Great art for small people: how do we engage the youngest audience?
Great art for small people:
how do we engage the youngest audience?
A lecture given at the ASSITEJ Norge seminar as part of the ICE HOT Nordic
Dance Platform on 10th December 2014
Ben Fletcher-Watson, researcher in children’s theatre at the Royal Conservatoire of
Scotland
I am delighted to be speaking to you today about art for the youngest children, which
I believe to be one of the most exciting and radical art-forms that exists.
Over the last 30 years, there has been an explosion in dance, theatre, opera, music
and performance art designed for babies and toddlers to enjoy. Many of you will have
attended performances for these tiny spectators, and some of you have created
shows for them, but in case baby theatre is new to you, I’ll give you a short definition:
performing arts for the very young means artistic productions which cater to the
needs and abilities of children from birth to age three or four. Babies, toddlers and
young children visit the theatre with their parents or carers, to enjoy a performance
designed especially for them. Usually, these shows are shorter than adult
productions, and they tend to be much more participatory, with opportunities to come
onto the stage and interact with objects or actors. They are often small in scale, with
only twenty or thirty spectators at a time, and performances are sometimes restricted
to very narrow age-ranges, such as birth to six months, or 12 to 18 months.
However, this does not mean that art for babies is less than adult art, simplified,
reduced or shrunk down. On the contrary, these productions are often among the
most avant-garde performances being created today. There are shows in the dark,
shows without words, shows where you form your own narrative, even shows without
1
Great art for small people: how do we engage the youngest audience?
performers. They can seem more like the fractured, postdramatic theatre of Sarah
Kane or Heiner Muller than the fairy stories and folk tales which many of us
remember seeing in our own childhoods. I know of almost 1,000 productions from
around the world which have been made in the last few years for these amazing,
challenging and fascinating audiences.
So where did this movement come from? And what makes it work?
If we look back into history, young children have attended the theatre for centuries –
as soon as women were admitted, children came too. In England, they were held in
their mothers’ arms at religious mystery plays in the Middle Ages. In West Africa
before the advent of the slave trade, storytelling theatre for all ages was used as
informal socialisation. European figures such as Topelius, Fröbel and the Comtesse
de Genlis all wrote plays for children to watch and to perform in. Charles Dickens
complained in the nineteenth-century that the auditorium was becoming “a virtual
nursery”, and in fact by 1850, many theatres banned babies from all adult
performances.
The twentieth century saw a deliberate division created between theatre for adults
and theatre for children. In many countries, children were not allowed in the audience
until they were at school, and their theatrical diet was limited to educational moral
dramas or pantomime silliness. But for the youngest children? Nothing existed.
Babies were believed to be noisy, distracting, stupid or undeserving of culture. Artists
saw children as “audiences of the future”, as opposed to an audience from birth, and
so they wanted to train them up in theatre literacy, to teach them the building blocks
of art, so that in time they could enjoy Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov. In Soviet
Russia, the Tiuz system put children in classrooms for several years – before they
could see a play, they had to learn the theatrical vocabulary in alphabetical order:
audience, auditorium, audio-visual. Only once they had mastered this could they
enter the theatre itself. So a child that could not sit up, let alone speak or write, was
of no value.
The commercial theatre, which relied as it still does today on TV media franchises
and classic fairy tales, saw little reason to offer anything to babies. They required
huge venues to make a profit, so an audience that needed intimacy and a close-up
view of the stage was not likely to earn any money.
In addition, child psychologists and pedagogues argued that performing to tiny
children was at best worthless and at worst actively damaging. They claimed that
babies were not human beings, but human becomings. They had yet to learn
restraint, or consideration for others, or communication, and to overload their
developing brains with stimulation from lights and sound might be harmful. Far better
to stick to nursery rhymes with mother.
But in the late 1970s, something changed. I don’t think there was a single factor – in
different countries, it seems to have emerged for different reasons, but slowly, over
about 10 years, art for the youngest began to creep into theatres. In France, an
influential documentary series called “Le bébé est une personne” inspired a few
musicians to go into nursery schools and see what captured the children’s interest. In
England, left-wing theatre companies began to make shows for an audience that
they believed was being ignored, even oppressed. In Italy, companies responded to
the Reggio Emilia pedagogical model by bringing babies into their rehearsal rooms.
So in all these cases, the first shows emerged from a meeting between artists and
babies. For me, this is key, and still defines the genre today. Unlike the majority of
2
Great art for small people: how do we engage the youngest audience?
children’s art, and almost all performing arts for adults, the process of testing, trialling
and experimenting with invited audiences is central to the creation of art for the very
young. And the reason is, that only by sharing your work with babies can you find
what works. Babies have many capabilities, but they do not yet have an
understanding of the semiotics of performance – the signs that we comprehend
immediately, such as a curtain opening or bows at the end of a show. To a young
child, a blackout, or the sudden arrival of a character, or a burst of loud music can be
terrifying rather than exciting. By testing, artists discover what thrills and fascinates
their audience, allowing them to fine-tune their production before it opens to a paying
audience.
The term that most artists use when describing what they aim to achieve is
”engagement”. The days of pure entertainment or pure education are almost gone –
instead, artists want to engage their audience while they are in the theatre. They
want to keep them focused and interested in the action onstage rather than teaching
them something or making them laugh, although that’s great when it happens.
There are many different ways that artists achieve engagement, many different skills
that they acquire to do so, and many ways in which they maintain that engagement
once they have it. There are no rules, as every artist tells me, but there are common
threads.

