Øystein Elle about Rock me Baby: - The curious skepticism I felt before we started work quickly turned into fascination and excitement

November 13, 2023

Øystein Elle, associate professor at Østfold University College and artistic director of Rock me Baby together with Karstein Solli, reflects on their joint process of creating the baby and toddler performance Rock me Baby, and their research work related to the production of performing arts for the youngest.

Text: Øystein Elle

With Rock me Baby, I think we may have created the first and so far only glam rock dance theater performance for the youngest. Having now played at several festivals, it is clear that this was something audiences of all ages were very ready for. The youngest children, their siblings, parents and educators are dancing and cheering from the very first moment!

When I was invited by Karstein Solli in 2007 to be a composer and performer in the production Readymade Baby, it was completely new for me to create and perform a show for 0-3 year old children. The curious skepticism I felt before we started the work quickly turned into fascination and enthusiasm.

Since then, Karstein and I have collaborated on a number of productions for children aged 0-6 years. Our shows have been performed hundreds of times in Norway, Europe and South America.

Challenging conventions around artistic expression for the youngest

In "The Voice Tribe", which we made in 2018-2019, we began to particularly explore the interaction between male performers and the youngest audiences, and especially the multifaceted male voice in all its breadth, from roar to high pitch to soft whisper.

In the production Rock me Baby, we chose to go a few steps further in challenging our own and perhaps others' conventions regarding artistic expression for the youngest children.

Let's see some short excerpts from the performance:

After first having had a pre-project period where we, among other things, arranged an audition and put together a dance, music and theater band, we received production support from Arts Council Norway and the Audio Visual Fund in 2022 and began the production phase in January this year, with the premiere at Bærum Kulturhus (who were also co-producers of the performance) on March 2. Since then we have performed at Go Figure International Puppetry Festival, Coda International Dance Festival and Marked for music at Bølgen Kulturhus in Larvik. In addition, we played it in a circus tent in my garden at home in Hølen as part of my 50th birthday festival, as a gift to the children in the village I live in.

The following artists and professionals are involved in Rock me Baby:

Artistic direction: Karstein Solli and Øystein Elle

Concept development, musical direction and composition: Øystein Elle

Concept development, direction and choreography: Karstein Solli

Co-creating singers, dancers, actors and musicians: Øystein Elle, Thomas Hildebrand, Håkon Sigernes, Simen Iversen Vangen and Geir Hytten

Costume designer and make-up artist: Kjell Ingebrethsen Nordström / Baron von Bulldog

Set designer: Carl Nilssen-Love

Lighting designer: Benjamin Fjellmann

Visual consultant: Vitor Truzzi

Responsible Producer: Øystein Elle

Executive Producer: Beata Kretovicova Iden

Photographers and videographers: Truls Liang, Jan Hustak and Nela Hustak

Child-related consultants: Bente Ulla and Ann-Sofi Larsen (Østfold University College) and Maybritt Jensen (Oslo Met)

Supported by: Norwegian Directorate of Culture, The Audio Visual Fund, Bærum Kulturhus, Dans Sørøst-Norge and Østfold University College.

Lantern attention

Rock me Baby is developed in a design process where all the performers are co-creators, and the material is created from different initiators. The scenes were developed together in the rehearsal process rather than the performers being given specific actions, choreographies, songs or texts to rehearse in advance.

This method was used for physical actions, text, direction, choreography and music. Nevertheless, we did not have a completely flat structure, in that Karstein Solli and I shared responsibility as artistic directors. He had the main responsibility for direction and choreography, and I for music and voice work.

In the process of Rock me Baby, as in our previous productions for the youngest, we invited groups of children to the working studio several times during the production period. In this way, you could say that we work hermeneutically in the rehearsal process. Our search for new knowledge and insights about the art encounters with the youngest children is based on our interpretation of the experiences we have in our encounters with the children, with the materials and with each other as creative practitioners. By using our ever-changing preconceptions as a starting point in our encounters with the process we enter into, we gain new experiences that add to, challenge and change our knowledge base.

Our preconceptions and what we think we know are constantly put at stake in the development processes and in the art meetings with the children and their companions.

Øystein Elle

I am constantly surprised by the children's complex perception. In creating and performing for the youngest, we experience what Alison Gopnik shows in her research, that the pre-lingual children are capable of far more complex thinking than previous research concluded. In her book "The Philosophical Baby", Gopnik says that children are more aware and open-minded than adults because they have fewer automatic behaviors. In our recent productions for the youngest, for example, we have explored the concept of lantern attention, which is what Gopnik calls the youngest children's distinctive ability to take in lots of information from different sources simultaneously. This is in contrast to the typical spotlight attention of adults, where we concentrate on one thing at a time.

We find that older children, from about 4-5 years of age, in the same way as many adults, will look for a specific understanding of the various events in the art experience, while the youngest children, we find that they piece together a selection of impressions and are in an aesthetic process as creators of meaning in their interaction with the materials. I find it very interesting that this ability to relate to fragments and complex interweaving of expressions can turn out to be natural for the youngest children's audience, while this is often an ability that adults interested in contemporary art are working to develop - again. As theater researcher Erika Fischer Lichte says:

It's not possible to understand contemporary art just by perceiving it; you have to be open to the whole experience of it, and then create your own understanding and meaning. The worst question you can ask is: "What did they want to say?

