and pull of their child’s dependency and agency.

Hopfinger’s sense (in describing her own work with children) that, “it was their real effort of doing that constituted the qualities and layers of the piece” (2018, p.65, Hopfinger’s emphasis) applies to the parent-child dances which constituted Seashore, each dyad effectively creating their own version of the dance-within-the-dance. This was able to arise because, as Quick describes, however “tightly organised and controlling” the structure, it nonetheless allows the children “room to improvise, to roam and move between the different sets of activities that the performance demands of them” (2006, p.155). As Seashore’s familiarity developed, the children learned the show and felt able to play within the framework of each of their sections, inviting their adult to develop individualised responses to the ‘set’ dance sections and anticipating the ensemble images to such an extent that they were often able to lead them.

The second idea took the image of ‘footprints in the sand’ to evoke the ebb and flow of the parent-child relationship, where a resonance or an imprint of the parent always remains on the child’s mind and body, and of the child on the mind and body of the parent. We also liked the idea that the relationship has the chance to be constantly refreshed and renewed, like the daily rise and fall of the tide.

5.7.6 Stages One and Two

Stage One – Family Dance Lab

The first stage of Seashore invited children and their parents/carers as audiences, creators and performers into the project, which developed over nine weekly one-hour Family Dance Labs.

Engagement with families in our previous performance projects had been valuable, but minimal, taking the form of short consultations. Once in production, our relationship with

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families had been confined to the one-off nature of performances. As a response to the limits inherent within this way of meeting families, Seashore was designed to involve babies and young children for the duration of the project, building closer relationships with families as a basis for a creative dialogue. The Lab allowed the company to meet, observe and reflect regularly and iteratively on the responses of the children present, in the company of their parents/carers.

It was critical to the success of the Labs that the project had a performative quality from the outset. The Lab space (the Restless Dance Studio) was set up each week like a theatre, with props, objects and amplified sound. All day-to-day objects were left outside the space. Each week, our first invitation to the families was for them to enter the heightened “feeling tone”

(Stern, 1998, p.13) of the Lab space and sit together as an audience for a 5-10 minute performance, formally presented by Stephen, Felecia and Heather. Each section drew on a movement vocabulary harvested by the performers from the children’s offers in the previous

Lab. This ethos was at the heart of the project and well understood by the performing families, as the following parent observation indicates: “I really love the way that you work with children of this age and you value them in regards to being participants and viewers of theatre”

[AC 2, 24/4/19]. The Labs were also the forum for devising the performative material to be presented by the performing families.

An important factor in building relationships with the families was that as the director of the project/work I still performed the “holding” (Winnicott, 1971, p.150) role which continued into being the 4th performer once the work was in production. The scope of my role was described by Adult Cohort 2 as “conductor, narrator, facilitator, MC, guide, dance sherpa and participant”

[PDG 28/5/19]. For the Labs this involved running the devising/rehearsal, scaffolding the Lab with activities designed to foster connection and ‘getting to know’ and managing all communications with families. I wrote to the families by e-mail after each Lab session. The

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letters covered practical information (pram parking, schedules, venues) and invited discussion on our evolving ensemble’s language of practice, with particular reference to the complex and delicate role of parents/carers.

Seashore enjoyed the presence of an “outside eye” – dance practitioner Tanya Voges. Tanya and her child had been research participants in the project one work on Nursery. Tanya expressed a desire to observe Seashore as a volunteer and I embraced her input. Tanya’s presence allowed me to harness a phenomenon described by Brian Uzzi as “the Power of Q”

(cited by Lehrer, 2012, p.141). Uzzi studied group creativity using data from Broadway musicals, designating as Q the familiarity, or otherwise, with each other of the creative teams.

Thus, a show created by people who had worked together several or many times had high Q, while a work made by people unknown to each other had low Q. Uzzi noticed that where Q was low the musical was much more likely to fail; however the same appeared true for shows with very high Q, because “the artists were so close that they all thought in similar ways, which crushed theatrical innovation” (Lehrer, 2012, p.142).

Tanya’s very “outside-ness” supported the development of Seashore’s material because her presence provoked reflection and the exploration of ideas that sat outside my sense of what might interest very young children. She encouraged me to try activities that I might have considered too abstract, such as “gifting the imaginary shells” [Tanya, reflection after events,

2/4/19]. The image of listening to the sea in an imaginary shell arose from Tanya’s curiosity to see whether such young children understood the idea of imaginary objects.

We began with an invisible beach ball and progressed to the shells, inviting the children to listen to the sea inside their own shell and to share their shells, passing them back and forth in their family groups. The children understood and embraced this abstract activity. The group image it created was so strong that it became a recurring motif. Its success also paved the way

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for devising other imaginary objects. For example, building a sandcastle was depicted using dynamic rhythms on the floor with our hands. Further to this, one of the children offered the idea of building the castle up by placing his hands one on top of the other many times. We embraced this, created music to go with the image, and built it into the dance.

Each Lab concluded with a weekly “on your way out question” as reflection after events

(Boud, 2001, pp.12-14) inviting families to contribute to the images and ideas within the work through writing (words on post it notes, group brainstorms and verbal images and feedback via e-mail) and drawing. Two children’s drawings were used for the costume and set design respectively. As we moved from devising to rehearsal towards the end of stage one, the company began to refer to the group as “the performing families” to differentiate them from families attending the performance work as audience members.

Stage Two: The Performance Work

The project culminated in the creation of a 40-minute performance work, presented five times as part of the DreamBIG Festival. Seventeen performing families completed the project, presenting the show alongside Stephen, Felecia and Heather in sub-groups of seven to eight performing families per show.

The sonic environment was composed and performed live by Heather and some pre-recorded elements – an oceanscape of waves and a sonic bed of guitar composed by Heather. The live score involved two original songs, guitar, ukulele, a Korean flute, vocals and an ocean drum – a tambour-shaped drum filled with ball bearings which Heather skilfully used to evoke the swell and surge of ocean waves. The families were encouraged to join in the songs.

My role extended the holding (Winnicott, 1971, p.150) of the performing families to families

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attending the show as audiences. As always, my primary task was to create the sense of security required for safe and authentic encounter between audience and performers. For

Seashore this process began with ‘what to expect’ correspondence e-mailed to ticket purchasers prior to the performances and continued once families had arrived at the theatre venue through an initiation (Dewey, 1934, p.46) or enrolling of audiences into the space. I maintained a visible and audible holding role throughout the show, explicitly positioning my persona and my voice in the space so that I could facilitate, support and contribute to the aesthetic encounter. This work is described in detail in section 5.9.2.

5.7.7 Target Age Range

Seashore extended the target age range of the children in the performing families and audience families to three years and younger, opening up exciting possibilities for theatrical encounter, because children aged two to three “are now able to be fully collaborative partners in activities and in anticipation of events” (Mares et al., 2011, p.15). Parents/carers noted their children’s capacity for this, using language such as “memorise, anticipate and know” to describe the ways in which the children developed expertise within the work, demonstrated by their use of the movement vocabulary from the emergent performance work in the Labs and at home [AC 2,

PDG 28/5/19]. At around the age of two “language is established as is physical competence and mobility” (Mares et al., 2011, p.14). For children aged three, “language becomes more elaborate, as does symbolic and imaginative play … empathy and self-reflection” (Mares et al.,

2011, p.15). While such developmental milestones could not be expected to manifest uniformly in each child, the children’s agency as “they experiment with their own power”

(Mares et al., 2011, p.14), gave the company the opportunity to respond to a rich variety of Lab and performance participation.

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5.7.8 Design

Seashore’s performance venue – Slingsby Theatre’s ‘Hall of Possibility’ – allowed designer,

Wendy Todd, to opt for a wide, open area, redolent of the scale and breezy space of the

Seashore. The design elements were extremely simple. Wendy housed the action within her large-scale use of an illustration by one of the children. Wendy maintained the child’s non- literal choice of hot pink, using re-usable wallpaper transfers to turn her lines and circular shapes into bold wall and floor designs, suggestive of the shoreline and rock-pools. A downstage shoreline was positioned to create a clear audience zone. An upstage shoreline balanced the space. Wendy de-constructed elements of an illustration by one of the children creating floor designs in the general space suggestive of rock-pools. These were dispersed in such a way as to support the performing families to navigate each other and to spread out in a balanced way within the space.

Overview of the Seashore space. Image: Sia Duff

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A wave-like illustration by another of the children was transferred on to white t-shirts for the performing children, whose parents/carers wore their own clothes in shades of blue. The company’s clothes were in a palette of denim blue, cream and orange in order to make them clearly visible to each other and to the performing families in the space. The clothes were loose and casual, suggesting a relaxed day at the beach.

5.7.9 Structure

The work was structured in six sections, preceded by an enrolment and followed by informal open-ended play:

Enrolment

The second iteration of Nursery on 6 October 2018, trialled an enrolment schema (see section

5.4.2) moving through six stages, ‘Arrival, Preparation, Gathering, Welcome, Play, Procession’, designed to move audiences gradually across “the threshold, the crossing point that establishes an entrance into the world” (Guidi, 2018, p.70, interviewed by Ventrucci) of the work. The application of this schema to Seashore created an interesting logistical challenge based on there being no separate enrolling space at the venue. However, subject to some re-ordering and modification a distilled form of the schema still proved to be a solid enrolment framework.

Arrival

The arrival process began in the week prior to the performance by means of a letter e-mailed by the DreamBIG Festival to all ticket purchasers (see figure 5.4). The letter was aimed at parents/carers and designed to provide some ‘what to expect’ information. Families were invited to look out for and be guided to the venue by a visual reference: ‘footprints in the sand’.

Tickets and pram parking information were dealt with by front of house staff in a small

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corridor outside the performance space. Pram parking was just inside the performance space.

As each family arrived in the space I guided them to a specific place to sit.

Preparation

I asked audience members to take their shoes and socks off. Specially composed pre-show music created a relaxed feeling tone (Stern, 1998, p.13).

Play

I gave chalk to the performers who offered it to the children, drawing round their feet or inviting them to draw round their feet to make their own footprints in the sand. The performers moved to and from me for more chalk, allowing us to maintain contact whilst remaining focused on the arriving audience.

Welcome

I said words of welcome, introduced myself, the company members and the performing families and re-stated the core message for parents/carers that their children were welcome to enter the performance space with or without them.

