‘With Children: The Child as Collaborator and Performer’, a Symposium at Leeds Beckett University, January 2017
Photo: The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home
Closing Remarks (Lena Simic and Gabriel Anderson) Lena: Here I am, speaking as a daughter, not as a mother. Here I am, speaking from my space of creativity, as a teenager, dressed in a white blouse and black dress that arrived from Croatia yesterday. My parents sent a package to us, and I think it’s fair to say that I got the most presents, not my two teenagers Neal and Gabriel, not my 9-year-old child Sid, nor my toddler James, but me. I am still a daughter, a child, a rebellious teenager. In her book Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Maternal Subjectivity (2011) Alison Stone writes about the mother/daughter relationship and its connection to feminism. The position of authoring, creating, writing and responding comes to us as (feminist) daughters, not mothers. Feminism takes care of its daughters, not its mothers. Today, as I respond to this symposium, I am a daughter, I am a child. This is my entitlement. However, I am not one of those adults who is looking for their inner child. If anything it’s probably the contrary; I have always been one of those children who embraced their inner adult. And, crucially, I am still unsure about the delineation between children and adults. I haven’t made up my mind yet. Thank you to Helen Freshwater who has inspired my thoughts on the matter, as she outlined some of those inversions in her paper ‘Agency, power and the inner child: the ‘revolting children’ of Matilda The Musical.’ 1
And thank you to Alan Read for the ‘Build Your Own Keynote’ provocation which narrated his own growing up, revealed the fact his family used to bribe him with pocket money for good behaviour, explored (child) labour, money and family history, as well as showcasing two new skills: how to use the laser beam on his clicker for his PowerPoint and public singing whilst playing a guitar. Alan taught us about research, explained what it was and asked children to engage in 2.5 hours of it, choosing from five different subjects: the environment, art, politicians, parents and Bob Dylan’s song ‘the times they are a changin’. Each child was offered a contract and £10, which would require them to write up their summary of research on a post-card and send it back to Alan by the end of February. The money for the ‘Build Your Own Keynote’ research project came from Alan’s £200 keynote speaker’s fee, which was ‘surplus’ to his own needs, as explained in the lecture. As I have decided to be a daughter and not a mother on the day, I took up a contract on ‘parents’ research and promised to engage in this topic for 2.5 hours. As things stand, I’m exhausted by doing too much research on maternal subjectivity and performance. I have been preoccupied with intersubjectivity, co-dependency and too many interruptions.
As I was delivering my response, my closing remarks, little James, my sweet toddler, kept asking for the microphone. After I had given it to him, he’d tell us some important babbles, and move on. Then other little children did the same, offering some more dada-ish sound poetry. I wondered out loud: is this agency? Are these children empowered or are they still stuck within the structures ‘we’, the adults, provided? Then I wondered whether we should even discuss the situation and definitions of children/adults in these terms, given that the boundaries are not so clear. I admitted that I doubted we had a grasp on the question of agency and power. We have to go back to Foucault and the understanding that power is not a thing but a relation. Power has the ability to be exercised through the social body. Foucault says: ‘Power exists only when it is put into action.’ Gloria Steinem’s much quoted proclamation: ‘Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself’ and The Godfather III tagline ‘Real power can't be given. It must be taken’ seem important here whilst discussing children in performance, with children. We, the adults, the three academics/artist-scholars have conceived and created this symposium; the other adults responded to the call. We all brought children with us, in some way or other. We decided the children would be tolerated in the pre-booked spaces of Leeds Beckett University. Does this mean that the space is theirs? Do they have a desire to be here? Many performance practices with children claim that the children are empowered by being in performances; there’s this constant, paradoxical and yet deeply moving desire for agency/autonomy on behalf of someone else. And whilst a certain kind of joy, celebration, a sense of achievement is inevitable (“I wrote this song all by myself!”) these kinds of claims, which are often made by adult facilitators strike a utopian note, perhaps a little rushed and wishful. Some kind of impossibility is presented. And somehow in the Leeds Beckett pre-booked and authorized studio spaces, having signed the disclaimer about the children’s safety and having taken responsibility for them as parents/guardians, we all seem to be sitting with 2
this difficult paradoxical position. Our spaces are highly managed, here and elsewhere. The fact that they are shouldn’t disable us, but we should be open about these constraining structures. This begs me to ask a question: What kind of open structures enable a production of agency? Additionally, and subsequently to the questions of agency and power, working with children in performance open up crucial questions regarding notions of authorship, recognition and collaboration. Gabriel: Mum! Do you ever stop? I’ve been watching, listening and taking notes as you commanded and now you’re saying what I’ve heard from various different people multiple times all day. No, this is a closing speech and I want to get home! I barely slept six hours last night thanks to you and Dad’s early start for Leeds. I’m just going to say my piece and sleep. Ah, sleep. Photo: Adele Senior
