Toddlers take in live performances created with them in mind Theatre for only youngest of audiences
The audience members are still in diapers. They mostly babble and coo. Some do not yet eat solid food. And yet, they are caught up in a theatrical performance full of a crescendo of colours and sounds with a storyline written just for them. “One Thing Leads to Another” is a play written by Young People’s Theatre for an audience of babies. Recommended for infants from three to 12 months old, it will be touring Niagara in March, presented by Carousel Players. The play was developed some three years ago after the folks at Young People’s Theatre became intrigued with the question: “You can play with babies, can you create a play for babies?” said Allen MacInnis, artistic director of the theatre company. “Can you create something that actually feels like a narrative? Something that starts and goes over a period of time and comes to an end.” Up until then, the youngest audiences for Young People’s Theatre — a national producer and presenter of theatre for young audiences for the past 52 years — were toddlers. Meanwhile, there was more research emerging on baby brain development and behaviour. “What many of us have discovered on the ground, in the room with babies, is that they’re not the blobs we thought they were,” he said. “They really have enormous capacity to listen and observe and engage.” They were drawn to the idea that babies possess simple logic. “One thing leads to another is something babies can understand,” he said. “That sequence — that this, plus this, plus this equals that — is something they can follow.” But could they actually be bona fide theatregoers? The play was created with all the elements that capture a baby’s burgeoning imagination — sounds, colours, movement — inside a simple storyline. One of the first times MacInnis watched the play amidst a room full of infants and their respective caregivers — they are asked to remove shoes and sit on big floor pillows — he watched the babies before the characters appeared on stage. “The kids were looking everywhere but the stage,” he said. Their attention was on the pillows. Stuffies that were scattered over the floor. Some were sleeping. And then the characters appeared. “There was instant silence. Instant,” he said. “From thereon, it was like they were all in suspended animation. “It was phenomenal to see how held they were by everything that was happening. “They create a colourful world bit by bit by bit, adding to what was otherwise an empty black box space. There’s an accumulation that the babies see happening in front of them.” At one point in the play, the characters blow bubbles and then begin to eat the floating, glistening spheres one by one. “The babies find that hilarious,” said MacInnis. “They laugh. They get excited about it.” When the characters pull a large, rectangular silk fabric back and forth over the audience, the babies reach to touch it or stare wide-eyed. “There’s something about the way it floats that they seem to recognize as something beautiful and lovely,” said MacInnis. Even the sound of water being poured from a big pitcher into a pail is exciting if you’re new to the noises of the world, he said. The play follows essentially the same narrative, although it is free to meander from a rigid structure to interact with infants. “But over and over we find we can tell the same story,” he said. “We can create a narrative as abstract as it is and hold their attention quite well.” The play runs about 25 minutes. Afterwards parents and babies are invited on stage to explore the set and experiment with objects from the play. For parents, watching their babies react and respond to the play helps them understand their infants more deeply, he said. “They learn something about their own baby,” he said. “They say, ‘I have a whole new way of playing with my child.”