Gathering

I gradually heightened my voice to manipulate the feeling tone (Stern, 1998, p.13) of the space, and to extend a sensory invitation, asking: Listen, can you hear the sea?

The procession stage was not relevant because the audience was already in situ. We considered – but decided against – inviting the audience families to use the entire space for their chalk footprints, in which case a ‘processional’ moment of transition to move back into the audience zone would have been relevant.

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Information for parents/carers bringing children to Seashore Prepared by Sally from Sally Chance Dance

Thank you for booking tickets to Seashore

Seashore is a new performance created with and for children aged 3 and younger.

The artists involved with my dance-theatre company, Sally Chance Dance, (musician/composer Heather Frahn and dancers Felecia Hick and Stephen Noonan) have been working since March with a wonderful group of families to devise and rehearse Seashore; So when you come to the show you’ll see me, Heather, Felecia and Stephen and the performing families presenting Seashore.

The show will start with the performing families sitting with you in the audience. When they move out into the performance space to begin their performance sections, don’t be startled! You’re not expected to join them. All we ask is that you’re an audience.

Being an audience at a Sally Chance Dance performance is as simple as settling in and enjoying the show. However, our work is all about children aged 3 and younger and so we are quite ready for a range of child responses.

Your child may want to stay close to you and watch from a safe distance, or they might want to get closer to the action. This is OK; in fact, we expect it to happen. It’s ideal if you stay in the audience area so that your child has you as a clear, secure base to return to, but please keep your child on your radar at all times and if they need your help do feel quite welcome to go to them wherever they are in the space.

If for whatever reason you need to leave completely for a while, that’s fine too. There’ll be people to help you and you’re welcome to come back again.

Looking forward to welcoming you to Seashore

Figure 5.4: Pre-performance information for families

1. Being the Sea – Opening section performed by Stephen, Felecia and Heather

(ocean drum)

Abstract sonic and kinetic images of waves, seabirds and people at play

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The ocean drum stops. Stephen and Felecia sit and press an imaginary shell to

their ear to listen to the sea. The performing families enter the general space and sit

with their own imaginary shells.

2. Smooth pieces glass and shells – A solo by Felecia, created in response to an

image offered by one of the performing families (Korean flute and a vocal blowing,

whistling sound, evoking the sound of the sea)

Felecia performs images of gathering, scattering and sharing shells

The children play with their own shells

Every so often Felecia pauses and listens to the sea in her imaginary shell. The

families join in with this image in their own ways.

Performing families’ imaginary shells, 1 June 2019. Image: Sia Duff

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3. Three Shapes – Images and shapes (Korean flute and vocal cues)

The company members and the performing families create their own shapes and

actions in response to three verbal images:

The infinite sky is motionless overhead (from On the Seashore of Endless

Worlds by Rabindranath Tagore, 1931)

A rock to climb on

Clear warm pools (from Magic Beach by Alison Lester, 2010, Allen and

Unwin)

This is repeated twice more using dynamic contrasts of speed and volume. The

performing families then move to sit behind the upstage shoreline.

4. Thongs (ukulele and whistling)

Sally enters the space with a net bag of thongs and piles them in the centre of

the space

Felecia and Stephen enter the space, each with different tasks. Felecia’s task is

to create patterns, such as pathways, circles, lines and piles. Stephen’s task is

to disrupt and destroy the patterns

The children enter and exit the game as they need to. Felecia and Stephen

respond to the children’s initiatives as they arise

Sally re-enters and creates a new pile of thongs. Eventually, she starts to pack

up the thongs in the net bag. On every occasion, some of the children help

with this task.

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Interlude – Footprints in the Sand

Sung by Heather and Sally, the song brings the performing families, Stephen and Felecia back out into the space to step, shuffle and slide their feet on the floor, singing and evoking the sensation of stepping in and on sand.

5. The Seashore Blues (guitar and vocals punctuated by playful sounds from all adult

performers – splash, wheee, whoosh)

In the general space everyone performs The Seashore Blues, a high-energy dance

evoking a family day at the seashore

Actions link to the Lab task of completing the sentence I went to the Seashore and:

Got my feet wet (jumping phrase)

Breathe in the sea air (swaying phrase)

Built a sandcastle – build it up and up and higher and higher (hand rhythms,

taps and brushes on the floor, hands piling one on top of the other several

times getting higher)

Suspended moment of stillness precedes a dive forwards and down as if right

into the imaginary sandcastle

Got sand in my hair (brush hair)

Got sand on my hands (brush hands). Repeat these actions a second time.

Sally cues the performing families to make their way to both sides of the

performance space – the jetties. On the vocal cue: We’re catching a wave they rush

forwards to meet in the centre, rising as they meet like the peak of a wave

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Sandcastle, 1 June 2019. Image: Sia Duff

This is cued by the children, supported verbally by Sally, working with Heather to

provide musical cues; it takes place several times as the children indicate that they

would like to repeat the action. Audience families are invited to join in

The dance finishes with the families (performing and audience) travelling with a

piggy back swim all the way to the jetty. Everyone sits, except Heather.

6. By the Seashore (original song, vocals and guitar by Heather)

During the second repetition of the song Felecia and Stephen enter the space to

perform a dance designed to summarise the movement vocabulary of the work,

followed by spacious travelling phrases, evoking waves and wind

During the third repetition, the performing families are invited back on to the floor

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Sand play, 1 June 2019. Image: Sia Duff

The final image is simple and sensory, involving a child from the performing

families in collecting a small bucket of sand from Sally, moving to Heather, who is

still centre-stage and pouring the sand on her feet

Heather steps back creating a reverse footprint in the sand. The show ends and

Sally says some words of thanks and farewell. There is time for the children to

play in the sand.

5.8 Investigate

Seashore created the context for a sustained investigation of young children’s participation in

TEY as audiences, co-creators and performers, asking “questions about children’s agency and power” (Senior, 2018, p.1) in the co-creative context of the Labs and performances.

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The most exciting aspect of Seashore arose from our developing awareness of the “multiple roles that children occupy in relation to performance: children as collaborators, researchers, philosophers, activists, artists, and political agents” (ibid) in the theatrical event. Quick describes the power of this in terms of the distinction between adult ways of seeing and those of young children, noting that the child’s theatrical participation “is the gestural moment itself, a happening now, an event, during which signification is forced to wait” (2006, p.158). The company’s rigorous commitment during the Labs to responding to the children’s offers allowed us to find these moments of waiting, so that the child making the offer determined the pace and trajectory of the next few moments of activity.

Taking this attitude into the more exacting formality of the performance season allowed us to explore in terms of both the adult and the child gaze a practice-led sub-question which arose during the work of project two, and asked:

When the performers respond to children’s participation, how is performative

coherence maintained or re-framed?

The question of coherence became more critical as the Seashore project neared its culmination.

Underpinning this question was another more fundamental inquiry: What do I mean by

‘coherence’ in the particular performative context of my TEY? The next section responds to this fascinating question.

5.8.1 Performative Coherence

I argue that performative coherence in Seashore arises from four factors:

1. From the quality of the work as a “felt experience” (Stern, 2010, p.8) for audiences,

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both child and adult, shared as an event (Bennett, 1997; Sauter, 2002; Engel, 2006).

2. From the work being experienced by audiences, both child and adult, as a time-

based arts experience (Dewey, 1934; Stern, 2010).

3. From the relationship between the responsivity of the performers and the quality of

presence of the children, characterised by play and “just doing-ness” (Hopfinger,

2018, p.61), and;

4. From the “simultaneity” (Whitmore, 1994; Knapton, 2008) between the elements

of the work.

If “to dramaturg [is] to curate an experience for an audience … which relies on the clarity of what characterises that experience” (Lang, 2017, p.7-8), then my drive for performative coherence arises primarily from my interest in crafting a theatrical experience enhanced by the participation of young children. Dewey notes, “esthetic rhythm is a matter of perception and therefore includes whatever is contributed by the self in the active process of perceiving”

(1934, p.169), and so, the question of coherence for each audience member is “shaped uniquely by the individual’s values, knowledge and experiences” (Whitmore, 1994, p.31). An observation in my reflective practice journal [6/2/18] notes the distinction between adult and child experiences:

‘Some reservations were expressed among the festival delegates about a style of very early years work where babies and very young children are specifically invited in to the action. Do these reservations arise because this feels (to the adult viewer) somehow separate from the overall arc of the show, diffusing the performative energy? My observation is that, once invited in, the children create their own energetic exchange with the performers and with other children. So perhaps we’re looking at new kinds of child-led dramaturgies’.

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Performative formality is understood and enjoyed by very young audiences, as demonstrated by their capacity for gaze, whether as a single “audient” (Winter, 2014, p.4) or as a ‘mass’ experience of shared audience attention. Dewey further observes that aesthetic experience arises through “a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and reunions” (1934, p.16). Stern’s description of “the shifts in forces felt to be acting during an event in motion” with its “fluctuations in excitement, interest, and alive-ness” (2010, p.45) suggests that a certain ebb and flow of energy and attention within a show’s relational environment is normal and indeed inevitable, whether created for adult, young or very young audiences.

Petocz suggests that even in the earliest years of life we are not “aesthetically satisfied with a pure state of harmony” (2005, p.34), but that “what is important is that the infant experiences and comes to feel confident that tension will be resolved” (ibid). The idea that resolution is the outcome of a necessary process echoes Dewey’s sense of unity arising “only when the resistances create a suspense that is resolved through co-operative interaction of the opposed energies” (1934, p.167). Dorothy Heathcote takes this into the performative domain, referring to “productive tension” (mantleoftheexpert.com, retrieved on 17/8/19), which also usefully re- frames Nagel and Hovik’s “risk of chaos” (2016, p.159) into a performer state of mind which stays “in the process of constructing problems” (Olsson, 2009, p.5), embracing “a space of chaotic interaction where many resources are used to build a perpetually evolving performance text” (Knapton, 2014, p.5). As Carter points out, “in ancient Greek the word [chaos] signified the yawning, or gaping open of time and space to permit creation … Greek chaos imagines … a crossing that does not cancel out but mutually transforms” (2004, p.3).

