Rehearsing catastrophe: cultivating affective responses to climate change through eco-somatic performance with babies and mothers

ABSTRACT

This article considers the related concepts of ‘rehearsal’ [Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions] and ‘catastrophe’ [Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Open Humanities Press] as activism, focussing upon eco-somatic drama processes engaged through In Your Arms (IYA). This participatory arts project for babies and their primary caregivers was co-created in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, by a four-person artist ensemble, ten pre-crawling babies, and their mothers. Multi-modalities were used, including improvisatory movement scores, natural props, sound-making and listening practices. The article suggests new ways to consider drama activity at a micro-sensorial scale, offering practices that cultivate environmental attunement and care from the very first months of life.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative ecologies
• ecological aesthetics
• eco-somatics
• rehearsal
• climate catastrophe
• Theatre for the Early Years (TEY)

Introduction

In her book In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (2015), Isabelle Stengers argues that we are currently ‘living in suspense’ (23) within a cascading series of climatological, biogenic, social, and technological catastrophes. She describes this state of suspension as a growing divide between what humans are collectively and individually capable of, and what is actually required to avert an inevitable descent into chaos as global impacts of climate change increase in severity. One of Stengers’s key examples is the extended impact of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans in 2008, in which wealthy citizens escaped the inundation, while poor people were abandoned. Since Katrina, the frequency and severity of climate-related disasters have increased dramatically and continue to have disproportionate impacts within marginalised and disadvantaged communities (Pörtner et al. 2022).

And yet, as Stengers (2015) writes, many communities ‘are already engaged in experiments that try to make the possibility of a future that isn’t barbaric’ (24). As climate catastrophe becomes inseparable from everyday life events and future trajectories, the question now is how to create ‘a life “after economic growth”, a life that explores connections with new powers of acting, feeling, imagining, and thinking’ (24, emphasis added). For Stengers, the climate catastrophe must be transduced into an impetus for catastrophic changes in affective, social, political, and economic life rather than simply addressed as a problem ‘out there’ that can be fought or defended from one side or another (see also Guattari 2014).

Drama performance and drama education are inherently concerned with the moving body and its relations with/in the world (Harris and Holman Jones 2020a), and therefore offer significant tools for developing the ‘new powers of acting, feeling, imagining, and thinking’ that Stengers (2015) calls for. This affective inter-relationship between body and environment is also central to children’s learning and growth processes from birth (Stern [1985] 2018). In this article, we propose that performative community arts which include co-participants from birth can provide a matrix for the body-environment relation to grow and develop in ways that are attuned and responsive to climate change.

To explore this, we focus on the project In Your Arms (IYA), co-created through collaborative processes by a four-person artist ensemble (including Author 1), ten babies and their mothers. IYA is an ongoing participatory art project first developed at ArtPlay, a lively children’s art space situated along Birrarung (the Yarra River), a traditional meeting place of the Wurundjeri and Bunurong peoples, in the city of Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. ArtPlay offers innovative programmes inviting children – from babies to 13 years of age – and artists to explore and create art experiences that engender playful connection and expression through diverse forms of aesthetic experimentation. In 2019, ArtPlay’s New Ideas Lab called for artists to propose projects responding to the climate change emergency. During the pandemic-affected period of 2020–2021, the founding IYA ensemble Rivka Worth, Vanessa Chapple, Ria Soemardjo and Charlotte Roberts¹ began the explorations with babies and their primary caregivers, employing ArtPlay’s 12-month creative development model of ‘Dream, Make, Show’ (see City of Melbourne 2023).

Drawing on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s theorisation of ‘rehearsal’ (2013), and Stengers’ theorisation of ‘catastrophe’, we conceptualise IYA as a rehearsal of embodied affects and performance practices that contribute to the construction of what we name as an eco-somatic imaginary that connects infants and caregivers through their reciprocal relationships with the surrounding ecological milieu in a time of climate catastrophe. Through a close analysis of examples from IYA, we explore how eco-somatic drama practices can cultivate the affect of environmental attunement, care and sensitivity in readiness response to the catastrophic conditions of climate change. By synthesising the theoretics of Stengers, and Harney and Moten, we conceptualise IYA’s work as a practice of ‘rehearsing catastrophe’, in which the concept of ‘rehearsal’ implies improvisation as a means of ‘being with each other’ that is collectively attuned and responsive to climatological and social crisis (Harney and Moten 2013, 156). Our focus on the processual dynamics of rehearsal (rather than products or outcomes) is an attempt to emphasise the continuous affective labour associated with creative forms of intergenerational learning, resilience, and recovery from eco-trauma (Verlie 2022). In doing so, our article builds on and contributes to recent work that connects affect theory with innovative concepts and practices in the field of drama education (Franks 2014; Harris and Holman Jones 2020b). Our analysis suggests that performance and drama-based projects like IYA exemplify how eco-somatic awareness can be nurtured through collaborative, participatory performance, and in turn, how eco-somatic practices can cultivate affective sensitivity to interdependent relations with the environment and work to foster resilience at the community level. To contextualise the work of IYA within the field of theatre in early years, in the next section we offer a brief landscape summary of that literature, especially in how it intersects with the field of somatic movement.

