Research: Moving With Light and Line

Research summary

• February 2019 to October 2019

Moving with lights and line was a research project focussed on a series of events for young children and their families. The events were designed to examine the way that children’s play is influenced by the space they are in, and how they interact with people and objects. It also looked at the way that parents can participate in play by immersing themselves in activities rather than simply guiding or observing.

The study challenged developmental narratives which reduce play to a series of symbolic processes. Instead, Moving With Light and Line focussed on the sensuousness of play, and how play unfolds in the dynamic entanglement of bodies, things and spaces. It also looked at ways in which adults can attune themselves to this form of play, by inviting parents to be ‘co-producers’, and to emerge themselves in the activity as it emerged. The study worked with the idea that interestingly arranged materials can generate sensorial contagion and transformation (Olsson et. al., 2016).

At a philosophical level, the study pursued an ethico-aesthetic approach as an alternative to dominant parenting theory and policy analysis organised around neoliberal discourses and their critique. It posited that none of these perspectives imagined parenting beyond the discourse of neoliberal subjectivity. An ethico-aesthetic approach to parenting offered the possibility to theorise subjectivity more openly, and with a focus on how sentient bodies are transformed by the material forces of the world (Rolnik, 2017). Ethico-aesthetics affirms that it is the vital force of subjectivity that sets the subject in continuous variation, affected, altered and mutated by forces and states not dependent on subject’s intentions. The world of the vital force does not work through communication but through sense and empathy with the other.

The study comprised of two play events for children aged between two and six and their parents. The events took place in a large drama studio, whose floor was fully covered with a white sheet of paper. In the studio, children were invited to engage with materials through practices of mark-making and light transformation.

The event was curated in four movements that involved different play propositions provoking children and parents to sense and move in different ways in pairs, collectively and with the different materials. The choice of materials was inspired by performative drawing and contemporary dance, with the aim to disrupt the expectation that there are recognisable materials and spaces for children’s play, and to arouse children and parents’ curiosity and encourage experimentation with new practices.

The study’s ethico-aesthetic approach helped in inviting parents to become participating bodies traversed by forces affected by the immediacy, emergence, and process of the play event. As a result, the team was able to situate its attention in parenting as moments of experimental togetherness (Stengers, 2005), where new existential relations were met open-endedly, with curiosity, to pose new questions. Through this method, the study sought to cultivate a view of the parental subject not as one who supervises, supports, and scaffolds children’s play while remains outside the event.