Knapton’s reference to the performance text alludes to postdramatic practices. Fletcher-

Watson considers TEY “as inherently postdramatic” because it is “decentred, non-hierarchical and explicitly playful theatre” (2016a, p.40). These ideas speak to the complex relationship between the controlled aesthetic dimension of the adult performers’ rehearsed material and the

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spontaneous aesthetic dimension provided by the children’s participation, leading to layers of simultaneous activity and imagery, where “there is interaction with everything as a resource”

(Knapton, 2014, p.56, Knapton’s emphasis). The postdramatic concept of simultaneity, where

“presence, sharing, process, manifestation and energetic impulse creates an environment where dynamic interaction creates and is the creative work – therefore its performance text”

(Knapton, 2014, p.55, Knapton’s emphasis), can here be harnessed by performers and audiences to make “poetic connections and harmonious movement between the resources”

(ibid, p.5). Whitmore notes how “each of the elements of a production … can produce meaning only because they exist simultaneously with one another at each moment and throughout the total timeframe of performance” (1994, p.203). In this context, coherence is created by “the choices made by the artists, the performance moment and the realisation created by the audience member” (Knapton, 2014, p.31).

For Knapton the space of simultaneity requires “an engagement consisting of interrelated sense impressions” (2014, p.63). This links for very young audiences to Gopnik’s concept of

“lantern consciousness,” (2009, p.129), the all-encompassing way in which babies and young children perceive the world around them. As Spellbound Theatre’s Lauren Jost puts it,

“everything is part of the experience because they’re not filtering anything out” [AC 1B,

20/11/18]. This capacity allows young children not to be “disturbed by the continual choice offered to the spectator: Where to look? What path to follow?” (Knapton, 2014, p.59); instead,

“they become co-creators” (ibid).

The harnessing of the children’s responses to the performance as a resource with which to build the performance text “requires an intuitive and synaesthetic engagement by the performance makers” (Knapton, 2014, p.64). The company’s early attempts to answer our questions about performative coherence included “not everyone doing the same, but a shared feeling tone, when the group sing together and move together and yet have their own unique

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way of doing things” [company reflection after events, 2/4/19]. Dewey articulates a similar idea in his reference to an “old formula for beauty in nature and art: Unity in variety” under conditions in which there is “a relation of energies” (1934, p.167).

TEY which values children’s participation in this way is given coherence through its structure as a “lived body-time-space-world” event, whose “form comes as a result of a dynamic meeting of the now” (Engel, 2006, p.95). Engel describes how “all transformation in a system is a result of energy flowing through it” (2006, p.95). In Dewey’s terms, the beginning leads to the ending via a journey of “completeness of relations” where “relation … denotes something direct and active, something dynamic and energetic … [fixing] attention upon the way things bear upon one another, their clashes and unitings (1934, p.139). In this sense, coherence is a

“felt experience” (Stern, 2010, p.8) shared by everyone present in the “social phenomenon”

(Bennett, 1997, p.86) of live theatre. An example of this arose as a result of a Lab initiative by

Ramona, and the company’s subsequent observation that “the group comes together as a whole when we honour the children’s moves” [company reflection after events, 9/4/19]. During the

Lab (9 April) Ramona initiated a solo dance. I responded by asking the entire ensemble of company and performing families to match her movement. This was felt by the company to

“bring the group together” [ibid]. I had been looking for ways to extend the company’s practice of matching beyond its previous deployment as a discrete section, and so I wondered whether there was space within the performance work to include this kind of ensemble matching.

During the remaining Labs I noticed that Ramona tended to initiate her dance during a specific section, The Seashore Blues. I began to look out for her initiative and to manage it by cueing the rest of the group verbally, beginning with the words I’m looking, I’m looking, continuing with I looked and I saw Ramona at the Seashore. When it was decided to include The

Seashore Blues as a section of the show we hoped that Ramona would initiate her dance during

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a public performance. She did this on one wonderful occasion, repeating her initiative during the Lab run on 28 May 2019 (see video clip 8).

A further example of Stern’s shared “felt experience” (2010, p.8) arose within the ‘thongs’ section of Seashore, structured as an invitation to the children to take part in a playful task.

Fletcher-Watson notes “playing is key to the entire genre of Theatre for Early Years” (2016a, p.41). Quick’s observations as an adult audience member of a work (Kabinet K’s Übung), involving child performers, speak to the link between improvisation in performance and play and again, to the distinction between the adult and child gaze. He writes, “I realise that I am searching for patterns for structure, attempting to work out what is being ‘done’ before me. I fail. And thinking this over, as I watch the performance, I conclude that the performer is working and walking through numerous possibilities, making particular sets of performance choices before me” (Quick, 2006, p.155, Quick’s emphasis). This creates myriad interpretive possibilities in the mind of the spectating adult, whereas for children the possibilities are inter- subjective and participatory, because within child’s play “improvisation and rule testing are utilised and pushed to various limits within particular spatial and temporal configurations”

(Quick, 2006, p.152). The “improvisational instant” is “inevitably, circumscribed and ordered by rules” though the play is not about bending to the will of the rules, rather “it plays within the very co-ordinates of what governs and orders” (Quick, 2006, p.153).

The children’s participation in the ‘thongs’ section of Seashore operated in the same way, the deceptive simplicity of the tasks revealing themselves to be the key to the success and the performative coherence of the section; in fact, the more the company tried to structure the section choreographically the less the section was amenable to the children’s participation, and so we abandoned rehearsed images in favour of each of the two dancers having a particular playful task. Felecia’s task was to create thong patterns, such as pathways, circles, lines and piles, while Stephen’s was to disrupt or re-arrange the patterns. In Caillois’ terms, ‘thongs’

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explicitly harnessed the ludus-paidia spectrum by responding to the païdic impulses of one of the children, whose desire to use the ‘thongs’ to build and destroy during the Labs led to our use of the same approach in the ‘thongs’ section of the show. Felecia’s ludic task of creating thong patterns contrasted with Stephen’s païdic task of disrupting the patterns.

This section generated high levels of all four categories of participation (gaze, initiative, sharing and circle) each time we presented the show. Children’s initiatives corresponded either with Felecia’s task or with Stephen’s task, perhaps according to their own disposition. Overall

Seashore included both païdic and ludic elements, prompting children’s initiatives responding to each end of this continuum. The children at the older end of our age spectrum used a high level of ludic precision to offer initiatives inspired by the movement of the adult performers, while the open space, its size and playful feeling tone (Stern, 1998, p.13) often invited a small handful of children to function at the païdic end of the spectrum, sharing the show by running, their pathways moving in a spirit of ilinx (Caillois, 2006, p.144) in and out of congruence with the material of the show.

Olsson’s observation of the way children intentionally construct problems as a creative response to their world links to one of the findings of the Seashore project, which harnessed

“the way children vibrate and resonate together with the world in the process of constructing problems” (Olsson, 2009, p.5) to create performative images. The highly focused nature of these suggests a further element in the quest for performative coherence, arising from “the performers being physically engrossed in doing the tasks” (Hopfinger, 2018, p.64). Jackson’s sand is a good example.

Jackson’s Sand

Once Jackson had become comfortable in the Labs he began to perform long intentional

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walking pathways in the space, with his hands held like a scoop. This lasted for most of the session and integrated calmly into the other actions of the group. Jackson’s father revealed that

Jackson was imaginatively sand carting. He was initially concerned that this action was undermining the Lab work. The public context of the forthcoming performance season was also clearly on his mind when he asked, “What if this is all he does during the shows?”.

Two important implications – one for Seashore itself and the other for this research – arose from Jackson’s initiative. The first was that his concept directly inspired the final image in which, in a tiny and manageable way, we brought real sand into the show by inviting one of the children to pour a small amount on Heather’s feet.

The second implication arose out of his father’s gentle concern that Jackson’s activity was problematic and even spoiling the show by his action being “let be” (Orozco, 2010, p.82). This thought was understandably, and probably unconsciously, underpinned by highly prevalent ideas about the inherent risks of performances involving children. The cliché “never work with children and animals” exemplifies this and has begun many a publicity interview in my own experience. It is also the ironic first half of the title of Orozco’s paper on “Risk, mistake and the real in performance” (2010, Performance Research, (15) 2, 80-85), which unpacks the presence of a four-year old child in the context of UK-based Quarantine’s 2008 work, Old

People, Children and Animals, as “a theatrical hazard” whose “emotional and physical needs might get in the way of the performance” (ibid).

I was happy to confirm for Jackson’s father that far from being troubled by the sand carting activity I found it a focused and intentional initiative, carefully integrated into the rest of the action. This takes us into the question of the quality of children’s performances in professionally presented works, which is not only “an emerging field of practice and scholarship” (Hopfinger, 2018, p.63), but also a relevant concern in TEY, because the

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children’s strong and visible presence in the performance space arises as a result of the participatory categories of gaze, initiative, sharing and circle, and needs to be taken into consideration as a performative factor. The performativity of children’s actions is usefully articulated by Hopfinger’s concept of “the spontaneity and pragmatism of … the just doing- ness of performance” (2018, p.61, Hopfinger’s emphasis).

Jackson’s initiative is an example of ‘just doing-ness’, a neologism devised by Hopfinger and investigated through her own work, Wild Life, which “explored how the creative work of the child performer emerges between the known container of prescribed tasks and the unpredictable ways they do those tasks live in the space” (2018, p.65). Wild Life involved children aged 9 – 13 in tasks such as “light a match, watch it burn and blow it out when you wish” (ibid, p.66). Hopfinger had determined the tasks, however Jackson’s action was his own initiative, clearly linked conceptually to the work of the Seashore Lab and integrated by

Jackson with deep and appropriate intention into its structure and feeling tone (Stern, 1998, p.13). Relevant here is Hackett and Rautio’s concept of “intentionality that drives forward with a purposefulness that is not directed towards a specified goal” (2019, p.1029). Jackson’s action functioned in the sense of “children answering the world through their moving bodies”

(ibid), in his case the world of the seashore around him.

‘Just doing-ness’ applies to other images within Seashore. Some of these link to Hopfinger’s sense of ‘just doing-ness’ as being “about enabling performance to expose human and nonhuman entanglement” (ibid), for example, the child pouring sand from a bucket on

Heather’s feet at the conclusion of the show, and the children’s desire and willingness to enter into the task of positioning the thongs and/or destroying the thong patterns, then restoring them to the net bag, the performativity of which emerged through “the child performers’ dedication to doing” (ibid, p.64, Hopfinger’s emphasis). I argue that ‘just doing-ness’ seems to be equally applicable to the, as it were, ‘human-and-human’ entanglement intrinsic to TEY through the

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children’s intra-action with the adult performers. In this way, children’s ‘dedication to doing’ underpins their participation, and so “the children’s materiality” (Orozco, 2010, p.84) becomes part of the materials of construction of the work.

