Excerpts from the text "The Emancipated Baby"
by Ben Fltecher-Watson

Sensescapes offers a shifting panoply of propositions, inviting interaction and observation in equal measure. Immediacy is heightened by the unpredictability both of the dancers' movements and the babies' physical responses. Indeed, "all forms of physical encounter between people stimulate interactions even if their shape is not always plainly evident... you cannot not react to each other" (Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p.43). A dancer’s encounter with their audience may take the form of an intimate moment of direct interaction or simply a glance, a ‘checking-in’ of mutuality, but in all cases, the reactions are equal, generating a collective experience.

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The interrelational ecology which emerges from the placement of children and carers within a safe, immersive environment creates a community which itself reflects and embodies the performance aesthetic. As noted earlier, the aim of productions such as Sensescapes is to highlight the partiality of experience, rendering each child's perception of performance as equally valid, equally legitimate. The audience becomes a collective of actors in their own story, emancipated from the fixed viewpoints and semiotic codes of conventional dance. "[B]y externalising their emotions and experiences, fantasy and real" in participatory play and performance (English, 2005, p.182), babies are freed to construct their own identities. Space, action, reaction and perception are reconfigured to encourage agency, and thus emancipation.

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