Creche Landing

Comment by Samantha Butler on November 17, 2011 at 13:07

Lucky children. It takes brilliant places like this creche to take 'risks' like this in allowing a company in for a week. It would be great to hear from Starcatchers about the experience with children, parents and staff at the creche. Please share any insights you gained.

Comment by Lucy Vaughan on November 18, 2011 at 12:33

Thanks for posting this. Great to see everyone - children, artists and staff  - all so involved in the experience.

 

Comment by Hazel Darwin-Edwards on November 18, 2011 at 18:36

Thanks Samantha and Lucy, great to get some positive responses. It was such an amazing experience to be a part of, and we were so grateful that the staff and parents were really supportive of the project. The staff were actually not sure at all at first how they should act with us; it was a bit strange to have these 'incompetent adults' around- though they knew we weren't really, we were just acting like we didn't know things so the children could show or teach us. But after a few hours everyone relaxed into it and at the end of the week we got this feedback from them:

"You guys have really opened our eyes to all the possibilities in providing opportunity for creative play- really offering and not leading... having you guys with us for the week has really given us an insight into how the children we know who attend regularly, have developed and learned throughout this whole journey."

There were four artists on the project; one director, two actors and an in-role film maker- two had never worked for this age group before- and we are now all currently involved in creating work for under 4s. It's quite a big ask of a team just to throw themselves into a 4 hour improvisation every day, but I was really lucky to work with really amazing risk-taking artists. 

As for parents, well occasionally I see some of them and they tell me that their children still talk about it. I think my favourite bit of feedback was when one parent said their daughter had been playing more with her older (grown up) brothers now, after playing with the 'big boy alien.'

 

Comment by Samantha Butler on November 22, 2011 at 9:43

Hazel that feedback from teachers is wonderful, particularly the part about 'offering' rather than 'leading'. This is something which constantly comes up when we are making new work for children; that they are rarely given the opportunity to think and imagine entirely for themselves, there is usually an adult sat beside them even in performances pointing things out, explaining and offering explanations for everything rather then just allowing the children to discover, think, and wonder - and I do know why they do it, i do it too, we want them to get the most out of every experience, but that is the point rather, that it is ok to simply experience something in the same way as an adult in an audience does, and it doesn't  always have to 'mean' something, or 'be' something.

Comment by Hazel Darwin-Edwards on November 25, 2011 at 10:27

Yes, I have also thought about that a lot while making work for young children. And of course the other side of the scale, where they are scared to get involved at all. I wrote a blog about it this week for another project that I am doing

http://starcatchersforgottenforests.wordpress.com/ about some participatory dance experiences we created last week. The adults obviously have that urge to join in the experience- and we were exploring one way of asking them to do that fully, using movement, which did seem to switch of the part of them which was trying to process the experience, and allowed them just to be in the experience.

 

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