Theatre for the early years

There is an extensive history of Theatre for the Early Years (TEY) projects over the last forty years which have ecological themes. Over the past decade, Australian projects such as An Unusual Time (Sarah Austin), Glow and Rain (Threshold), Nursery, Seashore and Wonder (Sally Chance Dance), The Ballroom Projects Threads and Polyglot Theatre’s Pram People have created live and online theatre arts experiences for babies and families which offer sensory, aesthetic experiences. IYA adds to these TEY offerings with a specific focus on eco-somatic practice. Eco-somatics refers to a growing practice that integrates somatic embodied research with considerations of ecology, providing a way for practitioners to explore bodies in and as part of nature. Eco-somatics acknowledges the relationships between the physical environment and the body and the inseparability of inner and outer material worlds.

IYA adds to the global repertoire of TEY for babies, drawing specifically upon the work of pioneering somatic movement educator Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen (2018) and her conceptualisation of infant developmental movement patterns, particularly the notion of ‘yield’ (169), which can be described as an active meeting of the body with its environment and a readiness to respond. Yield is an active state of engagement between a person and that with which they are in contact. The experience of yield foregrounds the relationship of the body with gravity, ground, surround and other beings, and this meeting offers options: to remain, push, reach, or pull to new experience. These movement and learning patterns enable babies to organise the body in relation to gravity, space, and their surrounding environment (Bainbridge-Cohen 2018).

Taking the earth’s gravitational force as a fundamental aspect of nature acting within a baby’s environment, the IYA project focuses on pre-crawling babies (approximately 3–6 months) and their felt sense of material and supportive relationships with the environment, from playing on the floor to being held in their caregiver’s arms. This time is a vulnerable period for babies who are transitioning from the fluid support of the womb into the world of gravity and multi-sensory stimulation and space (Stokes 2002). IYA focuses upon the sensorial world and affective expression of babies as they develop an embodied capacity to move into and through space. Central to the project is the embodied relationship between the baby and the primary caregiver, respect for the subtlety of the ongoing internal movement of sensory perception and affective expression, and recognition of support and safety which have an influence upon the ongoing life experience of the infant in the environment.

This article argues that IYA provides a staging ground for rehearsing Stengers’ notion of ‘catastrophe’ in ways that acknowledge the climate emergency as implicit in every juncture and facet of a child’s life. To ‘rehearse catastrophe’ is to collectively undo and re-assemble the broken conditions of the present without resorting to the lure of transcendence, or any other way out of a world which, given current trajectories, is on a path to destroy itself. It is to dramatise and prepare for catastrophic events which are already in the germ (Demos 2020), while at the same time, exploring what life-affirming insights and joys might still emerge out of such conditions. As a point of resistance to the ‘coming barbarism’ that Stenger’s forecasts, IYA offers an opportunity to rehearse climate catastrophe alternatives through a lived presence in eco-somatic performance practices in community settings.

Gathering vitality affects

In exploring our extension of Stengers’ and Harney & Moten’s concepts, we put to work Daniel Stern’s notion of ‘vitality affects’ ([1985] 2018, 2010, 2018), which enables both the rehearsal and the embodied acknowledgement of catastrophe in this project through eco-somatic practices and felt qualities of the experience of the babies. The creative and somatic practices engaged in IYA extend Stern’s vitality affects from the primacy of the infant-caregiver relation into ecological relationships with the natural environment. By extending the vitality affects of being held as a child into the wider environment, IYA suggests that an infant’s vital relations with gravity, heat, light, sound, weight, and other elemental factors constitute an eco-somatic image or ‘imaginary’ of the body-environment relation (Harris and Lemon 2012; Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles 2023). With the felt sensing of support through the experience of yield, whether through the mother’s holding arms or in explorations on the surface of the floor/ground, this eco-somatic imaginary is influenced by the material relational connection a baby experiences as they encounter the world. In this respect, the relational approach to eco-somatic practice and affective attunement undertaken through IYA has resonance with Indigenous knowledge practices and concepts which situate children within more-than-human kinship networks from birth (Bawaka Country 2022; Cajete and Williams 2020) and as inextricably connected with Country (Jones-Amin, Nicholson, and Ewen 2014).²

