IN YOUR ARMS
(draft website in development 12/21)is a participatory performance
for babies and caregivers.
It is also available as an online audio playspace.
Come and join us is an
immersive sensory space
where imagination and nourishment
invite your baby
newly in the world,
into relationship with body and nature.
“One of the ways to experience (yield) this is through rolling. I feel passionately about babies laying on their front, back, and sides so that they have this experience with gravity and so they’re familiar with it before they can actually roll around themselves. For a baby that has only been placed in certain positions and not in others, it can be fearful for them to go into unknown positions because their body doesn’t know how to increase this tone. We can help them to feel safe, not by just putting them in certain positions on the floor, but by using your own body as a surface so it’s your body yielding and moving. And your own body is yielding and moving in such a way that it helps them to feel this increase of tone, not just in these four positions but also all the transitions between back, belly, side, and side.”
In your Arms explores babies’ relationship through the early developmental movement key principles of Body-Mind Centering® (BMC) somatic movement education for adults and infants. Babies’ first motor skills are built on what they are able to sense. Bonding and safety lead to curiously and then learning. In Your Arms will share a story of the land through sound, image and texture creating opportunities for babies to bond with their experience of environment. It is in first stages of development and is co-created with artists and babies.
In your Arms project is collaborating with first nations mentors as cultural advisors in the exploration of Indigenous philosophy and practice of environmental connection and care. The aesthetic of the piece will reflects the restoration of deep rooted connection, to ancient knowledge to land and earth through the body and all the senses, through the imagination, through music song and the elasticity of time.
Indigenous thinking recognises that everything in the universe is alive and full of knowledge.”We experience time in a very different way from people immersed in flat schedules and story-less surfaces” (Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk). Stories and songlines, language and cultural practices express the interconnectedness of living things, living systems. In Your Arms will be the chance to collaborate with babies and care givers, indigenous artists and elders in research, development and creation of an accessible and interactive performance piece; a piece which connects Indigenous ways of being in nature, caring for country and all beings with how our youngest generation is being raised. The project foregrounds using creative arts experience to grow an embodied sense of agency and the capacity for connection with the earth.
