About
In Your Arms
In Your Arms is an immersive, participatory art experience for babies, mothers and caregivers which brings attention to the importance of new babies’ interdependent relationship with the earth.
In Your Arms is available as a live participatory performance and as a selection of online audio playscapes. These offerings invite pre-crawling babies and their mothers and caregivers into an imaginative world evoking sensory connections between body, movement and nature.
In Your Arms began in 2019 and has been created with support from the ArtPlay – New Ideas Lab, City of Melbourne. Vanessa Chapple and Rivka Worth (both long-time students and educators-in-training of Body-Mind Centering®) make work which explores the connection between somatic practice, babies’ development and human’s relationship to nature, climate change and Indigenous ways of listening and caring for the environment.
The research and development stages of In Your Arms included consultation and conversations with local Indigenous activists, artists and elders, Doreen Garvey Wandin, Stacie Nicho Piper, Arika Roo Waulu and Tyson Yunkaporta. The artists continue to collaborate with First Nations mentors as cultural advisors in the exploration of Indigenous philosophy and practice of environmental connection and care and how it relates to the listening body. Stories and songlines, language and cultural practices express the interconnectedness of all living things.
In Your Arms was developed in consultation with Body-Mind Centering®Teacher and Infant Developmental Movement Educator Amy Matthews (Babies Project) and Body-Mind Centering® Teacher Kim Sargent-Wishart (Circulate Arts & Education). The project explores babies’ relationships through a lens of early developmental movement and key principles of the Body-Mind Centering®(BMC℠) approach. Babies’ first motor skills are built on what they are able to sense. Bonding and safety lead to curiosity and learning.
Musicians/sound designers Ria Soemardjo and Charlotte Roberts work with archetypal sounds including heartbeat and principles drawn from TaKeTiNa Rhythm Process and improvisatory processes informed by diverse musical scales. They draw upon inspiration from local flora and fauna, somatic practices, an eclectic range of musical instruments including handmade ceramic percussion and their vocal expertise for sound design creation.
The first two years of the project included collaboration with babies and their caregivers as we tested ideas and spent time observing, playing and co-creating. Our listening and learning underpins our artistic choices, sharing with our audiences how both somatic and indigenous practices are grounded in attunement, listening and presence.
In Your Arms promotes taking time to nourish, nurture and care for inner and outer environments and centres the new baby’s intertwined relationship with the earth.
We would love to hear from you !
For information on booking In Your Arms please CONTACT US.
Inspiration from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
“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.”
From Embodying Cellular Consciousness through Touch and Movement: A Body-Mind Centering®) Approach
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen is a movement artist, researcher, educator, and therapist, and the developer of the Body-Mind Centering® approach to movement, the body, and consciousness. For over 50 years she has been exploring the anatomical, embryological, and developmental foundations of movement and how they relate to our psychophysical processes and wellbeing.
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We acknowledge the first storytellers - the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We specifically acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation on which In Your Arms was conceived and developed. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
Sovereignty was never ceded.