Children, it’s what everyone is at heart, don’t you think? I mean, you can celebrate your 50th all day long, but you’ll never stop being a child. I know a lot of children… I’m sure you do too, ah, the simplicity. I miss being a stress-free child. Now, it’s all about school, GSCEs, A level choices, universities, making good choices, being a good person, I mean ugh. Children get to do whatever they like but they’ll get treated like butter wouldn’t melt. As a teenager, I feel extremely victimised. No matter how nice you are, how smartly you are dressed, how clever you are, you will never, EVER get a smile from an old lady in the street or dog walker in the park. You can smile at them all you like, wave, say hello, stroke their dog, but teenagers are always assumed to be gang involved, drug and alcohol using, underachieving criminals. Nevertheless, this conference has been on children, sweet innocent children. And the different aspects of them from home-schooling to dancing. So let’s all give a round of applause to the children, the stars of the show. Thank you kids for playing so nicely and being so patient for the sake of your parents’ careers. Anything to add, mother? Lena: Yes, of course. The issue of appearing as a good parent/mother has haunted me throughout the symposium. Have my kids behaved? Why is Sid on the iPad? The symposium itself was an act of endurance. Adele approached me shortly before my closing remarks response was due, with slight alarm in her eyes, saying the children have rebelled, that they had truly had enough, that they were outside the theatre shouting and screaming, out of control. You are out of your mind Adele for having organized a symposium like this! Well done, 3
you! Well done, Leeds Beckett University with all of your health and safety and ethics procedures and for letting it happen. Have you had fun kids? Have we failed you as parents today? Marina and Angelina, Elena Marchevska’s daughters grew a bit more as young feminists today having presented at an academic conference. They told us about feminism, they were serious, they were adult, they learnt from presenting in front of others, adults and children. They also made friends for a day. Lots of things happened off stage, in breaks, in between spaces, in experiment, in play, just like Lisa Scheers and Carolien Hermans’ paper ‘Why do you think that you but not me should be on stage?’ showcased. New skills were learnt; new experiences gathered; my toddler James ran away and got lost for a while. Sid sang along to Matilda the Musical extracts shown in one of the presentations: his eyes lifted from the iPad onto the screen, transfixed.
Photos: Adele Senior
The dreadfulness of disclosure of our parenting failures, and certain embarrassment, (just like Alan’s daughter turning her head in the photo at her university graduation) never left me. I suffer from that syndrome of always being happy to hear some other kid crying on an airplane, which of course means that my kid isn’t the worst one. Bring it on, cry some more, I don’t mind. The symposium also touched on the delicate revelations of artists’ lives with children in it, and in particular through the work of Shirley Cameron and Grace Surman who were part of the evening panel. Shirley’s work was presented and beautifully facilitated by Miffy Ryan as she engaged in a conversation with Shirley about her past works whilst the symposium children took over the stage, recreating some of the performance works from the 1970s and 1980s. We were reminded about such a wealth of feminist performance in the 1970s and the fact that none of this is new: artists had children back then as well, artists had to find their own kinds of coping mechanisms in combining of art/life. Children, back then, were on stage both intentionally, but also there as a necessity as no childcare was available. Grace Surman and Clare Dearnaley’s careful video Film with Hope closed the day. Throughout the film, we heard from mother Grace and daughter Hope. The roles got reversed; the mother and daughter play with one another, reinventing their daily places, stopping/subverting time, and subsequently their lives. Hope is the one taking care of Grace, Hope, the carer. It is through the film that family life takes on a different kind of aesthetic form. Personal is 4
yet again reimagined as political but also aesthetic; lived experience reinvented as art. In the afternoon panel I attended someone said: ‘Does it matter if the baby in performance is his own?’ This was in relation to Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Tragedia Endogonidia BR#4 (2004), which has a scene with a baby on stage. The baby is sometimes content, sometimes bored and sometimes cries. Are the artists okay to damage their own kids? Through his paper ‘Acting up: baby performers on the contemporary stage’ Ben Fletcher-Watson reminded us about the different kinds of babies on stage, fake ones and real ones, and prerecorded cries which were once upon a time real, bored babies, distressed babies, screaming and annoying ones. Ben discussed Zoo Indigo’s performance Under the Covers (2009) which asks the audiences to babysit, via Skype, performers’ babies who are asleep and at home, so that the mothers can get on with the job of performing. Via Skype technology, the audience becomes present in someone’s home, with the ability to interfere with real babies’ sleep. Oh, isn’t this just too much? Some audience members protested the set up and demanded for the camera and Skype link to be ended. Yet, children are always there, policing us and censoring us, even when not physically present. They are ‘real’ elsewhere. On the way from Liverpool to Leeds, I remember seeing the motorway signs which read: ‘My Daddy works here’, and Gary’s comment about the capacity of children’s images to make us good law-abiding speed-obeying motorists.
