The Garden Of Spirited Minds [5 min trailer]

The Garden Of Spirited Minds / durational performance/installation for babies 0-12 months

Concept, choreography, light and stage design: Dalija Acin Thelander

In collaboration and performed by: Noah Hellwig and Dalija Acin Thelander

Music: Thomas Jeker (CH)

Running time: six hours with one hour break

The Garden Of Spirited Minds proposes to babies and their adults exceptional immersive and multi-sensorial artistic experience. It invites audience to freely move, enjoy multiple perspectives, explore, be active and/or relax - choosing the ways to engage with the proposed environment.

The installation/performance environment is designed to challenge usual conceptions of aesthetics for babies and it affirms the idea of place as sensed, place as sensation - space as audile-tactile or kinaesthetic sensory universe in which proprioception is key.

The dense installation setting is inspired by organic forms and provides out-of-ordinary esthetic experience, interlacing movement and dance, music and sound, visual and tactile stimulation as well as natural smells. Variety of forms and their positions in the space are stimulating the audience's curiosity, encouraging the exploration as well as providing the calm and intimate space for relaxation.

Essential for the concept of the The Garden Of Spirited Minds is notion of audience's agency in correlation with multi-directional interaction of the senses and sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment. The audience is challenged to reorganise their repertoire of responses in accordance to unfolding events. With this approach, I am aiming for a multi-modal and affective experience of both child and care-taker.

The role of the care-taker is emphasized as adults are invited to support and follow their child and to share the experience. Safe and stimulating performance environments is conceived to generate an interrelational ecology, providing unique conditions for a wide variety of interchange and communication.

In order to respect the individual needs of both babies and adults, as well as the time needed to constitute the experience, the audience is invited to enjoy the installation upon their personal needs - to arrive at the time which suits them the best and stay as long as they like to, within the 6 hours running time.