Early childhood is…a period of momentous significance for people growing up in our culture. By the time this period is over, children will have formed conceptions of themselves as social beings, as thinkers, as language users, and they will have reached certain important decisions about their own abilities and their own worth.
Margaret Donaldson, Professor of Developmental Psychology, Edinburgh University
I’ve been working on new types of experience for under 5s for about 6 years now with Starcatchers. We are always experimenting. I’m interested in how arts experiences affect young children and their adults – I’m always thinking about what is important to offer young children/babies and their parents, what we miss in our lives at the moment and how the arts can provide this. I want to uplift people’s spirits with what I make – even if it’s just for 1/2 an hour.
Doing theatre for babies is to explore the unknown. It goes against common sense. It’s political. It’s also necessary, I believe, because babies have a right to beauty and they’re not always exposed to it. Theatre for babies implies commitment, but a commitment that draws us in. It’s the opposite of cynicism. It’s hope in its purest form. It’s an attempt to talk with the beginning of the world. Veronique Cote, theatre director
This particular project – Blue Block Studio– looks at genuine connection, interaction and play between an adult and a child. At a time when the government is attempting to’ schoolify’ children younger and younger, testing and ticking boxes in a ‘one size fits all’ programme.
We must value play as vital to physical and mental development.
With Blue Block Studio we want to focus on this early time in life and encourage the possibility for connected play.
Albert Einstein said Play is the highest form of research.
Creative play fosters divergent thinking, the capacity to think ‘outside the box’ imagining ideas and solutions to problems that go beyond convention. Divergent thinking is a threat to totalitarianism. It is essential to democracy. If we constrict children’s opportunities for creative play from birth, they won’t even begin to know how to generate new ideas, challenge existing norms, or revel in their own creativity’.
Susan Linn, Instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
We want to provide a sense of freedom, physically.
We want to make a safe environment – when you look around there are very few places that have thought about babies, and how they can be in the space. Sometimes they are determined to explore but there are few public places you can let them down to crawl.
Giving our infants a safe environment with opportunities for free, unconfined, and self-directed movement fosters their innate desire to explore, practice and perfect physical skills. They are then naturally geared toward a lifelong inclination to exercise, which (as stacks of research conclude) will lead them to a longer, healthier, (brainier) and happier life. Janet Lansbury, Child Care Educarer
I’ve experimented in the past with including a narrative in work for 0-2 year olds – knowing that it is really there for the parents, the babies don’t need it necessarily. I’ve also experimented frequently with work in the context of ‘theatre’, but from a visual art background I am more drawn to white spaces. We are making something closer to an art studio than a theatre experience. It is interactive – the children create some of the images, working with the idea that young children can create and play unselfconsciously – they make instant fleeting sculptures, images – things can fall down and move on, as at this age children are not generally precious about the things they make.
Many little children, I’ve found, don’t want to enter a dark space – so we are trying out a white space with a low door so you can get a feel for the space before entering.
We are exploring the idea that sometimes less is more. We want to avoid visual clutter and sound clutter. Babies pick up sounds so sensitively – for example if you read them a story when the telly is on it’s over stimulating.
In Blue Block we are hoping people will let their babies absorb the sounds we’ve created.
Blue Block Studio is a special opportunity for 1-1 interaction between adult and baby aged between 0-24 months. It is an unusual place for 0-2 year olds and their parents or carers that makes a very small dent (but hopefully a nice dent) into the lack of spaces made for them.
Katy
We’ve created a video with ideas of ways to enjoy Blue Block Studio with your baby: 10 things to do in Blue Block Studio
Blue Block Studio & Yellow Valley 