The key to the performative coherence of these types of activity is that the children’s ‘just doing-ness’ is a response to the world of the show – its configuration of space, the people and objects involved and the pacing and dynamic arc of each section. This brings us to the relationship between invitation and participation in Seashore.

5.9 Analyse

This section analyses the work undertaken by the three elements of Seashore, which operate in relation to the children, whose participation is also, of course, their work (see Insight below).

These are the structural elements of the work itself, the performers, including me as the 4th performer, and the input of parents/carers. The idea of the ‘work’ of the show harnesses Bolt’s concept of “the work that art does … the ‘movement’ in understanding, thought, material practice, affect or discourse that occurs through the vehicle of the artwork” (2014, p.93).

5.9.1 The Work of the Show

My works aim to create the conditions for live, theatrical encounter. This is whether young children wish to take part at the ‘viewing’ or at the ‘doing’ ends of the participatory spectrum, exhibiting gaze and initiative, as well as sharing and circle. My works do not “need the [overt actions of] children for the performance to proceed according to plan” (Nagel and Hovik, 2016, p.160). If the circumstances require the company to present our rehearsed material, while the audience watches, as is the case for example when the audience consists entirely of babies-in-

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arms, we are very happy to do just that, given that young children’s gazing spectatorship is ‘a constitutive part of performance’ (Fischer-Lichte, 2016, p.165). In this way, my TEY differs from principles of immersive or “audient-centric … work that is created for the audience to experience and which can only occur in their presence” (Winter, 2014, p.2). Even for older, more mobile children the invitation to enter the performance is still wholly optional.

Nonetheless, in the context of my goal that the very fabric of the performance lets the children know and feel the reciprocity of their presence, the structure of each of my works accommodates multiple responses, privileging equally sections of set performative material and sections of material with a more open-ended quality, in order to provide a range of types of invitation.

Insight The children’s work, April 2019

At the end of a Lab session a few weeks into the Seashore project I noticed that I was surprised by how tired the children were. Our workshop had been shorter than usual because the Lab had begun with a long performance section presented by the company, and so our workshop section needed to wrap up after only half an hour or so.

I realised that I had fallen into the trap of thinking of the performance as somehow being less work for the children than the workshop, whereas in reality their experience of each was an equal effort for them. In Dewey’s terms, which stress that “the work of art … is active and experienced” (1934, p.168), the children had been working for a full hour as audiences, gazing, sharing, travelling on the circle and offering initiatives, and as Lab co-creators.

***

No work can hope to control the wide range of factors influencing the children’s responses.

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Seashore’s ‘outside eye’ Tanya noticed how the children’s “entry points” [reflection after events, 28/5/19] into the show varied according to their disposition, their sense of security or otherwise within the theatrical context and their mood, wellness or other pre-occupations on the day of the show. The influence of other children’s actions, and the age range represented on the day, was also significant. Nonetheless, the momentum of this research was borne by a consideration of elements within the work that can be crafted. Nagel and Hovik refer to these as “openings” (2016, p.160) for the children’s participation within the dramaturgy.

Seashore was structured in one of three ways: as set performative material, as a framework of actions with dependable cues (musical, visual and verbal), or as a set of open-ended tasks.

The order and range of structural types supported Seashore’s ability to function as an audience- performer encounter along a continuum, functioning in ways akin to the SceSam model of closed to open interactive dramaturgies (Nagel and Hovik, 2016, p.159). However, in order to hold to my company’s ethos of responding with rigour to the children’s participation my preference was to think of the continuum in terms of formality, informality and open-ended- ness. Table 5.6 (overleaf) represents this continuum, which ranged from the formality of the set performative material, through the relative informality of the frameworks with dependable cues, to the open-ended nature of the sections structured as playful tasks. In these terms, the greater the clarity of intention of each type of section, the more the children’s responses matched the desired type of ‘opening’. For example, the set performative material tended to encourage conventionally audience-like responses of sitting/standing and watching, whereas the open-ended ‘thongs’ section generated open-ended child responses. This allowed me to be reasonably sure that beginning and ending the show with set sections of performative material would establish coherence, ‘book-ended’ with open-ended arrival and departure windows.

Seashore’s playful heart, positioned mid-show, was the open-ended section, ‘thongs’.

Furthermore, degrees of formality, informality and open-endedness applied within each section

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type; for example, the ‘thongs’ section was less open-ended than the enrolment, which was less open-ended than the post-show play, although all three involved open-ended tasks. The fabric of the show is of course not separate from the work of the performers, discussed in detail in the following section, and so the quality of each section along the formal-informal-open-ended continuum linked intimately with the nature of the performers’ tasks.

Framework Set performative with Open-ended material dependable Tasks cues Pre-show 1 ! enrolment

2 Being the Sea !

Smooth pieces of 3 ! glass and shells

4 Three Shapes !

5 Thongs !

The Seashore 6 ! Blues

7 By the Seashore !

8 Post-show play !

Table 5.6: Seashore’s structural section types

The ‘thongs’ section was less open-ended than the enrolment because it involved the performers in specific tasks from which they did not deviate, even though the way these played out – in terms of the timing and duration of activities, the use of the space, the numbers of children involved at any given moment and the nature of their participation – was unpredictable.

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The degree of formality or open-endedness of each section did not equate to the need for more or less preparation. Each section required its own careful rehearsal in anticipation of and “in the service of the precise moment of interaction” (Andersen, 2017, p.179). The preparation varied between sections, some for example requiring more drilling and repetition (set performative material) and others requiring more consultation and trial runs with children

(open-ended tasks).

For the performers the formal/informal/open-ended continuum functioned as follows:

1. The open-ended nature of the enrolment allowed them to gain a feel for the arriving

audience, to make useful predictions about the likely responses of individual

children and to approach the audience by means of the playful task of drawing

‘footprints in the sand’ around the children’s feet.

2. Seashore began and ended with the work’s most formal sections – Being the Sea

and By the Seashore. This created a sense of security for the performers by

beginning and ending with explicit performative offers. The images evoked an

imaginative world grounded in the lived experience of the children and supported

each end of the performance arc. Though precisely prepared, the choreographic

framework of the sections allowed scope for the dancers to modify their use of the

space and to pace the sections with some flexibility, in order to respond to the

children’s responses.

3. The sections involving frameworks with dependable (mostly musical) cues allowed

a high level of flexibility, allowing the performers to curtail or extend the duration

of some images, to repeat images as many times as appropriate for the occasion and

even to pause the show entirely as needed.

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For the children the sections functioned as follows:

1. The open-ended nature of the initial and final transactions – the enrolment and

post-show play window – supported the children to enter the world of the show and

to leave it again in an unhurried manner. A relaxed, pre-show window allowed the

children to arrive in the space and to take their time to assess the situation. It also

created a context for their first decision – whether or not to accept involvement in

having an adult draw around their feet with chalk.

2. The formal sections made a clear performative offer to the children. The very

formality of the movement vocabulary and spatial dramaturgy of the section

generated a reciprocal formality from the young audience, inviting more gaze than

other participatory categories.

3. The open-ended sections were experienced as having a playful feeling tone (Stern,

1998, p.13). The almost complete flexibility of the spatial dramaturgy and duration

of each activity and image invited and accommodated a wide variety of child

responses. The children’s responses built collectively, generating momentum as

more and more children became involved.

4. Overall, the more open-ended the section, the more children were emboldened to

be involved in the action. In contrast, the sections of set performative material,

though eliciting high levels of gazing participation, tended to involve a smaller

number of initiatives.

Other Structural Factors

Children seemed enabled to proffer their initiatives as a consequence of several factors – the proximity of the performers, the configuration of the space and the transitions between sections. These ran through and within each type of section.

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Early in Seashore the children were more able to enter the space when the performers were at a distance from them. The wide, open configuration of the space created a ‘zone of invitation’ allowing plenty of space for the children’s decision-making, although this did also create the potential for random running. Transitions between sections were supported by careful use of contrasting dynamics, accommodating a play or task ‘lag’; for example a transition song

‘footprints in the sand’ moved some children’s attention slowly from their thongs and into the following section, The Seashore Blues, while opening up delayed play possibilities for others.

Underpinning these dramaturgical considerations was the basic principle of allowing each child to undertake their own ‘trust journey’ with the show. The concept of trust journey was developed by Pocketfool Theatre’s Jennifer Andersen and Heidi Weatherald and has been an element of my company’s language of practice since our 2016 collaboration with Jennifer and

Heidi on our work, Touch & Go for children aged 2. Dunlop et al. describe the journey as moving for the children from apprehension to confidence (2011, p.15), with deep and careful consideration of its implications being a necessary responsibility for TEY artists.

5.9.2 The Work of the Performers

Seashore relied on the experience and the “knowledge engagement in performance production”

(Melrose, 2006, p.121) of the performers – dancers Stephen and Felecia, musician/composer,

Heather, and me as director of the work and its 4th performer.

In keeping with most TEY performers’ sense of their specialist experience Stephen, Felecia and Heather pride themselves on the breadth of their skill set and the knowledge they have acquired over time to bring to the work. As Stephen noted, “I’ve never known an audience so deeply” [AC 1A, 7/9/18].

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Dancers

Stephen and Felecia see their expertise in dance and movement as merely the baseline for their

TEY work. The quality of their work as a meeting point between themselves and the very young audiences they encounter relies on several personal dispositions, philosophical attitudes and specific skills for its effectiveness, because their search is for “poetic connections and harmonious movement between the resources. This engagement relies on intuitive playmaking where the artists must exhibit restraint and reserve to privilege the interaction of resources and observe the emerging performance” (Knapton, 2008, p.5). This requires having the perceptual skills to see the nature of the experience for the children, the capacity to work flexibly with the movement material and skills in improvisation within the pre-rehearsed framework. Stephen describes the mutual gaze of child and performer: “I see the child look with intent and curiosity upon my dance and the child sees me looking back at them in a way that they are being acknowledged and experienced in that moment in time by me and the dance. The child sees me dance and I look back at them with an intent, that is, an unspoken acknowledgment that they are here and necessary” [reflection by e-mail, 7/11/19]. Felecia describes how once the movement material has become absolutely embodied she can “bring on the next layer… me

‘being’ ” [AC 1A, 10/10/18]. The skill of ‘being’ involves responding energetically to the space, calibrating dynamic shifts accordingly.