Erika Fischer Lichte

In Rock me Baby, as in our previous performances, we experienced that different and often unconventional voice aesthetics together with "non-sense" language contribute to aesthetic processes and experimental construction of meaning in the dialogue between sender and receiver.

The man in art production for the youngest

The starting point, or trigger for Rock me Baby, was our observation that most performing arts productions for the youngest are created and performed by female artists. In addition, both the visual and aural expression offered to the youngest is predominantly characterized by muted colors, soft materials and often floating soundscapes. Many of these performances are of course of high quality, but we wanted to create a counterpoint to this aesthetic and continue to explore the man as creator and performer in art production for the youngest.  

This time we positioned ourselves within a visual and aural aesthetic expression that is fairly unexplored for the youngest target group, namely the rock and glam rock expression of the 70s and 90s.

Øystein Elle

Since we have also found that it is usually the child's mother or female caregiver who accompanies her child to performances, we wanted to address the male caregiver accompanied by his children to a greater extent than we had previously seen. However, the show turns out to appeal to all genders, and in fact also to a very wide age range.

In our experience, toddlers often react instinctively positively to rock music. We therefore wanted to create what appears to be the first ever rock theater concert for 0-5 year olds. We wanted to explore what sound, level, timbre/texture and pitch can mean in a meeting with the very youngest, within an aural rock aesthetic. We also believe that many fathers and other caregivers experience a connection to the baby through musical experiences that move towards a heavier and rawer musical expression. This may of course also apply to female caregivers, but it seems that the performance attracted more men with babies to the theater than we often see is the case, and that the word was spread.

We also see the youngest children's fascination with rock and riff-based music in connection with their ability and urge to relate to patterns. In the context of multilingualism in children, Patricia Kuhl's research at the University of Washington shows that babies are able to distinguish between all sounds and all languages in the world.

Long before they can speak, babies listen to language, take it in and record it as "statistics" or patterns.

Patricia Kuhl

Kuhl argues that when children have early experiences of visual, auditory or haptic stimuli, it is not just the eyes, ears and sense of touch that are trained. These experiences create something bigger and broader that can affect all cognition. Through such experiences, the ability to detect and predict patterns is affected.

From the performance Rock me Baby. Photo: Morten Hvaal

We wanted to express gender performatively, in the same way as other instruments. Rock me Baby is created and performed by men, and in this context we define gender as an instrument on a par with other scenic instruments such as lighting and costumes.

We wanted to be conscious of portraying men in different gender aesthetic shades.

Øystein Elle

There are several examples from research that show that children at an early age "read" what a woman or man is doing. Gender researcher Judith Butler is interested in how aesthetics can liberate fixed gender categories. Butler claims that people are not just men and women, but people with a free choice of lifestyle and orientation. She considers gender to be performative. This makes it possible to "think gender" and the choice of focusing on men and young children, both as a constructed and performative move in a process, and as a performative tool in a performance context.

Costume designer from Maskorama

Costume designer Kjell Nordstrøm (known to many TV viewers as the guy who makes the costumes for the TV show Maskorama) has developed the costumes for Rock me Baby. He developed them from inside the process, allowing the individual performer and the process's development of characters and stage actions to inform the design. He and we were inspired by the children, who are independent of norms of "right and wrong" when dressing up or dressing up. As Nordstrøm says:

A child can dress up for a party with orange rubber boots, a pink tulle skirt and a green bubble jacket.

Kjell Nordstrom

Furthermore, we were visually inspired by the glam rock and poodle rock of the 70s and 80s, where the boundaries between gender markers were less clear. The artists often appeared with an androgynous expression. We could see this historical trend in the context of gender researcher Judith Butler's idea of aesthetics as liberating us from normative gender markers.

We relate to the idea that the youngest children are "multimodal", i.e. that they can use several forms of expression at the same time through their play. They can sing and dance, create fictional universes both non-verbally and through nonsense language. They can transform objects and things into something other than "what they really are". They can change roles and perspectives and create great variation in the use of bodily movements and how they use their senses. In Rock me Baby, we wanted to meet the children on their ability to recognize this form of ambiguous expression and communication. This is also linked to the understanding of the youngest children's ability to pay attention to lanterns, which I referred to earlier. In the research project "The magic language", Liselott Olsson says:

Children, when allowed to, seem to enjoy a certain kind of intense, non-domesticated and vital experimentation rather than looking for any kind of permanent and stable knowledge.

Liselott Olsson (2012)

The theme of Rock me Baby is not based on a narrative, but comes about through the exploration of such vital experimentation with all given materialities available in the process of creation.

The artistic approach therefore lies in the exploration of the formal and multimodal expressions of music, sound, objects, costume, movement and stage space. Patterns and motifs are the inspiration for the musical expression as well as thematically recurring patterns in costumes, scenic elements and in movement and dance.

We are delighted and proud of the fantastic reception Rock me Baby has received, and are looking forward to many screenings at home and abroad.

Thank you very much for your attention.

The text is a transcription of Elle's presentation of Rock with Baby during Dansenett Norway's organizer seminar in Bergen 27.10.23.

Øystein Elle

Photo (portrait): Østfold University College