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.
'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 relation- ships”. (Taylor, 2013 in Murris, 2018)
My practice is aligned with K. Murris' (2018) theoretical framework on childhood, which critiques traditional deficit-based models that frame children as incomplete or inferior. Murris highlights how the construct of the “normal” knowing subject as the mature, Western adult reinforces institutionalized power imbalances between adults and children. This dynamic assigns adults specific roles—such as instructor, disciplinarian, socializer, and protector—while simultaneously framing children as lacking in knowledge and agency, requiring intervention or correction (Murris 2018, 8). Within this framework, childhood is positioned as an inferior developmental phase, where the rational, autonomous, and mature adult—implicitly male and Western—becomes the normative ideal (8).
Murris further critiques this deficit-based framing by arguing that humanism, with its discourse of progress and perfectibility, no longer situates the racial “Other” or prehistoric “man” as the representative of ground zero (Kromidas, 2014. in Murris 8). Instead, 'that position is now solely the child’s '(8). While people of color and women have gained legal recognition (though not always practical equality), children remain marginalized, regarded as “appendages to adult society” and occupying the lone position of “the last savage” (Kromidas 2014 in Murris, 9). Children are frequently dismissed based on assumptions of their developmental status—deemed innocent, fragile, irrational, and immature. These perceptions prevent them from being recognized as legitimate sources of knowledge, denying children ethical, epistemic, and ontological recognition (15). As Murris argues, such ageist prejudices are directly related to the Nature/Culture binary, which separates the child from the adult epistemically and positions the child as an ontologically colonized “other” (16).
This Nature/Culture dichotomy situates children in relation to “Nature” and adults in relation to “Culture” (Murris 2018, 8). Within this structure, embodied experiences and the body (Nature) are rendered inferior to the mind (Culture), leading to the separation of “the thinking subject with agency” from “a sensing body (object) that is temporal, spatial, without agency, and not involved in knowledge production” (4, 14). As a result, affective, embodied, and other transcorporeal knowledges are excluded from what is considered “real” knowledge.
In alignment with Murris’ work, my practice rejects these hierarchical and binary framings of childhood. Instead of viewing children as separate from adults or as lacking agency, I consider children and adults to be inherently entangled. Child and adult are never separate entities; they exist in constant relation, influencing and co-constituting one another within a sympoietic system (10). This perspective draws on Haraway’s understanding of sympoiesis—a relational, co-creative process that acknowledges how beings continuously shape and are shaped by each other. When applied to childhood, this framework allows for more equitable and dynamic relationships between children and adults, dissolving traditional boundaries of hierarchy and exclusion.
From this theoretical foundation, my practice honors the individuality and complexity of each child’s experience, rejecting one-size-fits-all assumptions and embracing heterogeneity. By recognizing children as active participants who engage with the world in diverse, embodied, and sensory ways, I aim to challenge deficit-based notions of childhood and foster a more inclusive understanding of their contributions.
When the child is reconfigured as part of a sympoietic system, more equitable relationships between humans (of, e.g., different ages) (...) are brought into existence." (Murris 2018, 19-20)
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Murris, K. (2018). The posthuman child and the diffractive teacher: Decolonizing the nature/culture binary. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), Research handbook on childhoodnature (pp. 1-22). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_7-2