My journal notes that an aspect of Felecia’s work in response to several children who began to run in the Seashore performance space “injected [the section] smooth pieces of glass and shells with a bigger energy, which ‘met’ the runners” [reflection after events, 31/5/19]. In this contingent way of working “the ‘rightness’ of particular movement choices ... is predicated … upon the ability to ‘faithfully’ attend to an internal awareness and the ways your presence, your

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movement choices are shaped by and, in turn, shape those around you” (Midgelow, 2019, p.9).

Curiously, “the just doing-ness of performance” (Hopfinger, 2018, p.61) supported Felecia’s sense of ‘being-ness’ in the section ‘smooth pieces of glass and shells’. When she first trialled the material during the Family Dance Lab on 2 April 2019, Felecia began with a reflective question: “Can I keep the children’s curiosity, as opposed to their attention?” [reflection after events, 2/4/19]. In this way, she deftly re-orientated the task of her solo from being focused on the adult effort of maintaining child engagement to being playfully and co-creatively child- focused within her adult role. We layered in a ‘just doing’ task for her of catching the eye of every performing child during the solo over and within the vocabulary of her own movement, potentially lingering within, but not altering this vocabulary. This became the key to the encounter and allowed Felecia to take “an artistic approach where the liveness of doing – beyond just being – is understood to lead the performance” (Hopfinger, p.65, Hopfinger’s emphasis). Quick describes this process as allowing “the rule of what is being ‘done’ [to be] worked through in the improvisational moment” (2006, p.153).

Stephen also nominates his capacity for improvisation as a critical skill, defining it as his ability to “notice movement offers and responses, as well as how to extend and build a movement idea” [reflection by e-mail, 16/6/19]. In this way “improvisatory ways of going about things” (Midgelow, 2019, p.8, Midgelow’s emphasis) yield “chance intersections and random unpremeditated confluences” (Grabowsky, 2019). Such confluences expect, and indeed rely on, a high level of agency from the performers, arising from “the extreme discipline that lies behind successful improvisation” (ibid). Grabowsky goes on to describe how the components of the improvisation have an equal degree of independence, which allows for a higher degree of interdependence between the components (ibid), linking to Stephen’s sense of the constant process of negotiating the participatory presence of the children, within the rehearsed framework of the show.

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In the words of another high profile Australian musician, Deborah Conway, this is “the vernacular of real-time composition which makes every show … a little bit different from the last” (McMillen, 2019, The Weekend Australian Review). Conway’s matter of fact sense of a performance, which simply communicates itself, rather than announcing itself as technical or virtuosic, links to Lerman’s interest, which I share, “in dancers who look like people dancing and not dancers dancing” (2011, p.xv), “competence being no substitute for presence”

(Andersen, 2018, p.177). Grabowsky’s comment that “there is in any great improvisation a sense of inevitability” (2019, qpac.com.au) is also relevant here. The presentations of

Seashore enjoyed several intra-active moments with this quality of ‘inevitability’ where the performers’ choices within the framework of responsivity, and their capacity to maintain a

360° awareness of the children’s actions, allowed the initiatives to converge in images that felt entirely natural in that moment.

Midgelow proffers “convergence” (2019, p.8) as an improvisatory theme. Others include

“irreversibility”, which speaks to the work of the dancers as the “constant process of making choices and going with them” and “receptivity” (ibid), which Stephen describes as “the ensemble work involved in listening and tuning into the other performers, asking what are they doing? Where are they in the space? Where are they moving to next? How are they moving?

What is happening for the audience?” [AC 1A, reflection after events, 11/11/19].

Midgelow’s final improvisatory theme of “emergent-construction” (2019, p.8) perhaps encapsulates the dancers’ task of creating a relationship between the “known container”

(Hopfinger, 2018 p.65) of their rehearsed material and the unpredictability of the children’s responses. Seashore’s framework of four potential ways – frame, balance, contrast and track – in which the dancers might respond to the children’s initiatives, was in itself a framework for improvisation because each functioned as an attitude towards the entire encounter of the show, rather than towards specific sections or performance vocabularies. In this way the framework

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had the potential to play out at any point, regardless of the formality, informality or open- endedness of the performative material. Initially, the bulk of the responsibility for deploying the elements of the framework rested with Stephen and Felecia.

Insight Convergence, May 24 2019

The ‘thongs’ section of Seashore is in full flow. Children from the audience

families and the performing families have entered the space, drawn in by the open-

ended quality of the section, by the availability of the thongs-as-play-objects and by

the presence of other children. For the children from the performing families

‘thongs’ has become a favourite and much anticipated section.

Felecia and Stephen are on task. Felecia’s task is to create patterns with the

thongs and Stephen’s is to destroy them. They are free to use the space and respond

to children as they see fit, as long as they stay within these tasks. A child responds

to the rhythm of the ukulele. She’s wearing one thong, which is far too big for her

little foot; she harnesses this to adopt a slapping stomp as she travels forwards.

Stephen joins in. Together they create a small procession in a strong forwards

pathway. The rhythm enters the child’s knees; she bends further and bounces as she

stomps, and so does Stephen. The child’s initiative ends. She concludes the dance

and she and Stephen separate in the space to begin new initiatives. After the show a

TYA colleague attending as a guest quips that she hopes we’re working up a contract

for the child to tour with us, so perfectly had her initiative fitted the show and so

seamlessly had Stephen responded to it.

***

In practice the dancers found it hard to hold all four elements in mind at once, in fact, rather

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than an explicit holding in mind, the dancers refer to the framework as becoming more of an implicit practice of awareness, “developed through consciousness and sub-consciousness”

[Stephen, reflection after events, 11/11/19]. As their experience of the framework deepened they both discovered preferences, for example, framing proved particularly useful for the two dancers to deploy together, drawing on “an ability to frame the drama and each other and the child all at the same time” [ibid].

Frame, 1 June 2011. Image: Sia Duff

Table 5.7 (overleaf) provides some examples of the relationship between the response categories, children’s actions and performer responses in practice.

Frame and balance are in many ways co-creative responses and add coherence to the performance when the children’s own responses are already in dialogue with the show. The

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performers make decisions about what to respond to, based on their sense of the child’s desire to be involved in the theatrical encounter. This requires “self confidence in your artistic skills”

[Stephen, reflection by e-mail, 16/6/19].

Category Children’s Actions Performer Response

Ramona is drawn to Felecia. See Felecia frames Ramona’s sitting presence by

image above – DreamBIG show, travelling around her in a circular pathway, 1/6/19] then by positioning the next gestural phrase Frame (hand pile) over her head. Stephen joins the hand pile image.

Children are in the space, gazing at Stephen, Felecia and Heather adjust their the action [See image below – positions to balance the space in relation to Balance DreamBIG show, 1/6/19]. the children’s presence.

Jackson decides to start running. The Felecia tracks Jackson, integrating her run is soft and playful but his energy is response into her actions by extending her Track at odds with the feeling tone (Stern, gestural phrase into pointing at his pathway 1998, p.13) of the ‘smooth pieces of as he runs by, then resuming her rehearsed glass and shells’ section [Lab run, phrase.

28/5/19] Kiara walks purposefully towards Felecia pauses to accommodate Kiara Felecia who is rolling [DreamBIG without looking at her, then tracks with her show, 1/6/19]. gaze as she rolls away from Kiara and rises up to standing.

Table 5.7: Framework in action

Stephen goes on to clarify this as follows: “Our work looks to invite others’ participation

(professional and audience). Sometimes your ideas are taken up and sometimes not.

Sometimes an audience member doesn't want to engage with you or may be afraid for a variety of reasons. This requires the performer to understand that today that child didn't want to participate. You may notice and observe that, but it doesn't mean that you have failed or didn't get 'it right' “ (ibid). Heather’s observation of the work of Stephen and Felecia is that it requires “the opposite to an internalised form of dancing”, drawing on a multi-dimensional, peripheral sensory perspective on the space [reflection after events, 11/11/19].

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Balance, 1 June 2019. Image: Sia Duff.

4th Performer

The 4th performer establishes the feeling tone (Stern, 1998, p.13) of the space, manages the enrolment, scaffolds elements of the open-ended sections, manages the pace and duration of some sections by cueing the musician, and maintains an overview of the audience – noting the wellbeing or otherwise of everyone present.

My primary task as Seashore’s 4th performer was to create the sense of security required for safe and authentic encounter between audience and performers. My work began with the stages of the enrolment phase. I scaffolded (Eisner, p.73) the enrolment with various tones of voice designed to move the audience from the quotidian world of their arrival to the world of the show. By recording myself watching and describing footage of my handling of the enrolment on 1 June 2019, I was able to document the words (spontaneous and scripted) I used

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and the actions I undertook, to make the following observations:

1. I needed to repeat logistical information (such as where to sit, where to place bags)

many times.

2. I provided a kind of countdown to the start of the show, anticipating the passage of

the pre-set [chalk play] time by using words such as nearly ready and we’re just

waiting for a few more families and by allowing plenty of time to collect up the

chalk as a cue for the end of the enrolment phase.

3. My words suggested a sensory environment: [deep breath] breathe the sea air.

4. My words allowed the enrolment to function as a kind of overture, alluding to

images that appeared later in the show: it’s like footprints in the sand.

5. I needed to support a parent with a visibly nervous child. I recommended that they

stand and allow their child to peep over their shoulder to see the show and/or to

move to a place near an exit so that the child feels they have the option to leave.

6. The chalk play activity allowed me to maintain constant verbal contact with

Stephen, Felecia and Heather.

Through listening to the rather high pitch of my voice during the enrolment and contrasting it with the measured tones of my recorded commentary, I discerned that I had been nervous, which reminded me that handling the enrolment is always challenging. The above observations could become an enrolment checklist (countdown, sensory images, overture, maintain contact), which may support my feeling of preparedness in future seasons.

Musician

Seashore’s musician, Heather, was a sonic and visual anchor point. Her deployment of the

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framework was more subtle than that of the dancers, but no less important. Her responses to the children framed their presence and she balanced the space with her own spatial modification in relation to the presence of the children. Heather considers that she provides music that is

“sustained and trustworthy” for the dancers, as a means of supporting the relationship between the set structure and responsive quality of their work, and of “holding the space for this changeability to occur” [reflection after events, 11/11/19]. Heather describes her work as

“pivotal” in a spatial and energetic sense, with a grounded quality that the children perceive

(ibid).