Repetition – art experiences are often repetitive, which helps children to
understand. Seeing the action repeat with small variations, or taking control
themselves to repeat a moment again and again allows them to make
connections between cause and effect.

Multisensory experiences – for an audience who cannot speak, words tend not
to be the vital mode of communication. Visuals, sound, texture, smell and even
taste become much more vivid. I’ve lost count of the number of different foods
that I’ve eaten as part of baby theatre shows! I’ve also got my hands dirty in clay,
sand, mud, chalk, charcoal and fallen leaves.

Extending the performance beyond the theatre – this might begin in the
lobby, with characters greeting the audience, or may take place after, when
children are invited onto the set to examine the scenery and touch the props.
English company Oily Cart talk about creating “airlocks” for their performances,
meaning a space that lies between the world outside and the world of the
theatre, where audiences acclimatise and calm down.

Abstraction – many performances for the very young deliberately avoid
presenting a single logical message. Instead, they embrace all the possible
meanings that children can make from a sequence of happenings. This
dramaturgy gives children creative control, making them the agents.

Safety – there is no suspense, shocks or threat of danger in art for babies and
toddlers. These are replaced with surprise, often by subverting the familiar.
Performances may present familiar surroundings – gardens, kitchens,
bathrooms, for example – but these are made strange and fantastical. Thus
children are calmed by something that they recognise, even from their earliest
years, but then astonished by its transformation into something new. As in
children’s free play, a box becomes a house, or a table becomes a ship.

