This is a transcript of my talk for the Magic Acorns Network Meeting at Snape Maltings, 13th March 2020. The theme of the day was Empowering Music in Early Years Practice.
My talk was followed by a wonderful, messy, improvised musical free-play workshop with Sophie Fox. The afternoon was an open space forum led by Dr Amy Mallett, programme director of the Creative Campus at Snape.
My talk troubled the idea that music is something that adults bestow on, or empower in, children and instead put forward the idea that empowering music in early years practice is more a matter of - Not Breaking It.
I suggest that ideas around ‘being musical’ or ‘not being musical’ are false ideas. Music and musicality are a commonality of human beings and other species – but one that has been appropriated and colonised. While a majority of human beings in the western world will identify as being ‘Not Musical’. I have never met anyone who was not told that they were not musical at some point in their childhood.
Who sets the boundaries for who is and who isn’t musical? Who gets to decide what counts and doesn’t count as music? Education secretary Nick Gibb thinks he knows because he was exposed to the “best music every written” in primary school assemblies where classical music was played every morning! (?) Personally I am more of a free-improvisation musician - more Sun-Ra than Chopin. You say Eno and I think Brian rather than the English National Opera. I also am not attached to making claims about what music is best. That’s a job for stupid people.
I am going to talk about children’s knowledges, abilities and competences. I propose that young children have vital knowledge of their own childhoods. And vital knowledge of that mysterious, communicative, world-making force that we call music.
There seems to be a profound lack of interest in the actual knowledge of and abilities of children (Voneche 1987)
Children are described in ways that both embody and reconstruct colonialist views of the world They are the largest group of people who have been othered, marginalized and colonized’ (Cannella & Viruru 2004).
I call for a decolonising of children’s knowledge and for music art practices that ‘work with’ rather than indoctrinate or colonise. This involves a genuine commitment to what children bring to an educational relationship and an admission that we learn from children’s knowledge, because children have something vital and important to bring to our educational, artistic and our personal relationships with them.
Children are not empty vessels. The state of childhood has inspired artists, scientists & philosophers and our own childhoods continue to play through our adulthoods, shaping our playfulness, our aesthetics, our curiosities, our delights and our fears.
Furthermore, I suggest early childhood music education has an ethical imperative to walk with children in their present time and space. Let that walking meander and drift in many directions. Childhood is not a race to adulthood along the quickest measurable route. And When we do orientate on the future let us walk with children towards their own futures rather than making them reproduce our pasts. Because our young children face a future that we cannot yet imagine. Let them make music that has not yet been heard.
All those working in early childhood bear the weight of a tyrannical, top-down, curriculum And I wish to pay homage to the unsung heroes who are our early childhood education force – underpaid & undervalued and yet having to somehow accomplish the impossible task of navigating between curriculum, targets and the complex wonderland of young human beings. I can’t say how much I value and respect the work of the early childhood practitioner. And I dream of a future where the knowledges of child, parent and practitioner become once again central to shaping early childhood education.
Pedagogies of Improvisation
Pedagogies of Improvisation are educational practices that ‘work with’ children in open ended ways, in the present moment, and for unknown possibilities rather than towards an outcome. Today, I will show practices in early childhood that attempt to decolonise by working in co-productive, wordless and open-ended ways.
I am going to talk about Improvisation and also Complicite - a term used in performing arts. Improvisation and Complicité are skills that I learn and practice with children. This is why as an artist; I work with two-year olds. It’s not at all altruism. It’s to keep my practices of Improvisation and Complicité sharp.
· Children are wonders of improvisation – they have specialist knowledge
· Children are virtuosos of attuning to the present moment
· They are transversal and rhizomatic thinkers ( Dahlberg and Moss 2013)
The work I am involved with and presenting today has some commonalities
· It strips back adult talk in order to communicate and make meaning through voice-play, movement, gesture, material play. This is a decolonising move.
· It involves improvisation and experimentation with a variety of art forms at the same time as pre-planned and pre-created materials, transitions and spaces.
· It is responsive to what happens Response-ability
· It is open-ended and as such is different every time. It is not a set of outcomes
· It is rhizomatic rather than linear.
· Attention is focused on the present moment rather than the plan.
· Working in this way reveals the complexity of the present moment.
I showed films from SALTmusic
Saltmusic took place at the Priory Children’s centre in Great Yarmouth (the center went into liquidation just before Christmas 2019). It was an action-research project and partnership between early childhood music specialists and speech and language specialists who ran music sessions for two year old children diagnosed with communication difficulties and their families.
SALTmusic grew out of a 20-year practice of music embedded in a Children’s Centre. The idea of music specialists and SLT’s collaborating came through interdisciplinary conversations around how to meet the needs of families and children. How to focus on communicative competences rather than lack of words.
