Science, big purple tents, specially composed music and a vast amount of strategic collaboration in many art practices help Anna Newell, Ireland's only maker of theatre for babies, create unique and inspired events for newborns - below, she introduces her latest production, babyGROOVE.
Babies are brilliant. A 10-minute old baby can mimic what you’re doing with your face. And everything that happens to you in the first 3 years of your life changes how your brain is formed.
When I first started making work for my extraordinary audiences over a decade ago) I reconnected with an old friend from way back in the 90’s in Dundee, Dr Suzanne Zeedyk who, it turned out, had become a key voice in the story about early years neuroscience and how being curious about babies and their brains can change all of our worlds.
She opened a whole world of knowledge to me that made sense of everything I’d been thinking and feeling instinctively about how I wanted to make work for audiences of babies. Bottom line – it’s ALL about human connection.
At about the same time, I was doing some initial research towards my first show for audiences of children with PMLD (Profound & Multiple Learning Difficulties) and over the course of the week, these pupils revealed to me what I think theatre is. For me, theatre is one human being connecting with another. And my job is to creative the optimum conditions for that connection. That takes us all kinds of way – we use portable performance spaces a lot (babyGROOVE is performed in a great big purple tent) that means there’s no visual 'background noise’ so our audience can really focus on specific things; it also means that the high production values are always the same wherever the show is performed so we can take the show both to theatre venues but also to where our audiences are; one of the key connections for me over the past couple of years has been with the national network of CYPSC (Children & Young People’s Services Committees).
What always happens in my process of making all my shows for babies is that, from about day 2, there are open sessions with invited creative consultants who inform and inspire the work. And they’re all under 12 months old. These creative consultants also train the performers better than I can – in how diverse they are, in how to read tiny non-verbal signals, in how to have a really detailed, often changing ‘conversation’ that is truly led by our audience members.
I'm often asked about where the specific ideas for the shows come from. It’s not an entirely rigorous process. It generally goes a bit like this: I say that I’m going to do something and then I work out what I might mean by that. So, in 2014, I said I was going to make a poetry slam show for kids aged 3-5 and then spent a week in a room with a writer, a choreographer and a composer working out what that might be. Last year, I said I wanted to make an epic dance show for babies – and we messed around with fringing and tiny lights and A LOT of foil and made SHIMMER.
Slightly more ambitiously, in 2013, I said I was going to make the world’s first BabyDay – and 18 months later, around 16,000 people came to over 80 events in more than 20 venues across the city of Belfast. But that’s a whole other (entirely exhausting and wonderful) story.
So last year, I said… babyGROOVE is a 70’s happening for babies aged 0-12 months and their adults. I remember googling to find a definition of what a ‘happening’ was. And basically, it was this – there’s music, there’s visuals, but everything else that happens depends on who’s there on any one particular day and what they bring to the table. And that’s exactly how my baby shows work. The sung score and the visuals remain the same, but everything else is dependent on how the babies respond, both as individuals and as a tiny temporary community.
I absolutely think that this kind of way of co-creating with babies is positive in terms of their development and there’s all kinds of responses around how both parents and other adults who work with our audiences have taken home some of what they’ve seen in the shows. But politically, what’s key to me is the basic human right of every child to high quality arts experiences, no matter how young they are. My youngest audience member was four days old.
The science I’ve been lucky enough to be exposed to by amazing advocates like Suzanne and others has meant that creating the best conditions for connection is absolutely key to me. But what creates the alchemy, the magic, is beauty. So politically it’s crucial to me that my tiny audience members have work made for them by the very best.
babyGROOVE's costume designer, Susan Scott, has designed costume on films with Liam Neeson, Guy Pearce etc; our video artist, Conan McIvor has created video for theatre productions at The Gate, and the gorgeous vocal score was created by a collaborator that I’ve worked with for more than 30 years, award-winning Scottish composer, David Goodall.
Babies are brilliant. I genuinely believe that, if we listen in a way that means we can truly hear them, they can teach us how to be in a way that is nurturing and transformational. Inspired by this idea and by the Roots of Empathy project and by my experience of working with young professional performers in Cape Town, in 2019 myself and David did a thing where we invited 10 transition year students to join us and created a show for babies that the transition year students performed in. It was a rollercoaster – all of them said in the final evaluation that they’d considered leaving the project at some point or another – but then the babies came in and it all made sense. And at the end of the project, they said that they felt like different people. That was my first collaboration with neuroscientists from Trinity – three MA students from ImmaLab (which specialises in the teenage brain) joined us and it added a whole other layer to the project.
So I’m delighted with this new collaboration with FOUNDCOG and the Global Brain Health Institute for their Creative Brain Week. It’s a whole new set of positive connections and that can only lead to growth and more exciting adventures for the future. For audiences who haven’t even been born yet…
Anna Newell kickstarts her 2022 programme of events with babyGROOVE which opens at Naughton Institute, Trinity College on March 14 as part of Creative Brain Week 2022 and also tours 9 other venues, including the Civic Theare, Tallaght until April 13 – find out more here.