The collective of artists who produced IYA are experienced practitioners whose work enfolds eco-somatic pedagogies and performance practices and, in this case, instantiates the kind of reworlding that rehearsing for catastrophe can provide. This project foregrounds the inseparability of body–mind-earth as an ontological frame, described by the artists as

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 invites pre-crawling babies and their mothers and caregivers into an imaginative world evoking sensory connections between body, movement and nature. The project foregrounds using creative arts experience to grow an embodied sense of agency and the capacity for connection with the earth. The project is informed by the concept of the body as a site of interdependencies and full of potential for vitality and interconnectedness. (In Your Arms n.d.)

The invitation for adults to take part was articulated as an experience of taking time out of the ordinary to immerse in an imaginative sensory performance creation process for babies and caregivers; to be part of a participatory experience that tends to the relationship between new babies and the natural world. IYA artists invited mothers/caregivers to bring their babies to ArtPlay to co-create an immersive theatre work focused on cultivating and expressing connections between bodily and earthly milieux.

IYA follows other work in the TEY field combining what Fletcher-Watson et al. (2014) describe as inductive and deductive methods to create the dramaturgy of the piece. The praxis of the artists includes research and mentorship from chosen experts in the field of somatics and child development to inform their ethico-aesthetic choices.³ These are aesthetic practices that acknowledge that places of safety and security are necessary for an eco-somatic imaginary to grow amidst an environment of ubiquitous risk and catastrophe. Through practices of yielding and bonding, babies rehearse the movements that will become integrated patterns of coordination which connect them to an intrinsic understanding of their relationship to gravity and to the support of mother/caregivers. And these practices are also extended, through IYA, to practices of yield and bond in relation to the creatures, elements, and forces that populate the earth.

There is a substantive body of literature in the fields of environmental education and childhood studies that demonstrates the impact of significant childhood experiences on life-long commitments to environmental connection, care, and activism (Chawla 1998, 2020). Infancy and early childhood present particularly significant junctures for fostering these dispositions of environmental attunement and care (Duhn 2012). In this regard, the project contributes to the recent turn towards ecological aesthetics currently emerging at the intersections of environmental education, childhood studies, and the creative arts. If aesthetics has traditionally been concerned with sensory perceptions, feelings and tonalities of human experience, then an ‘ecological aesthetics’ radically extends this power and capacity for aesthetic experience to the whole of nature (Cajete and Williams 2020; Stern 2018). The project also extends Harris’ (2018, 2021) concept of creative ecology which suggests that ‘every ecology is creative … and every creative ecology is an event, forever changing all of its elements as it co-creates the next moment’ (2021, 5). IYA weaves these interrelated concepts, through Stengers (2005) ‘ecology of practices’, which ‘is quite simply a question of habitat, the context in which you undertake your labour, and the habits that circumscribe your methodologies’ (Frichot 2017, 139). Like Harney and Moten’s notion of the ‘undercommons’, this kind of labour provides channels for creative resistance as well as imaginings of a more interconnected future.

IYA also attends to the specific conditions of the COVID ‘moment’, which in itself represents a kind of catastrophe rehearsal on many fronts. These ten babies and their mothers were welcomed to the ArtPlay context to perform encounters with water, ground, the sound of magpies, leaf branch puppets, textures of cloth materials in temporary nests, gum trees seen and heard through the windows in the distance, and stories from each adult participants’ memories of animals and natural ecologies from their childhoods. In what follows, we weave empirical vignettes from the IYA project with analytic sections that build on the concepts of vitality affects, rehearsing catastrophe, and the eco-somatic imaginary discussed above. By attending to the embodied relations of child and environment, and how this relation can grow and develop through eco-somatic drama practices, this article contributes to current discussions regarding the crucial role of drama education in addressing climate change across the life-course.