The SALTmusic report can be found here.
My MERYC 2019 (Music Educators and Researchers of Young Children) conference paper can be found here (p17-24).
There are multiple refrains turning around in these films. With players all staying with the musical and material encounter that is emerging between them. Complicité emerges through and with the encounter rather than through a sense of clear direction or intention. To introduce words that would direct action (“look, you are spinning the basket”) into this ensemble runs the danger of destabilising the suspended state of this ensemble.
• We do not know yet how to speak to each other, how to make art together. The very act of coming together is an experiment. […] we develop our antennae for one another, and then we end in an open-space improvisation […]’ (Petra Kuppers 2016).
• A pedagogy of improvisation involves responsibility within the unfolding ensemble to stay sensitive and keep exploring. There is a loss of self within the collaborative space. David Lines (2015)
Dramaturge John Wright sums this improvised, playful practice up like this
Find the Game
Play the Game and entertain each other with it
Recognise when the Game is over
Find a new Game
Complicité
• There is no Complicité method — what is essential is collaboration, and a turbulent forward momentum
• Seeing what is most alive, disrupting and integrating
• For players, it means a dynamic, sensed, attuned, force between players; a moving or murmurating-with (It is interesting that the English equivalent of being complicit is associated with involvement in crime).
• When engaging in performed Complicité, the performer’s sense of self becomes blurred and distributed through the group. Like murmurating Starlings
• Complicité is deeply connected with the present moment.
• It is a knowledge of the body which unsettles the dominance of words (and even thought)
I showed some footage of my work with Kabantu
I was asked by Kabantu to come in as a dramatuge on their show for Early Years.
I took on the job because a) I checked out their website and thought they were amazing musicians and b) Percussionist Delia Stevens said that they wanted to make it an immersive encounter with music
We worked on transitions and invitations – the essentials of both immersive theatre and working with young children. How to invite children into the music. How to extend transitions so that they become wonderous and magical rather than problematic. We removed all talking and script leaving only the words of the songs. And then we tested it on an audience.
One of the problematics of early years theatre is the threshold-crossing of young audiences into an unfamiliar and strange space.
I will give the example of one family that came in, with a toddler and a young child of around 3 years. The staging of the piece was around the audience who would sit in the centre. Leaving his family, he explored the darker edges of the large theatre space. He did not want to enter the centre – this is common with young children. There were a number of potential tensions here. Would his family become anxious about his not being with everyone else? Was he ok? During the opening section the child came around the set and positioned himself within a micro set that was at the back but to which the performers would move to next. He began playing with an inflatable fish. The open-ended expectations and improvisational approach of the players allowed this - and so he happily became surrounded and immersed in the ensemble for a time. This shows the importance of going with the way that children wish to engage and planning for open ended eventualities.
I shared some Video data from my doctoral project: - More Than Words
My doctoral project, More Than Words aims to reconceptualise understandings of young children’s communication through improvisational arts practices. For my fieldwork, I worked in residence for three weeks with two-year-old children at a Manchester nursery with dancer Anna Daly. I created an immersive environment which was at the heart of my doctoral project. Using music and dance with materials such as silk, string, duvets and light, children, parents, artists and educators adopted a practice of stripping back talk in order to tune into the multiplicitous encounters and communications that are going on between children and the world.
I have created data in two ways
Tcam
Tcam is a toddler-driven, freely, rolling, position-able, child’s height,video camera which is designed to be an ‘embodied camera drawn into the world’ (Grimshaw & Ravetz 2015). I hope that children will freely use tCam and explore its potential. Its camera can live feed to an iPad, projector or nursery monitor offering potential for augmentation (e.g making small things big or close up) making special or giving focus to ‘things that would be overlooked from an ‘adult-centric view’. (Caton 2019).
360˚ film
I used a 360˚ video camera to create audio/visual data. This more-than-human technology observes in ways radically different to ‘framed’ video. It makes tangible young children’s entangled knowledge through relation and movement in ways that are not perceptible to the adult gaze or traditional video technology.
I finished by saying that children do not necessarily make clear distinctions between themselves and the rest of the world and perhaps we could pay more attention to this and the blurred boundaries between self and other. As an improvising, performing artist I seek and long for the state of murmuration between myself and others (human and non-human). And I find this in my creative practices both with young children and other artists. I am also married to a Buddhist who would point out that this inter-connected state is the actual state of reality. So are children's blurred senses of self and other really wrong, immature and undeveloped?
I will finish with a quote from Quantum physicist and Philosopher Karan Barad
The very Nature of materiality is entanglements. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the “other”.
Karen Barad 2009