We are concerned with Process-led Pedagogies of Improvisation and Relation and the work we can produce through these processes. Near and Far was a collaboration between digital tech EY artist, Roma Patel, Artist, Sophie Fox, theatre maker, Joy Haynes, Capoesta and technician, Jaz Crampton and Dancer Abby Page.
Magic Acorns Vision statement
Following Tim Ingold, Magic Acorns encounters the world with children. Learns what children can do from children and learns what Art can do by listening to children.
Magic Acorns aims to make great art & culture accessible to children of 0-5, their parents and the communities that surround them. We pioneer world-facing, multi-model creative work and make it in partnership with young children. We advocate the fundamental importance of EY arts to the health and wellbeing of all.
We see early childhood as a space and time in its own right rather than a developmental stage to somewhere else. Young children are highly discerning audiences and participants, and have diverse knowledges that are valuable and relevant to art making generally, and critical for informing the educational and arts policies that affect early childhood.
Magic Acorns
aims to distinguish early childhood through arts based practice, make the EY sectorvisibleand champion those who work within it by:
• Articulating and growing a world-facingpedagogy of practice to develop high-quality arts education.
• Developing theoretical approaches and publications through engagement with arts-based research and education philosophy.
• Putting research at the heart of practice.
• Building communities & making connections by creating and animating spaces - geographical spaces, playful spaces, emotional spaces, imaginative spaces, temporal spaces.
• Generating inspiration and excitement with young children and those who work with them -
· Caring for the carers, parents and educators – by creating enriching, compassionate, aesthetic spaces;
· Collaborating with artists and arts & cultural organisations who want to share, change and re-imagine practice;
· Developing skills & workforce through experimentation, exploration, experience, and reflection.
Co-devising new, inclusive approaches and producing new materials for exhibition, installation and performance.
Igniting excitement and participation in exquisite, world-class, art and performance work being made for and with very young children
Creating portfolio materials that support and extend understanding of young children’s knowledge through film-making & documentation.
Magic Acorns Artistic Approach
Magic Acorns aims to inspire and nurture excellent, diverse, multi-model arts practices and make truly experimental work by listening and responding to young children.
We are working towards a combined arts, multi-model aesthetic, which recognises that children do not make distinctions or form boundaries between art forms. We co-create playful spaces, imagined through children’s diverse connections and assemblages combining: materials, objects, movement, rhythm and musicality.
The Arts hold intrinsic, uneducable knowledges; beyond words and based in improvisation, connection, movement and affect. Practices combine human and more-than-human forces: place, space, material, object and time. They face the world and all it holds and are therefore vital practices for a sustainable future.
Our artistic development involves process-led approaches based on A pedagogy of improvisation, involving a ‘responsibility within the unfolding ensemble to stay sensitive and also keep exploring. It requires openness, alertness and attentiveness to sustain creatively’ - David Lines (2015). Practitioners require highly tuned and intuitive skills, that can only be learned by doing and reflecting, in order to prepare the pedagogical space, and be open and responsive to unexpected new connections and surprising events that emerge.