Eco-somatic techniques of attunement

Upon arrival, I take time to pause along the banks of the river Birrarung flowing alongside ArtPlay, to sense into my fluid body, my cellular breathing. I stop sipping my morning takeaway coffee to consciously yield into the path on which I am standing, closing my eyes for a few minutes to sense inwards. Under the tall eucalypts, a faint breeze travels across the water and touches my exposed skin; the river gums connect beneath my feet and my vision is drawn skyward. I am orienting to the 360 degree field of relations and my thinking opens up. I prepare myself for welcoming the babies and their caregivers into this creative encounter. I am both nervous and excited to be beginning this process of co-creation. I wriggle a little and then stretch, calling up my own bodily intelligence so that I can meet everyone with presence. (Vanessa – artist IYA)

The babies arrive at the expansive building of ArtPlay in protective prams, already a collective performance of singular rhythms of sound and movement, responding to the atmosphere of the large space with coos, cries, and some wailing, letting everyone know they are here in various volumes. It is 10am and as reported by mums, the best time to get out of the house to not disrupt daily sleep patterns. None of the babies or mothers knows each other. They have seen publicity for the programme which invites them to co-create a piece of participatory performance with their babies and the artists who are dancers, theatre makers and musician sound artists. During the session, all the mothers express an eagerness to get out of the house and do something to change routine from the repetitive, exhausting activity of mothering a newborn during COVID.

The artists gather with the mothers as they arrive and introduce themselves and the project. They take turns in the telling and appear a well-rehearsed ensemble; the feeling of care and connection between the artists is palpable. One of the artists offers a heartfelt Acknowledgement of Country celebrating the Birrarung, the traditional owners and the more than sixty thousands of years of storytelling, connection and Wurundjeri custodianship of the land and waterways on which they are gathering. In Australia, Acknowledgement of Country is a spoken or written demonstration of respect for the traditional custodians of the land on which a meeting or event is being held. It is a recognition of the continuing relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Country (Bawaka Country 2022), as well as acknowledging newer settlers on the land and the attendant responsibilities to the land, and the privileges, of being there.

The mothers listen in; the babies gurgle and continue to ‘pull focus’. The artists lead the babies and mothers to leave their shoes at the door, to move slowly through the heavy black curtains, into a large adjoining space and into a circle of mats. Each mat has a sturdy wooden back support and a small branch of eucalyptus leaves laying ready for puppeteering (Figure 1). The musician-artists have picked up their frame drums and shakers and offer a regular deep pulse as everyone walks in expectantly. A small mountain of cushions and blankets rises out of the centre of the space. The mothers are invited to take cushions and soft blankets from the mound and take their time to create their individual pods of comfort for themselves and their infants – nest-like, facing into the central space. The mats have been chosen with special consideration given to the density, flexibility and depth to offer a firm surface of support. The mothers are invited to lie with or beside their babies, to change positions when they feel like it, so they can immerse themselves in witnessing the activity of their individual babies and also see and hear the artists. Everyone is at ground level and can see each other across the space. In the circle, the babies are invited to explore different sensory textures of their environment through touch, hearing and their near-sighted vision. Toes wriggle, yawn breathe, and tongues protrude in cat-like, then lizard-like choreographies as they sense, exploring the new world whilst supported through their mother’s body or laying on the ground. The artists invite mothers to remain in the circle with their babies even if babies are crying or hungry. The artists have conceptualised the design of the space as a temporary meeting place, simple in architecture and materials, comfortable and carved out from the everyday hustle and bustle of urban life.

Figure 1. Leaf play during the IYA ‘dreaming’ stage.

The soundscape moves between simple, repeated vocal melodies and percussive offerings using squeezing sponges and water bowls, branches with long fingers of leaves, body percussion and subtle bell chimes especially curated for babies’ ears. The artists dance and play in close proximity to the mother-baby dyads, staying a while, slowing down from the everyday rhythms of the outside world. Through these embodied performances in which the artists are tending to their interoceptive experience in unison with external stimulation, a weft of aesthetic encounter takes place which offers a shift in the atmospheres in which the baby and adult can experience the world.

The drama is delicate, nuanced. Two artists perform choreography of cellular breathing and sponge-like condensing and expanding, a dance of almost imperceptible affects, improvising through tracing the movements travelling throughout their bodies. There are palpable shifts in the tonality of the collective gathering with its swirling intermixtures of rhythms and breath. The artists orient to the babies leading with their micro-movements, sounds and attention. The babies are tended through touch and sound, honoured in this temporary meeting place in their iterative processes of co-becoming.

