Sally Chance Thesis

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 2I 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. 3I 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 4I 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. 5I 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 6I 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 7I 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 8I 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. 9I 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) <a href="/goto?url=http://mapping-project.eu) considers" target="_blank">network’s mapping project (n.d., http://mapping-project.eu) considers TEY to include </a>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).

Sally Chance Thesis

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