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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.

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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

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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

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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).

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    ASSITEJ GENERAL ASSEMBLY Cape Town, South Africa, May 17 – 27, 2017. CANDIDATE FOR THE TREASURER Name of Centre: ASSITEJ ITALIA Name of Candidate: ROBERTO FRABETTI Presentation of candidate: Roberto Frabetti has been the Treasurer and member of the Executive Committee for the period 2014-2017. In 1976 he took part in the foundation of La Baracca - Teatro Testoni Ragazzi di Bologna – Italy. For this company he works as director, actor and playwright, but also as artistic director, project manager and administrator. In 1986 he started the research on Theatre and Early years, and in 2007 he funded the Network Small size. He is project manager of Small size, Performing Arts for Early Years, a four year large cooperation project supported by Creative Europe, the Cultural program of the European Commission. He is artistic and organisational director of “Visioni di futuro, visioni di teatro - International Festival of theatre and culture for early years”, a La Baracca - Testoni Ragazzi project. He is one of the promoters of the “Charter of children's rights to art and culture”, a La Baracca - Testoni Ragazzi project awarded with Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic. On behalf of La Baracca - Testoni Ragazzi, he received the ASSITEJ Award for Artistic Excellence 2008 for the project “0-3 years. Theatre for the very young”. In 2013, he received the National Award “Infanzia (Childhood) - Piccolo Plauto 2013” for the “contribution to Children Culture”. Also in 2013, he was awarded the “ASSITEJ Germany Award 2013 - Assitej Prize for special achievements in the field of Theatre for Young Audiences” for “his dedication to our theatre’s very smallest and very youngest spectators and in appreciation of his tireless commitment to borderless dialogue and artistic exchange.
  • A Guide to Uk Theatre for Young Audiences

    A Guide to Uk Theatre for Young Audiences

    A GUIDE TO UK THEATRE FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES 2009/2011 Edited by Paul Harman A GUIDE TO UK THEATRE FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES 2009/2011 Edited by Paul Harman AURORA METRO PRESS (i) We gratefully acknowledge financial assistance from Arts Council England. First published in the UK in 2009 by Aurora Metro Publications Ltd. 67 Grove Ave, Twickenham TW1 4HX [email protected] www.aurorametro.com +44 020 3 261 0000 Selection, compilation and editing © copyright Paul Harman 2009 [email protected] Photographs: We are grateful to the photographers who have given permission for the use of their photographs in this guide. The individual photographers retain copyright in the images reproduced within this guide. We are grateful to the authors who have contributed articles to this guide. The individual authors retain copyright in their contributions to this guide. Production With thanks to: Stuart Bennett and Cheryl Robson for invaluable editorial comments, the members of TYA – UK Centre of ASSITEJ for support and guidance, all my colleagues in Hungary, Israel, Germany, Denmark and many other member countries of ASSITEJ from whose promotional material I have drawn inspiration and ideas. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.