Sally Chance has been exploring the cultural lives of babies and very young children through dance during a two-year Australia Council Fellowship, exploring ideas about babies and very young children as participants and as audiences.
‘The mother-infant interaction…seemed to be an elaborate dance, choreographed by nature’, Daniel N. Stern

I’ve had the luxury of observing huge leaps in this field and discovered a fascinating world of psychological theories and practices.

Until recently, our ideas about the arts in early childhood began with four year olds. Now, cultural practices for children under four are regularly covered in articles in Lowdown Magazine and the Performance for the Very Young Blueprint group facilitated by Young People and the Arts Australia (YPAA) meet regularly to share philosophy and practice, with topics ranging from training, to approaches to making performance, to links to early childhood education.

Several Australian works for children under four are in repertoire. This year’s Come Out Festival featured new work by Windmill Performing Arts and two touring works by Pocketfool. These performances are characterised by a deep understanding of how very young audiences understand and pay attention to the world.

A beautiful exploration of the ways in which small children experience their world is captured in the Diary of a Baby by American paediatric psychologist Daniel N Stern. (BasicBooks,1990).

Diary of a …