Touch & Go is a tactile collaborative dancing game for children aged 2-3 and their carers, created by Sally Chance (Founding Artistic Director of Restless Dance Theatre and Sally Chance Dance). The experience will be at Sydney Opera House’s Centre for Creativity March 21 – 30. Full details and tickets here!
I had the chance to learn more about the philosophy behind this work from Sally Chance, and I love the focus on community building and letting little people be exactly who they are.
Hi Sally! Could you please tell us a bit about what families can expect from Touch & Go?
The chance to enter an Australian icon and attend a carefully prepared dance-theatre work tailored to a very precise age range (children aged 2 and 3 years), the opportunity to view the work and be like any audience anywhere and also the opportunity to be involved in the dance-play action as part of the show (not as an “audience participation” bit), an occasion, a special morning out together, shared joy, memories to treasure.
Specifically, families are invited to enter a world of shapes and stepping stones made from plain old masking tape.
Even more specifically, families are welcomed in the foyer, move together into the Centre for Creativity and sit together to watch professional artists performing, then something magical happens – families are invited gently into the performance space so that there’s no longer an audience and a performance space, it’s all one and everyone is involved in ways that suit them.
How did you come to work with this age, 2 to 3 year olds, specifically?
I came into this work about sixteen years ago as part of my role as the artistic director of South Australia’s children’s arts festival and noticed that works for very young audiences were becoming a ‘thing’. During my six years with the festival my own child arrived. This opened my eyes to the wonderful world of very young children and so I curated some early years work as part of my festivals and then focused on this work when I left the festival to resume my performance practice. I made Touch & Go in response to ideas that perhaps aren’t so helpful, the “terrible 2s” for example. The things the children are doing at that age aren’t terrible, they’re developmentally totally appropriate! Being the parent/carer of a child aged 2 (and 3) is equal parts joy and challenge for sure, but this isn’t because of the children it’s because most of us don’t have the village around that it takes to raise children and support their adults. Touch & Go is a friendly, albeit temporary village!
Could you talk about what you’ve noticed about very young children and their relationship to movement and their bodies?
They’re skilled. Movement is one of their languages and they use it all the time to communicate, make connections, explore and respond to the world around them.
What is something that has surprised you, as you’ve developed this work?
How very true the phrase “less is more” actually is!
One of my favorite things about my kids when they were little was that they would just dance anywhere – street corners, grocery stores, everywhere. It was just pure joy with no inhibitions. They started to lose that by the time they reached primary school. Is that inevitable or can we nurture that joyful expression in our families – adults included?!
Definitely. Family means many different things and so I think the nurturing of joyful expression is ideally society-wide and happening in all the places children find themselves.