Lastly, there is feedback – performance is always reactive, responding to
shifting moods, negotiating each exchange with precision, and monitoring social
3
Great art for small people: how do we engage the youngest audience?
cues like eye contact, verbalisations, gestures at all times. Performers
acknowledge the children’s right to be present, and more importantly, to
withdraw whenever they wish.
Hopefully, you can see the difference between this art-form and adult performing
arts. As adults, we expect to sit quietly in the dark, to have our emotions roused but
not to speak, to signify our enjoyment by restrained and polite applause before
heading out into the night. By contrast, dance and theatre for the very young is
active, participatory, abstract, and engages its audience as equals.
So what do we look for as signs of engagement? What does an engaged child look
like? In Scotland, researchers have developed a set of micro-signals that can be
coded onto video footage of test audiences to accurately measure engagement –
how long a child looks at a performer, whether they turn round to their carer, whether
they sit up or even stand up, whether they reach for an object being passed around,
whether they make a sound. Some artists have made enough work for the very
young that they have an intuitive understanding of engagement, often using sound as
their guide – they compare it to a wave, where the loudness or silence during a
performance gives them clues to the audience’s mood, and they can respond in the
moment. For others, the rehearsal period can last months as they exhaustively refine
their work until it satisfies the test audience.
The dance piece Oogly Boogly was made in 2003, and has been re-staged by
companies around the world, including Dansstationens Turnékompani in Sweden.
The initial devising process took nine months, mainly because of the difficulty of
finding the radical minimalism its creators wanted. Guy Dartnell, the co-director
describes it like this: “A group of performers simply follow and amplify the babies’
movements or stillnesses, while their guardians are encouraged to sit back and
witness the spectacle, attempting not to encourage or discourage their children from
doing anything. Their task is simply to be “present” for the babies’ sense of safety
and security. What takes place is simultaneously a game for the babies and a
performance for the adults, though no performance is created beyond what the
babies choose to do or not do. We, the performers, try to go no further than the
babies, to have no ambition beyond what they immediately show us.” Spectators are
sometimes moved to tears by the experience – they have never seen their children
be in control, and are amazed at what they can do. Oogly Boogly has been
enormously influential in dance for the very young, inspiring new productions as far
away as Australia. At its core is the simplest form of engagement imaginable:
copying someone else. And somehow, putting a baby in charge within that
relationship, even for a few minutes, causes adults to reassess their perceptions of
what a child can do, can be and can become.
And so, having looked at how we engage the youngest audience, the final question
perhaps is, why engage them at all? Scholars have claimed that babies can be
entertained by pretty much anything, or that they are unable to separate “viewing and
doing”. If we take this view, then the creation of artistic experiences centred around
babies seems pointless – we could fill a room with balloons and offer them a day out
which is far cheaper and just as entertaining as a specialised theatre event. Equally,
the avant-garde forms often seen in Early Years arts can appear to lack the
conventional elements of drama – characters, narrative arcs, scripts and stages.
They have been described as “theatre-but-not-theatre”.
Yet these attitudes suggest a rigid focus on ‘traditional’ art for children – which we
must remember has only been a tradition for less than a century. As we move
through the twenty-first century, perhaps it is time to reassess not only our
4
Great art for small people: how do we engage the youngest audience?
perceptions of children, but also of theatre and the performing arts. New evidence
from developmental psychology shows that children are involved in complicated
modes of communication from the moment of birth, perhaps even in the womb. Think
of the hormonal messages sent by a baby to its mother as it prepares to be born, or
the proto-conversations shared between parent and child starting only a few minutes
after birth, with copying of facial expressions, cooing and musical echoing. Some
psychologists even claim that very young children are more skilled than adults in
domains such as imaginative dexterity, improvisation and creative inter-play.
And just as parents communicate immediately with their babies, to bond and form
strong attachments, so artists (via the process of testing that I’ve mentioned) are led
by children to create works which fit their needs. Just like a chair in a nursery, the
stories we tell are identical to those in adult art but the right size for a tiny spectator.
Francoise Gerbaulet, French theatre maker, says "I am always deeply surprised by
the seriousness of infant spectators. Babies do not understand, they absorb… the
sound of voices, the music of words, anxiety, fear, grief, violence, love, they absorb
them all... Babies are ideal spectators".
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees the right “to
engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to
participate freely in cultural life and the arts”. It is worth noting that only three UN
members have not signed the Convention, being Somalia, South Sudan and the
United States of America. The majority of artists in Europe will cite the Convention as
central to their work – especially the themes of age-appropriateness and free
participation – and my own research takes this a step further.
I recently interviewed 26 theatre-makers, choreographers, composers and designers,
all making work for the very young in Scotland. Some were established artists, others
just beginning their careers. Some had made a number of productions, others only a
handful. But all of them shared one defining factor. In these interviews, I identified a
powerful belief that children deserved access to high-quality art experiences from
birth, but also that artists deserve recognition for the complex skills they have
developed to create this work. I call this a Theory of Deserving, and it is this belief
which informs the sort of dance, theatre and music that is currently being made
around the world. No longer do we see babies as unfinished, or future theatregoers –
instead they are full of communicative ability, sophisticated in their engagement with
art, and able to enjoy culture on their own terms just like adults.
An edited version of this talk was featured in the Annual Magazine of ASSITEJ
2015, pp.97-99.
Biography: Ben Fletcher-Watson is currently completing his PhD in drama at the
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the University of St Andrews, supported by an
ESRC CASE Studentship. His research examines contemporary Scottish practice in
theatre for early years. He has published articles in journals including Youth Theatre
Journal and Research in Drama Education, and is Co-editor of the Scottish Journal
of Performance. His wider research interests include autism-friendly performance,
theatre for foetuses and the history of pantomime. He serves on the Executive of the
Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) and is an ASSITEJ Next
Generation Artist.
5