Sound and nests

By targeting the first stage of human development, IYA enacts how human-ecological relations must become foundational to child development in order to be fully embodied, rather than a later intellectually ‘learned’ priority. In this respect, the project works to establish the relational conditions necessary for a manner of responding to climate change to emerge from the very first months of life onwards. As Stengers (2015) argues, this is an urgent task not only for the survival of human societies, ‘but also for the innumerable living species that we are dragging into the catastrophe’ (40).

The black birds sing from branches along the Birrarung today, and now inside: In the circle one of the sound artists, Charlotte, transforms a baby’s singular gurgling expression into an impression of a magpie song. With flowing repetition and prosody improvisations, drawing upon her own skill development and attunement practices over many years, she acknowledges all the babies with her embodied vocal delivery. She dances the shape of the bird as she warbles. The baby who ‘made the offer’ is mesmerised. A mother expresses worry that her baby is not doing anything in response to the music. This seemingly still ‘not doing anything’ is given another framing by the lead artists in shared conversation with the group. Imperceptible movements of the baby body involved in complex processes of processing are given recognition. There is always something going on. (Vanessa – IYA artist notes)

Infant movement specialist Beverly Stokes (2002) suggests that ‘babies learn about themselves and organize their experiences in relation to a responsive environment’ (39). Touch and sound are ways of offering safety and comfort which are vital in the very early stages of infancy (Bainbridge-Cohen 2018; Barnaby and Matthews 2017; Stokes 2002). The IYA theatre space was shaped to give import to the micro-events and affective encounters offered to the babies. With carefully curated ‘just enough’ but not too much stimulation, the babies were able to sense and move (in minute choreographies) from a place of safety and comfort either when held by their mothers or supported by the ecology of the ground (floor) beneath them, with mother tending nearby. These transitions from safety and comfort also form a foundation for connection to other species and can bring attention to climate health as the baby grows, understanding its interdependent relationship with and responsibility to the more-than-human environment. The use of sound and nests were two important sensory performance elements in the IYA project, allowing babies to participate fully in performing and ritualistically connecting with the environment of both mothers and surroundings through the vitality affects produced by these material offerings.

Two members of the IYA performance ensemble, musicians/sound designers Ria Soemardjo and Charlotte Roberts, worked with archetypal sounds including heartbeat and improvisatory processes informed by diverse musical scales. They drew upon inspiration from local flora and fauna, somatic practices, an eclectic range of musical instruments including handmade ceramic percussion and their vocal expertise (Figure 2). As Layne Redmond (1997) writes, ‘the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear’ (4). IYA sought to employ these primordial rhythms in the babies’ participation, using handmade ceramic instruments and the human voice as an embodiment of breath that delivers an immediate experience of human-nature entanglement.

For IYA we explored sounds, rhythms, musical modes that might encourage a range of different responses from babies and their carer. We explored the question of how rhythmic play – through movement and voice and sound – allow the listener, in this case the babies, to balance the need for both stimulation and deep rest? Voice, the sounds of wood, clay, glass, breath, membranes of frame drums and body percussion were chosen carefully and arranged for sensitive ears. We wondered if we could somehow hold the baby and carer gently, with words and sound. (Ria – IYA artist)

Sound can offer new babies the coordinates of their peripheral worlds, opening their perception to the expansiveness of space within which they have arrived from the fluid-filled space of the womb. The IYA project employs these levels of sound to connect babies with their creative ecological environments through multiple senses and vitality affects of the natural world.

Figure 2. Array of percussion instruments used by the artist ensemble for IYA.

A second method used to nurture intimate infant connections with the environment involved the construction of ‘nests’ (Figure 3). The nests are composed of thick rope, blankets, pillows, leaves, and branches from a local eucalyptus tree. In the nests, the mother-baby dyads are invited to variously sit, kneel, and lie at ground level. Time is given to discover the physical contours and weight of forms that shape support: through the floor, through the density of cushions, through the meeting places of the surfaces of their skin. During the session, some of the babies need to feed, suckle or drink from bottles; others are held more vertically on knees and thighs, scooped and supported by each mother’s belly and arms. The co-becoming bodies move together in changing positions of touch and weight.

Figure 3. Example of a ‘nest’ for babies and caregivers to connect and explore.

