4.2.2 A NIVEL NACIONAL

Critic Mark Fisher has claimed that “the younger the audience gets, the more focused the shows have to be” (2008). Performing arts experiences can thus be explicitly tailored to accommodate the capabilities of the audience, whether the need to bond with primary caregivers in a quiet, soothing environment in the immersive experience for newborns, BabyChill (2010), or the newly-found empathetic facility central to the French-Canadian narrative play Glouglou (2004). Today’s artists collaborate with infant specialists or regularly test performances to construct a nuanced interplay between aesthetics and ability, fitted to their spectators.

To take into account developmental milestones is to celebrate an audience’s current capabilities, offer opportunities to explore the now, and reject the future- oriented training in ‘theatre literacy’ preached for the last century. Traditions and boundaries are either presented for re-negotiation or expelled entirely – as shown in figure 1, the improvised dance-theatre piece Oogly Boogly (2003) makes no distinction between stage and auditorium, nor performer and spectator. Similarly, Swedish play Babydrama (2006) ameliorates its unusual 80-minute length by permitting loss of focus, allowing each audience member to move away from the action if they become bored or distracted (Höjer, 2009; see Figure 11). Captivation is not necessarily the aim; instead, baby spectators may engage with theatre on their own terms. In the experiential piece Le jardin du possible (2002), traditional theatrical hierarchies are reversed as touch and smell take priority over sound and sight (Pinkert, 2009), reflecting new capabilities in fine motor control. Not simply spectators, children are granted the right to give themselves up to their instinctual desire to participate, rejecting the passive and prescriptive (Hendy and Toon, 2001) in favour of independence and interplay in a shared theatrical space.

Such performances highlight another vital developmental process – the path from attachment to self-confident autonomy. Productions such as BabyChill and Bebé Babá (2001) centre on the presence of the parent, as they are aimed at the youngest babies, while Oogly Boogly allows its tightly-prescribed audience of 12- to 18-month-olds to range further in safety, moving away from their caregivers but able to return at any time. By the time a child is old enough to attend Le jardin du possible (from 18 months), they no longer suffer from separation anxiety and actively seek

experiences for solo exploration and collaborative peer activity. Vulnerability is thus both respected and confronted, the artist exploiting their knowledge of developmental capabilities simultaneously to keep their audience safe and test their limits.

Furthermore, a distinction can be made between what Carol Lorenz terms a “didactic and moralizing theatre” (2002, p.97) explicitly teaching children, among other things, how to be an audience, and a theatre which takes into account their requirements in order to present novel concepts, assuming them to be a natural audience. For example, a text-based TEY piece such as Glouglou may appear traditionally instructive in style, but makes vital concessions to the spectator, presenting a subject matter (the daily life of a baby) whose familiarity is comforting, in order to introduce the novelty of narrative drama. By contrast, the Soviet practice of ‘theatre literacy’ in Russian children’s theatre emphasised knowledge and understanding of theatrical concepts and terminology (van de Water, 2004).

Performances designed for tightly specified age-ranges therefore implicitly reject the twentieth century’s didactic approach to TEY. The influence in particular of Lev Vygotsky (1978) on theatre for children has waned: where once there was a belief that theatre should be edifying, spurring on constant advancement in each child, or goal-oriented, tutoring them in the traditions of the stage to create a theatrically-literate spectator (Schonmann, 2002), now the aspiration is often engagement on their own terms: celebrating the present rather than striving towards the future.

Theatre for Early Years employs a multiplicity of forms to engage with its rapidly changing audience, from play environments to performative installations, from improvisatory co-creation to narrative dramas, and Liz Tomlin asserts that “the importance of audience immersion and sensory stimulation beyond the verbal and the visual began to underpin the majority of theatre for the very young in the 2000s” (2015, p.81). As described above, many of TEY’s creative forms, and the immersive, sensory or participatory practices associated with them, seem to trouble traditional notions of theatre, leading some scholars to describe the genre as “a more sophisticated kind of game” (Goldfinger, 2011, p.297) rather than a distinctly theatrical field. Yet it can be argued that game and its corollary, play, are in fact

woven into performance for the very young as an explicit performance process of co- action, just as Erika Fischer-Lichte has posited for adult productions:

Through their physical presence, perception and response, the spectators become co-actors that generate the performance by participating in the ‘play’. The rules that govern the performance correspond to the rules of a game, negotiated by all participants… they are followed and broken by all in equal measure. (2008, p.32)

In the next section, I will use the work of Hans-Thies Lehmann and Erika Fischer-Lichte to position TEY as inherently postdramatic, abandoning the tacitly accepted “theatre of dramas” (Lehmann, 2006, p.21) in favour of a decentred, non- hierarchical and explicitly playful theatre, embracing equality of form, equality of presence and equality of action to define an ideal of TEY. These equalities are only achievable if developmental capabilities are taken into account by theatre-makers: a newborn baby’s first encounter with performance is more easily mediated by their primary caregiver rather than a stranger, but the artist is needed to create the theatricalised setting and atmosphere to help the parent perform for their child; similarly, in responding to a toddler’s natural hedonic desire to participate by carefully rationing agency, the artist demolishes hierarchies of experience or skill – all actions are welcomed as contributions to the drama.

In summary, for some artists, testing a piece with its target audience will suggest ‘what works’, while for others, collaboration with child development professionals provides a strong theoretical foundation for their artistic practice. Neither inductive nor deductive practices guarantee a well-received production, but respect for the audience’s needs reflects the very best practice and also fulfils the artist’s duty of care to a vulnerable population. Knowledge of developmental milestones is a powerful tool when creating work for the very young; a readiness to experiment allied with inductive exploration of the latest research and / or the assistance of infant specialists uses these milestones not as prescriptive formulae, but a springboard towards equality.