Photos: Adele Senior
In her paper ‘Children as failing adults – adults failing to see children’ Isis Germano provided a challenging and intriguing invitation for both, children and adults, to imagine each other differently. We watched HETPALEIS production The Hamilton Complex, which showcases thirteen thirteen-yearold teenage girls and one body builder in compromising, joyous, celebratory and provocative scenes. The title of this performance is in response to David Hamilton’s controversial photographic books The Time of Innocence (1995) and Dreams of a Young Girl (1971), which feature images of nude teenage girls. The Hamilton Complex is uncomfortable to watch, but it’s intentional and powerful. Going back to my sense of rebellious teenage self, I’d say I would love to partake in this kind of performance. Why must the idea of innocence still haunt our childhoods? None of us were really innocents as teenagers, were we? Still, watching the extracts from the production, I can’t help but 5
reflect on my own predatory nature as an academic/scholar: why is it that the more difficult the production, the better/the more challenging my thoughts and the understanding of experience of self, categories, life in general? Why is it that as a researcher I seek something else, which is beyond me and maybe even intolerable, perhaps even indigestible. Isis invited us to see children on stage as a form of failure, as animals, as objects, as ill-fitted. Using Jack/Judith Halberstam conception of ‘queer time’ she proposed a reframing of our linear (past/future) thinking in relation to children. Can we think and grow sideways? Can we stop projecting? Can we subvert time? Can we be slow? Can we be patient? (something Alan Read suggested earlier in the day). Care, sensuality and a certain kind of patience got staged in the last paper of the afternoon in studio 2 titled ‘Love – Touch – Risk – Trust – Play – Dance’ by David Harradine, which reflected on Fevered Sleep’s current project Men & Girls Dance. Again, we were invited to consider agency, collaboration, ageing and touch. According to the abstract, the piece staged ‘a refusal of the prohibition on touch’ and claimed to enable ‘genuine collaboration between people of different ages, sexes, and professional settings’. The piece itself Men & Girls Dance called us to question our cultural presumptions about young girls and adult men. At the symposium, there were talks about skills and training as well as misbehaviour and provocation; there was wonder about our responsibilities as parents and guardians towards children performers; there were disagreements about notions of power and agency and claims of collaborations. Did it get us elsewhere?
At some point during this write-up and the days after the symposium, I started being interested in different kinds of questions (beyond agency, power, issues of collaboration), possibly even those through which we glimpsed answers to. Maybe I wanted a closure (as it often happens when one sets on a task of ‘academic’ writing), some kind of accomplishment. My questions became: How to generate space? How to create a space of difference? How to hold a space of difference? At the very opening of the symposium, Gary Anderson asked us to come closer, to get up from our seats in the auditorium and join in the two young keynotes on stage, Leilani Storm Cottle and Avaiyia Rae Cottle, who delivered powerful poems about racism, asked a pertinent question of who was the first racist and discussed their experience of home-schooling, learning in pyjamas and disobeying prescribed 9-5 work day structure. Leilani and Avaiyia told us about growing up sideways, about a different kind of experience, and confirmed our misconceptions about children. In the opening act of the symposium, with Gary, we were asked to refocus our attention to the here/now of the situation and be present. This was rather different from our usual conference experience, where we are placed in the auditorium, semibored, semi-terrified awaiting our turn. Here, we had to be invited into the now. Our young children demanded our attention. They made noises and 6
shouted and wanted to be heard otherwise. The space that was created was one of conflict, impossibility and endurance. I saw someone playing with my loud toddler, building blocks with him. Thank you, I thought, what a relief. Suddenly this was a space of difference, a new kind of public caring arena, which is available, not nice, but not thoroughly difficult and exhausting. Is it sustainable and more importantly is it worth holding onto? How long does it last?
Photo: Adele Senior
Gabriel: Throughout childhood a child learns, plays and develops the most important skills needed to survive in this world. These skills are developed through mistakes and embarrassment. I didn’t know you had to smile in pictures so in the nursery photo at St Vincent’s school I pulled my tongue. Everyone in the nursery had lovely smiley pictures and I was the only one pulling tongues. I also learnt not to eat sand, as it tasted disgusting. Another lesson: whatever the problem is now, there’s always going to be a worse one down the line… Life is always getting harder, so enjoy it whilst a child. SATs turn into 11+ then into GSCE then into A Levels then into Degree then into demanding a job and into, finally, demanding your own children – and so the cycle continues.
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