This [Baby] Life is Australia’s first performance work for 4 to 18 month old children and has been developed by a group of Adelaide artists headed by Sally Chance.
What made this concert unusual was that for certain segments the performers replicated the gestures and expressions of the babies. One by one they made eye contact with the baby, then copied what they were doing, from sitting to smiling to crawling to batting their arms to chewing their hand. It was really delightful watching the babies react to this mimicry, watching and smiling. One of the artists told me later that it was the group’s philosophy to let babies participate in the performance, as often we don’t offer consider babies an as audience member. The performance had been workshopped for years with various babies and groups to find the most effective segments.
As you can see from these pictures, NKOTB was delighted by the whole performance. Every moment was ‘wow! look at that! that’s great! wow!’ to the extent that one of the performers came up to me afterwards and told me what a beautiful big smile NKOTB had on her face the whole time. It was really special to experience it with her.
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