Heather also responded discreetly and efficiently to my holding of the space. Throughout

Seashore we stayed in close verbal and eye contact, working together with a pre-arranged system of dependable cues to hasten, delay or pause sections via the music. The Seashore

Blues section provides an example of our use of pause at the point of ‘catching a wave’, a great wave-like rush from two sides to the centre of the space.

Video Clip 8

View footage of Heather and me handling ‘catching a wave’ by clicking or pasting the link into your web browser: https://youtu.be/_MYOUzMQ5Fo

Video Descriptor: This invitational moment combines a flexible structure with a system of dependable cues between Heather and me, allowing Heather’s music to support an unhurried transaction, proceeding according to the will and pace of the children.

Heather maintained a musical bed while I invited the wave. My invitation was not a routine

‘audience participation’ moment, because my choice to extend the invitation or not depended on each occasion on my reading of the audience’s “bodily felt qualities of the elements of the experience of the dance event … [its] vibrations, rhythms, radiance, aliveness, expressiveness,

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and atmosphere” (Engel, 2006, p.93). Heather shared this aliveness to the space in the sense that “the more alive one is, the more energy is available for action and feeling” (ibid).

5.9.3 The Work of the Parents/Carers

The work of the performance and the performers is only one third of a “triangle of stimulus – sounds, movement, adult” identified by a parent during the Seashore PDG [AC 2, 28/5/19], in an echo of Desfosses’ triangular relationship between performers, parents/carers and children

(2009, p.103). TEY practitioners universally agree about the need to pay careful attention to parents/carers. All of the artists in adult cohort 1 referred in some way to the implications for the show of the parent/carer presence, expressed in ideas from managing the “tension for the parent” [Noonan, AC 1A, 7/9/18], “making the parents feel comfortable” [Grierson and Tesch,

AC 1B, 6/9/19] and attending to parent/carer dilemmas such as “do I participate or am I only an observer?” [AC 1A, company reflection after events, 2/4/19] to the importance of valuing the presence of parents [AC 1A, thematic analysis of transcripts] by “layering the relationships” [Grierson and Tesch, AC 1B, 6/9/19] between parents, babies and performers.

Seashore built on the work of project one in identifying and providing for the needs of parents/carers attending TEY. Artistically, Seashore took parent/carer involvement far further than I have before by inviting them as artistic partners with their children into the creative action and into the performance itself. This highlighted the delicate balance for them between leading and following their children and the implications of this for their own presence in the theatrical space. For the purposes of the research the partnership of the Seashore parents/carers became a key factor in working towards an effective language of practice for supporting parents/carers attending TEY as ticketed audiences, because their participation in the project made visible their dilemmas and allowed time for their questions.

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The art of parenting in the TEY space requires a dual awareness in the parent/carer of the needs of the child and the aesthetic nature of the theatre experience. My words during the welcome stage of the enrolment encourage parents/carers to do their ‘usual job of looking out for their child’ in the knowledge that ‘it’s all part of the show’. Their work as catalysts for their child’s capacity to participate in the show is thus balanced by their role as witnesses of their children’s experience of it (see section 3.3).

Witnesses

Parent/carer witnessing is a key feature of TEY, in which “parents, children and performers

[are linked] in a complex network of mutuality” (Fletcher-Watson, 2016a, p.174). As a parent described it, “baby is part of the show therefore you are part of the show” [PDG 1/12/18].

Fletcher-Watson considers this to be a dyadic reformulation of the feedback loop described by

Fischer-Lichte as “an autopoietic process characterised by contingency” (2016, p.164). If “the feedback loop between baby and carer is heightened beyond the typical domestic level of action-response… each reaction intensifies to form a rich proto-drama” (Fletcher-Watson,

2013, p.22), resulting in the inclusion of the audience in the aesthetic envelope of the show.

This can arise in private exchanges between parent/carer and child within the audience zone or in highly visible exchanges across the space, for example when the child uses their parent on the circle (» or «). When the feedback loop unfolds between performer and child, through the child’s participation and the performers’ choice of response, the delighted attention of parents/carers on their children’s actions can have as performative a quality as the formal material of the show.

At times, the situation for parents/carers can be awkward, such as on the occasions when the child invites their adult right into the action, which may feel at odds for the adult with their sense of the formality of the performance or their simple desire not to be visible to the rest of

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the audience. Most adults are understandably reticent about entering the performance space, even if during the course of the show the audience-performance spaces completely re-configure

(as is the case with my work Touch & Go for children aged 2 years). The presence of the performing families in Seashore was undoubtedly a factor in encouraging some audience parents/carers to join in with their children, perhaps rising above their misgivings to experience a surprise that “is one of self recognition” (Heim, 2016, p.160) as playful co-creator.

Catalysts

The pre-requisite for young children’s participation in TEY is their security as they navigate their own trust journey through the show. A Seashore parent described how “adult attention is so significant – Mum…Tick = I can engage” [AC 2, PDG 28/5/19]. The Wide Eyes Festival

(Galway, 2018) gave me the opportunity to witness this in action. I noted in my reflective practice journal (6/2/18) how:

‘A very frightened child climbed right on to her mother, but was still interested in viewing the show (Uoo, Mee, Weee! – a co-production between Baboró and Branar Teater do Phaisti,

Ireland, for children aged 3 to 6). The mother took her gently to the side and together they sat on the stairs, where the child seemed to feel that she was more securely positioned, perhaps because of having a more visible exit strategy than was available in the middle of a row of seating. She still needed a protective barrier however, and firmly placed her mother’s hand over her own eyes. The mother played gently with removing her hand intermittently, but the child placed it back again. Eventually, the child was able to move to sitting side by side with her mum and to viewing the show with companionable enjoyment’.

Desfosses mentions a similar observation made by Lauren Dupont, her artistic partner, who noted how “extreme fear [can be] tied to an irresistible curiosity” in very young audiences,

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adding: “Sometimes children need the adult’s knees” (2009, p.103). The “feeling way” (Stern,

1998, p.4) in which young children view their environment means that their parent’s/carer’s responses to the TEY experience tend to underpin their own, because they are expert readers of the non-verbal world (ibid). With this in mind, a Seashore parent recommended an initial

“focus on the parents because then the children relax” [AC 2, PDG 28/5/19]. This parent went on to talk about how Seashore’s enrolment (chalk play) and verbal introduction provided a clear message to parents/carers that “made it OK for children to enter the space” [ibid]. He also referred to having attended a presentation of Touch & Go with his child the previous year and having experienced permission to enter the space as a “relief” [ibid]. The parent further noted that an element of the Touch & Go set (a floor level line of masking tape) had functioned like the shoreline floor piece in the Seashore set as a useful non-verbal way of telling parents/carers where to sit on arrival.

This parent’s sense of relief when provided with clear information spoke to the tension often accompanying parents/carers’ experience of attending TEY. While parents/carers observed that everyone’s “physical and emotional safety inside the show emanated from pre-show information and the confidence of the performers with this age group” [AC 2, PDG 6/10/18], achieving a sense of parent/carer security is never straightforward because every family arrives in the TEY space with their own expectations, experiences of theatre and the cultural and class factors behind their choice to attend. Regardless of reassuring messages conveyed before a run of Nursery during the Adelaide Series, parents/carers reported having lingering queries: “Is it

OK to enter the mat? How much would this interrupt the performers? How do I navigate the fact that my baby needs me?” [AC 2, PDG 8/9/18].

Parent/carer views of children, often arising from their own childhoods, are a significant factor.

My company’s ethos of responding to young children’s agency may clash, consciously or otherwise, in the mind of the parent/carer, with older but nonetheless highly pervasive models

194 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Five: Creative Works

of childhood. Austin refers to the ‘property’ model in which children are contained and expected to be subordinate and the ‘deficit’ model, in which they are perceived as vulnerable and as yet lacking capacity (2019, Converge Symposium keynote), both of which have implications for the way parents/carers facilitate their child’s relationship with the show.

Parent/carer responses to their own perceptions play out during the show as tipping points in terms of whether they choose to intervene or otherwise. My journal (6/2/18) notes an example, falling ultimately on the side of parental trust, during a Wide Eyes Festival performance of

Sleepy Little Pillow/Pernuta Somnorasa (by Teatrul Ion Creanga, Romania, for children aged five months to four years):

‘A baby [14 months or so?] used a tissue or a handkerchief to try to dance like the performers had with their silky fabric, and moved towards the stage. The carer thought of pulling her back but didn’t. The baby turned back to the carer before reaching the stage and appeared to be experiencing pride and connection, conveying “did you see what I saw?” to her carer’.

Similarly, a parent attending Nursery on 1/12/18 observed that her daughter had been

“confronted” at times by the show, but that this had not been negatively perceived by the mother, because “that’s what art’s supposed to do, right?” [AC 2, PDG 1/12/18]. In contrast,

Mclean explains how a mother transmitted her own state of tension to her child during a performance of Nursery in 2015. To use the language of the Circle of Security© (Cooper at al.,

2019) and its implications as an aspect of the observational schema developed by this research, the child had begun to move away from the secure base of his mother into the performance space (circle »), looking back to his mother (circle «) as a way of checking her response to his choice:

195 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Five: Creative Works

The mother quickly bundled baby Thomas (pseudonym) up and sat him on her lap for the

rest of the performance feeding and distracting him, tacitly reinforcing the baby’s

uncertainty and impeding his ongoing self-propelled dance of curiosity. Later Liz, the

mother, rationalised her decision to hold onto Thomas because “he was teething”.

Reflecting, she commented that perhaps she had misread the situation and had inadvertently

modelled for Thomas the dance of “It’s not safe to go into the circle” (JM field note, 2015).

McLean and Chance, 2019, p.311

Over the course of projects one and two the reflections of adult cohort 2 began to lead to some guidelines encapsulated in the following advice for parents/carers attending TEY:

“The shows that Sally Chance Dance creates are for the child. This unique experience is an opportunity for you to observe how your little one interacts. They might watch, use their voice, get in the way, or sit back and not play today but it’s all valid. This is space that is created for them to experience. The performers know how to take inspiration from your child and will give them a beautiful experience” [AC 2, PDG 1/12/18].

In summary, a parent who had attended both projects noted how “the most important word is interactive – but that it’s not the parents’ responsibility to ‘make’ this happen, it’s the responsibility of the performance itself” [AC 2, PDG 8/9/18]. This brings us back to the show and the goal of my work, which is that a shared aesthetic experience takes place “in and through the process of the bodily co-presence” of parents/carers with their children (Fischer-

Lichte, 2016, p.164), and in which, “in this live-ness … the air is electric, brimming with possibilities for co-creation” (Heim, 2016, pp. 146-7) between performers and children.