From the nests, both mother and baby duets are invited to join a movement improvisation score by the artists, a ‘follow your interest’, a noticing task. The mothers settle into watching, listening, sensing their baby’s micro-movements, noting their shared affective flows and shifting tones. Composed in the moments unfolding and enfolding, the artist-musicians play a soundscape, which offers specific rhythms, patterns and tones acting as a river underneath to support the micro-choreographies taking place. Womb-like fluid vibrations pulse in the expansive room; the space becomes a transitional environment for the babies who have only very recently left the fluid environment of the womb. Through their ears, the sound makes its inward journey, spiralling through the ear canal from air to fluid spaces and resonance. The sound connects the worlds of the fluid cellular body and the outside external world of ground and gravity. Leaf branches have also been collected locally by one of the artists to tickle and create shadow play for the babies. The artists dance improvisation of small delicate steps around each nesting baby and mother, leaves hanging, twirling, patterning above just in range to see and lift, stretch, reach out small arms and hands to touch. Later the mothers speak with the artists about how unusual it is to have this time to be with their babies without distractions. They reflect on the incalculable value of time to notice their babies’ inclinations, curiosities, movement patterns, to move with them in and out of contact, to be immersed in the changing atmospheres and environmental connections they are co-creating with their babies.

Rehearsal

A key aspect that emerges from the IYA project is a sense of ‘rehearsal’ as a collective process of iterative and embodied social improvisation. To the extent that climatological ‘catastrophe’ is the ontological condition of the world into which today’s infants are born, rehearsal constitutes an ongoing relational practice of social improvisation and regenerative knowledge-sharing. In dramatic arts and education contexts, the concept of rehearsal is often taken as a means to an end, such as the rehearsals of material that lead to a public performance, film, or other creative outcome. The account above flips this linear notion of process and product by resituating rehearsal as an ongoing process of improvised relations that never resolve into a final outcome or completed form.

Harney and Moten (2013, 2021) describe rehearsal as an embodied social aesthetics embedded in the shared experience of change taking place. They refer to rehearsal as a form of ‘study’ that is irreducibly collective, improvisational, and always already happening beneath the formal demands of institutional standards, products, criteria, and categories.

The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present … To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that that has [always] been the case – because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought. (Harney and Moten 2013, 110)

The IYA project extends Harney and Moten’s notion of rehearsal to emphasise the improvised exchange of performative gestures and forms of expression inherently part of the mother-baby relationship, one that can form a loving foundation for care and connection with the more-than-human. This expansion of the boundary conditions around creative practice and ‘mothering’ also situates rehearsal as a mode of social relations that always need to be re-invented and re-rehearsed, rather than relying on prefabricated social contracts, outcomes, and terms of relation.

Through its commitment to iterative improvisation, rehearsal disperses itself in ways that never resolve into a fixed position or standpoint which might be identified and coded as an individual with particular attributes, qualities, and opinions. This is a particularly important aspect of IYA, to the extent that it rehearses ways of redispersing and redistributing experiences that actively include and respond to infants as pre-verbal participants. In this respect, rehearsal generates a ‘paraontological zone’ of encounter (Harney and Moten 2021), the playful collaborations filled with interdependent movements and circulations of bodies, affects and environments – where it is no longer necessary to say ‘I’ in order to participate in the improvisation of bodily activity, social life, and ecological relationality. Indeed, the aim of such rehearsal is to continuously elaborate a subjectivity that is open to the environment and irreducibly collective. In this sense, rehearsal has no ‘point’ as couched in terms of a linear progression from a point of origin (infant) to an end-product (adult). Instead rehearsal becomes the creative improvisation of a means without ends.

Similarly, as Stern (2018) makes clear in his model of child development, the vitality affects that constitute a child’s growing capacities to engage and learn from the environment never follow a series of progressive linear stages. Child development is, for Stern, more a process of accretion and layering of experience which continues to build on and permeate one another over time. Rather than stages of development that result in an end-product of the functional adult, Stern proposes an ongoing series of rehearsals through which new ‘ways-of being-with’ are continuously generated without ever achieving a final or complete human subject. IYA offers collaborative conditions for mothers and babies to explore invitations of song, leaf play, improvised movement choreographies and story in unrushed time frames, without the need for an end result beyond the experience of the drama processes themselves.⁴

