Fundamental for my motivation to create for the youngest audience is the perception of the child as equal to an adult, worthy of encountering arts in early years. Inspired by the notion of relevance of child experience for our understanding of human condition, my motivation is rooted in the boundless curiosity in unfolding the exploration together with a child, seeing a child as a partner in learning as well as in generating an understanding of meaning and value of artistic experience. My motivation resides in the recognition of the urgency of challenging the perspective of performing arts for the youngest audience within a general artistic and cultural context. I believe that performances for the infants and young neurotypical and neurodiverse audience should propose a valuable experience for both child and adult. They should resist the instrumentalisation imposed by traditional ideas of the educational role of theatre for children, decline theatrical conventions, oculocentrism and patriarchal dominance, ableism and ageism, and deny the concept of ultimate knowledge of the right way of experiencing the world.
“Humanism, with its discourse of progress and perfectibility theorized as a movement out of nature, no longer holds the racial Other or prehistoric man as the representative of ground zero – that position is now solely the child’s. So child is either positioned as good or as bad (e.g., immature) by Nature, and therefore, adults needs to protect child, or adults need to be protected from child. In both cases, it prevents children to be seen as part of the world they share with other earth dwellers, and prevents them from building “real common world relationships.”
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