196 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Six: Conclusion

Chapter Six: Conclusion

This exegesis has framed a process of artistic practice and scholarly research. The research was undertaken in the field of performance studies, with the goal of understanding the work involved in structuring and presenting Theatre for Early Years (TEY) as a responsive encounter between performers and very young audiences of children aged three years and younger. I investigated, analysed and articulated the relationship between the structure of two performance works, the work of the performers and the observable actions of young children as audience members and co-creative participants, to submit that underpinning young children’s responses to live performance is an aesthetic intention in relation to the show, and that their participation has the potential to be a critical aspect of the materials of construction of the show when harnessed by the performers within the framework of performer responsivity proffered as an output of the study.

TEY Practitioner Knowledge Infrastructure

The study contributes to TEY practitioner knowledge infrastructure by making available a practical method of balancing rehearsed material with opportunities for un-rehearsed artistic exchange in real time with very young audiences, whilst maintaining performative coherence within and throughout the work. Furthermore, given that “much more than a collection of skills, professional practice is intimately entangled with identity and belief” (Andersen, 2017, p.10), the practical application of this method is underpinned by a broader philosophical implication for practitioner perception of young children’s participation in live performance, and hence an argument that the cultural provision made available to them warrants a high level of ambition in its scope, content and delivery, as well as in terms of its “emotional and intellectual engagement” (Reason, 2010, p.39).

197 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Six: Conclusion

In the context of my own approach to Theatre for Early Years (TEY), which aims to maximise the intra-activity (Hickey-Moody, 2018, p.2, [citing Barad, 2007]) of the encounter, where the latter involves “different groups of people who negotiate and regulate their relationship”

(Fischer-Lichte, 2009, p.391), the performative relationship between the two groups becomes

“the means to create the performance as well as the performance itself” (Knapton, 2008, pp. 60-

61, Knapton’s emphasis). The children were understood throughout the research to be active agents, exercising the full ontological force of their ‘being-ness’ through and by means of two artistic works, Nursery (for babies aged 4-18 months) and Seashore (with and for young children aged three years and younger). These works functioned methodologically as the means by which the participation of young children in TEY and the work of TEY performers could be observed, theorised and codified into techniques as method for application to creative work (Smith and

Dean, 2009, p.20). The works themselves were artistic outputs of the research.

Children’s Participation and Performer Responsivity

Literature in the emergent field of TEY scholarship has proffered broad behavioural categories observable in young children within a live TEY experience (Young and Powers, 2008; Dunlop et al., 2011) and dramaturgical principles of practice (Fletcher-Watson, 2016a; Pérez and

Hovik, 2020). My research has built on this work, contributing to TEY literature and practitioner knowledge infrastructure by making an explicit link between the observable actions of young children experiencing live performance and the techniques deployed by the performers to create the conditions for co-creative participation. I have argued that underpinning each child’s response is an intention in relation to the show and I have shown that young children’s participation, encompassing at its simplest a spectrum from viewing to doing, has deeper nuances I term gaze, initiative, sharing and circle, re-positioning ideas about viewing and doing along a continuum of purposeful activity rather than in binary opposition, welcoming – and indeed inviting – the participation of the children.

198 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Six: Conclusion

Babies and young children bestow an intense gaze on the show, they offer the show their co- creative initiatives, they involve themselves in sharing the show with other children and they explore the environment of the show and the people in it using the parent/carer as a secure base on the circle of security (Cooper et al., 2019). A framework of performer responsivity proffers the categories frame, balance, track and contrast to codify for performers a range of potential ways of responding to the children’s participation. While the categories are particularly applicable to theatre which privileges non-verbal forms, the framework may be relevant to the practice of other Theatre for Early Years performers and performance-makers, and potentially to creators whose work targets older children in the field of Theatre for Young Audiences

(TYA), because the categories apply across and throughout the work as a principle of responsive practice, rather than to a specific movement vocabulary, or performance form.

The methodological basis of my investigation into the relationship between invitation and participation in TEY was practice-led research (PLR). This approach required me to begin with a consideration of my own practice. I brought together babies and young children, in the company of their parents/carers, and performers presenting live, prepared performance material, in order to give coherence to observing how the children responded to the live theatrical encounter. To this end 20 Adelaide-based families attended two types of theatrical experience – performances (projects one and two) and a Family Dance Lab (project two). I used ethnographic methodology to gather and harness the observations of parents/carers, my own observations and those of my company members – Heather Frahn, Felecia Hick and

Stephen Noonan – the three artists collaboratively involved throughout.

For the company, the projects evolved our language of practice, leading to the framework of performer responsivity by means of the works, Nursery and Seashore. The research journey allowed us to review and deepen our practice, and to re-frame approaches that needed to be refreshed. This was exciting. For example, matching, a long-term pillar of our performance

199 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Six: Conclusion

language (see section 3.1), has become refined and re-integrated into our works by means of the framework. Where the original iteration of Nursery used matching as a discrete section, creating a distinction between sections of matching and sections of set performative material, the company considers that new works, and any future opportunities to present Nursery, will not separate matching into its own section because the performers now adopt a responsive frame of mind throughout the work. For example, what once we would have described as a

‘matchable moment’ is now an opportunity to ‘frame’ a child’s participation. This has created a greater level of confidence in the responsive qualities of the company’s performative material, and in our ability to exercise our professional instincts, now solidly grounded in technique. The enormous benefit to the company is that our next project will begin with a greater level of responsive rigour, building on the work of this research from its outset.

Parent/Carer Role Warrants Further Study

For Young, “enquiring into the nature of the experience for the participating babies and toddlers has to be linked with detailed analysis of the ways in which the adult carers participated and were supported in participating” (2004, p.18). Critical to this process is the delicate management of the adult “audience’s perceptive potential before a performance begins” (Whitmore, 1994, p.36). I feel that a full analysis of the myriad ways in which my pre- show communications, messages for parents/carers during the show, and the shows themselves were received by parents/carers was beyond the scope of this study, given that “each spectator comes to the performance with a different amount of information framing the experience”

(Whitmore, 1994, p.42). The depth and complexity of the social, intellectual and personal- historical framing systems (ibid) brought to TEY by each parent/carer warrants further study.

200 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Six: Conclusion

I am interested – No. 4 “in how much dancers know and how little we share it with the world.” Lerman, 2011

My DCI was initially motivated by a desire to tell the world about babies’ capacity for a cultural life. My “enthusiasm of practice” (Haseman, 2009, p.56) was all about the competence of babies and young children as audiences and about making this visible through my performance work. As an emerging researcher in the very early phase of subjecting my artistic philosophy and practice to formal study, the proverbial ‘stone in my shoe’ was that the adults in the lives of babies and young children (parents/carers, performers, presenters, curators and critics) tend to miss many of their non-verbally expressed intentions. In this rather defensive frame of mind, one of my working titles was ‘having eyes to see,’ which sought to provide an aesthetic rationale for TEY on the basis that very young audiences were misunderstood, poorly provided for in cultural terms and subject to the limited gaze of their adults.

I came to realise that “accounts of early childhood that dwell in the … competency [and] progress … of the child are no longer enough. They were never enough” (Hackett, 2019, p.4) and so the trajectory of my research moved my own state of mind away from this limited – and indeed limiting – perspective, creating a shift from being motivated by advocacy for my very young audiences, to understanding how the children, the company artists and I could generate knowledge together.

‘Heart warm, beautiful eyes, such willingness to connect and create, child energy, alive and open to ideas and wholeness of body’ [Reflective practice journal, 19/3/19].

Bedard sees TEY as a potentially revolutionising force within the broader practice of TYA. He asks: “Does this age group (a subset of the cultural construction of childhood) offer a definition of ‘child’ about which both the theatre artists and society as a whole more readily agree? Or, rather than an expansion of the definition of child, does this represent the emergence of a new field and a new performative?” (2009, p.27).

201 I See You Seeing Me • Chapter Six: Conclusion

As an emergent field (Osten, 2009; Goldman, 2011; Fletcher-Watson, 2016a; Hovik and Pérez,

2020) TEY has the potential to represent both, at once creating environments in which young children have the opportunity “to ‘child’ – [the TEY space] giving rise to diverse modes of being a child” (Hackett and Rautio, 2019, p.1020), and welcoming the being-ness of each very young audience member. My research establishes that TEY can harness this heterogeneity, creating a world which positions the participation of young children as an aspect of its artistic quality, in which “children answer [that] world through their moving bodies” (Hackett and

Rautio, 2019, p.1029).

Such a rich sharing of performative experiences enhances community and inter-generational connectedness and – above all – a respect and appreciation for the ways in which babies and very young children can be a force in the cultural lives of their societies.

***

202 I See You Seeing Me • Appendices

Appendices

203 I See You Seeing Me • Appendix A

Appendix A – I Am Interested…

Liz Lerman, Hiking the Horizontal. Field Notes from a Choreographer (2011)

Artist’s statement used in Dance Exchange press kit, early 1990s

I am interested in remembering why I started to dance and how happy I was at that moment; in what we dance about; in who gets to do the dancing; in the idea that dance is a birthright; in keeping professional dancers alive as human beings; in what dancers have to learn from people who have been in motion for over sixty years; in how much dancers know and how little we share it with the rest of the world; in how much dancers know and how little the rest of the world knows we know it; in the moment when people who are too fat, too clumsy, too old, too sick to dance actually step out and dance, and how transformed the dancer and the watcher are in that moment; in how my choreography is a vehicle for me to learn about anything I want; in the continual hunt for interesting movement vocabulary that satisfies performers, watchers, and the subject matter; in the aesthetic, physical and social implications of combining young and old; in making an environment that somehow leaves room for individual and collective participation but stays loyal to an artistic idea and focus; in the continuing challenge of making personal expression valuable to me, the dancers, and the lady next door.

204 I See You Seeing Me • Appendix B

Appendix B – Ethnographic Texts

B.1 Colour Coded Text

Stephen and Felecia are quite still, positioned head to toe on the floor, at right angles to the shared gaze of the audience. Heather stands between them facing the audience. They create a strong performative trio.

The space belongs performatively to Stephen, Heather and Felecia for a moment.