Yielding and bonding

These notions of ongoing rehearsal and incompleteness are central to how we understand the role of IYA in responding to the climate emergency. Climate change demands new practices of eco-somatic attunement and response that refuse the western myth of the self-contained, autonomous subject who stands apart from the world. IYA looks to develop such practices from the very first months of life and works with the early developmental movement activities of yield and bond as key principles drawn from Bainbridge-Cohen’s (2012) Body–Mind Centering® somatic movement approach (see note 3). For Bainbridge Cohen, babies require the physical act of yield before they develop the movement pathways of push or reach which begin a baby’s move into space. Yield is articulated as the feeling and tone of resiliency and responsiveness through the body; an active state of engagement between a person and that with which they are in contact. Babies arrive in the world of gravity from the fluid environment of the womb. The infant’s development occurs in ecological correlation with the earth through continuous rehearsals with gravity and yield. The IYA artists, who are all also trained in somatic practices including Body–Mind Centering ®, use the concept of yield to inform their aesthetic provocations for co-creating with the mothers and babies. To yield, in this sense, is to give way to a process that ruptures the illusion of a body–mind separate from its environment, while at the same time, opening pathways through which the body–mind finds new capacities to grow and engage and bond with the environment as its condition for life.

Conclusion

The IYA project provides conditions within which babies learn through their bodies and environments, sensing and expressing in enfolding, dynamic cycles. The activism and radical act of care inside the project lies in providing and tending to conditions that support new babies and their caregivers in their interconnected ecological experience, developing modes of rehearsing care, or ‘acting, feeling, imagining’ which offer both resistance to and resilience in the climate catastrophe. Through grounded relational practices of nesting, sounding, yielding, and bonding, infants are able to find comfort and safety in cycles of sensory stimulation and expression. Mothers/caregivers learn from their pre-crawling babies’ responses to carefully curated aesthetic stimuli just how little is required for them to be receptive and connected to the world around them. IYA suggests that a child’s eco-somatic imaginary grows through these embodied encounters with the world in ongoing cycling and layering of experience. The rehearsal process becomes a space for rehearsing for and with the cascading catastrophes of life under climate change, using performance in everyday spaces of environmental care and recovery. In following these lines and cycles of rehearsal, this article contributes to recent work on ‘creative recovery’ and ‘creative resilience’ (Liguori et al. 2023), initiatives that foreground the role of participatory community arts in cultivating and facilitating solidarity under conditions of ecocide, climate emergency, pandemic, and social unrest. Ultimately the article proposes that community artists and performance practitioners can be frontline workers in responding to climate change within local environments, where techniques of eco-somatic attunement and environmental connection are effective modes of survival-rehearsal, from the first months of life onwards.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Vanessa Chapple is both a founding codirector/artist of the IYA project and coauthor of this article. The other ensemble members Rivka Worth (codirector), Ria Soemardjo, and Charlotte Roberts have agreed to have their work featured in this article and have reviewed the manuscript prior to submission. In Your Arms was developed in consultation with Body-Mind Centering® Teacher and Infant Developmental Movement Educator Amy Matthews (https://embodiedasana.com) and Body-Mind Centering® Educator/artist Dr Kim Sargent-Wishart (https://kimsargentwishart.com).

2 The research and development stages of In Your Arms included communication and consultation with local Indigenous activists, artists and elders, Doreen Garvey-Wandin, Stacie Nicho-Piper, Arika Roo Waulu and Tyson Yunkaporta. The artists continue to be mentored by Aunty Doreen Garvey-Wandin, Senior Wurundjeri elder and cultural advisor in their exploration of and practice of environmental connection and care for mothers and babies. First Nations stories and songlines, language and cultural practices express the interconnectedness of all living things.

3 ‘Body-Mind Centering® (BMC®) is an integrated and embodied approach to movement, the body and consciousness. Developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, it is an experiential study based on the embodiment and application of anatomical, physiological, psychophysical, and developmental principles, utilising movement, touch, voice and mind. Its uniqueness lies in the specificity with which each of the body systems can be personally embodied and integrated, the fundamental groundwork of developmental re-patterning, and the utilisation of a body-based language to describe movement and body-mind relationships’ (https://www.bodymindcentering.com).

4 In response to the severe Covid19 pandemic lockdown constraints experienced in Melbourne during the project’s development, the artists created an alternative iteration of the in-person participatory performance piece which consists of a series of audio playscapes composed using methods informed by eco-somatic practices. These audio offerings are available to families and playgroups online for use in the home, playgroup and community spaces.