Stephen and Felecia start rolling slowly, a tidal swell, kinetically matching the sonic effect of the ocean drum, towards the audience and away again, though not in unison. Kiara is drawn in to the space perhaps by the music, perhaps by the action, perhaps by her familiarity with the performers (circle »). She stands between the dancers, gazing, her presence contributing to the image created by all three performers. She turns, raises her hands joyfully and returns to her mother (circle «).

Heather starts to sing. Stephen and Felecia continue to roll, now quite fast, but suspending the roll at times. Kiara walks purposefully towards Felecia. She catches Stephen’s eye. They smile at each other in a moment of complicité. Felecia is rolling. She pauses to accommodate Kiara without looking at her, then tracks with her gaze as she rolls away from Kiara. Kiara stays close to Felecia as Felecia rises up to standing. Together they create a fleeting image of tenderness and connection within the rehearsed action. As Felecia sets off Kiara is startled and loses her balance, landing on her hands.

205 I See You Seeing Me • Appendix B

B.2 Text Highlighting Initiative Factors

Ramona’s body urges her forwards [IMPULSE], leading with her face and chin (circle »), as she moves from leaning back on her mother, to squatting, her mother supporting her. She relaxes back again (circle «) but only for a moment, before struggling a little to gain her own feet (circle »). Her mother supports her to rise to standing. She stands for a wobbly moment, then is drawn into the action by the “seabirds” pathways (circle »). She walks quickly and intentionally forwards [PURPOSEFUL] just as Stephen and Felecia are travelling in her direction. Felecia’s pathway takes her opposite Ramona. Stephen also looks at Ramona. They all pause for a moment.

Felecia lifts her left foot, bird-like, and spreads her elbows, wing-like. Ramona lifts her arms in response and touches her forehead with both hands [CO-CREATIVE] (perhaps she is initiating a version of the shells image that we know she loves and find memorable) and starts travelling in to the space [PURPOSEFUL].

Felecia travels away. Stephen moves in and bends down to Ramona’s level. They gaze at each other as he responds briefly to her gesture by lifting his own arms, before moving away.

Ramona follows him on her own pathway at a bit of a distance [PURPOSEFUL]. From sitting,

Ramona watches Stephen and Felecia travelling in a circle.

She stands and considers heading back to her mother or is perhaps just checking in visually with her (circle «). Stephen and Felecia arrive centre stage for their gestural sequence of waves.

Ramona’s attention is caught by Stephen’s gestures (hands and arms rise and lower).

The clarity of Stephen’s position allows Ramona to move close [IMPULSE]. She matches

Stephen by lifting her arms [CO-CREATIVE]. In the whole-ness of her bodily participation

[PURPOSEFUL] she relishes the upward gesture and lifts her head too, which causes her to

206 I See You Seeing Me • Appendix B

lose her balance and bump down. Sitting, she looks at the ocean drum, then back at Stephen, with her chin lifted high. Heather begins to drum the ocean drum. Ramona notices that this is a different sound (Heather has started drumming it rather than the earlier sound of swirling the ball bearings inside it to make the sound of the sea). She gazes at Felecia’s swooping sea bird, all the way behind her. Looking over her shoulder for this she appears to notice the audience and she looks at them for a long moment, tracking along the row. She finds her mother (circle

«) and is reassured, because she lifts her chin and smiles, then gazes back at Heather.

Stephen starts the hand pile game. Felecia joins it. Ramona rises up to standing [IMPULSE].

Felecia decides to frame her presence in the space by travelling around her. Ramona watches

Felecia’s circular pathway and bumps down again. Felecia continues to frame Ramona by situating the next hand-pile image over her head. Stephen joins this image. Ramona reaches up softly to their hands [CO-CREATIVE]. Stephen and Felecia travel away.

Ramona decides [ARC] to return to her mother (circle «). She stands and looks over her shoulder at Felecia en route back to her mother, perhaps saying goodbye with an arm action

[SATISFYING]. Felecia micro-matches her arm action.

207 I See You Seeing Me • Appendix C

Appendix C – Company (AC 1A) Interviews

C.1 Thematic Analysis

Descriptive Codes Interpretive Codes Overarching theme

Artists’ professional ethos Artists’ professional knowledge Artists’ dispositions TEY performer skill set Responsive rigour Artists’ responsibilities Specific performative skills

Meeting point Enjoying Uncertainty Dramaturgical choices Space of possibility Two worlds Magic Children’s Agency

Clear messages for parents The triangular audience* Need to attend to parents/carers Valuing parent presence (Desfosses, 2009, p.103)

* Overarching themes “can draw directly on any theoretical ideas that might underlie your study so long as these are supported by the analysis so far” (King and Horrocks, 2010, p.156).

208 I See You Seeing Me • Appendix C

C.2 Interpretive Coding of Company Interviews

Comments Descriptive Codes Interpretive Codes TEY has its own artistic language Artists’ professional ethos Performer skill set TEY is rigorous, praxical No hierarchy of form TEY performers respond to their audiences TEY artists understand the worth of the work On a learning journey Company ethos welcomes viewing and doing Children’s viewing to doing is not causative or instrumental, IE not we do this then you try, has no particular aim but is about sensation, joy and sharing this with parent No pre-defined outcomes Deep knowledge of the audience Artists’ professional Performer skill set The world of the audience knowledge Deep age-specific knowledge of the audience Embodied ways of communicating Intuitive (non cognitive) knowledge Intuitive Artists’ disposition Performer skill set Serene, calm A security in the work, a security in each other and a security in the self Authentic, genuine, not false, no ego TEY artist needs curiosity Responsibility to be in the right frame of mind Artists’ responsibilities Performer skill set Performer role balances the show now with an attitude to the child’s broader life Securely establishing the meeting point

209 I See You Seeing Me • Appendix C

Moment by moment/present moment Specific performative skills Performer skill set Work of performers – tuning in in multiple directions Accommodate the unexpected Re-directing the performative attention to what we value, not anything goes Acknowledge what’s happening Clear intention Audience “reads” the performer intention Establishing the game Meaning is made through physical expression and relationship “Being” Improvisation Knowing the material so well that its embodied 360º awareness Creating an energy Performers must navigate tension of moving between certainty [set material] and uncertainty [unknown nature of how they might have to respond] Music shapes the experience Exchange, meeting, conversation, encounters, Meeting point Space of possibility interaction, contingency Invitation Possibilities, what can happen Enjoying uncertainty Space of possibility Co-existence of “two worlds” IE Performers move between set pieces and interaction, structure and freedom Artistic framework models a participatory idea Dramaturgical choices Space of possibility We’ve chosen things Types of invitation Creating an experience of wonder and imagination Set material allows for performers to move to where a child is to incorporate them into the image Allows for responsive-ness Effectiveness of circle Meaning of narrative is not pre-determined Images build Heightened, magic Magic Space of possibility Something higher Different space, significance

210 I See You Seeing Me • Appendix C

Audience participates, engages, expresses Children’s agency Space of possibility Children’s interaction Child responses (watch, initiate, follow) Status of babies as co-creators Babies’ (sensory) skills Child responses – observing, going in Babies’ own version Babies tune(d) in Babies’ sense of the arc of the show Babies’ skills as a mass audience Babies’ individual experiences Interaction can be subtle No hierarchy of experience for children Children’s participation is a valid part of the Clear messages for parents Need to attend to show parents/carers Reassuring parents that it’s not an interruption Reassuring parents that it’s not a requirement but an invitation Allowing, permitting seem to be about conforming Bring our aims to the attention of the parents Bring our child participatory ethos to the attention of the parents Parents not in the world of the show is biggest challenge Parent not getting it Energetic presence of parents, having eyes to see Parent scaffolding Pre-requisites for creating the encounter (secure Valuing parent presence Need to attend to environment) parents/carers Parent delight Importance of parent comfort Importance of valuing parents Importance of including parents Safety of babies Parent journey to relaxation.

211 I See You Seeing Me • Appendix D

Appendix D – Performance Works

Babydrama, (2005), Unga Klara

Baby Rave, (2005), Young at Art

Blackrock, (1997), La Boite Theatre

Cerita Anak [Child’s Story], (2015-2017), Polyglot Theatre and Papermoon Puppet Theatre

The Green Sheep, (2005), Windmill Theatre

Haircuts by Children, (2006), Mammalian Diving Reflex

How High the Sky, (2012), Polyglot Theatre

Oogly Boogly, (2003), Guy Dartnell and Tom Morris

Old People, Children and Animals, (2008), Quarantine

Pas de Loup, (2018), Compagnie ONAVIO

Pernuta Somnoroasa, (2018), Teatrul Ion Creanga

Rain, (2014), Drop Bear Theatre and The Seam

Shh…Bang, (2016), Peut-Être

Übung, (2001), Kabinet K

Uoo, Mee, Weee! (2018), Baboró and Branar Teater do Phaisti

Wild Life, (2015), Sarah Hopfinger

9 x 9, (2002), Les Ballets C de la B

212 I See You Seeing Me • References

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220 I See You Seeing Me • Tables and Figures

List of Tables and Figures

Tables Table 1.1: Audiences and their age ranges...... 22

Table 1.2: Young children’s roles in Seashore ...... 24

Table 4.1: Ethnographic Methods ...... 99

Table 4.2: Observational texts – colour codes ...... 109

Table 5.1: Taxonomy of participation...... 123

Table 5.2: Iterative process – Reflective practice journal, 8 September 2018...... 129

Table 5.3: Iterative process – Reflective practice journal, 6 October 2018...... 133

Table 5.4: States of being...... 134

Table 5.5: Framework of performer responsivity ...... 142

Table 5.6: Seashore’s structural section types ...... 178

Table 5.7: Framework in action ...... 187

Figures Figure 4.1: Timeline...... 81

Figure 4.2: Three little heads, Reflective practice journal, 12 April 2018 ...... 98

Figure 4.3: Parent/carer ‘post it’ observation notes, 28 May 2019...... 101

Figure 5.1: Observation notes, 8 September 2018 ...... 128

Figure 5.2: The six stages of enrolment ...... 130

Figure 5.3: Thematic analysis, AC 1A...... 139

Figure 5.4: Pre-performance information for families...... 160

221 I See You Seeing Me

I SEE YOU SEEING ME

An analysis of the relationship between invitation and participation in Theatre for Early Years

Sally Chance 9914617 Doctor of Creative Industries Queensland University of Technology

9 November 2020

222