This (Baby) Life

"Delight is the name of the game in this gentle and beautiful performance" said the blurb.  Part of the Bank of Scotland's Imaginate Festival, this performance of dance, movement and sound by Sally Chance Dance, is specifically aimed at babies aged between 4 and 18 months.  We'd never tried the venue before - indeed, Madeleine had never experienced any performance art at all.  As you know, we like to get out and about. Why  not, we thought.  The £8 was burning a hole in our pocket.  We phoned the ticket hotline and off we went.


Lets get the easy bit out of the way first.  The performance space at North Edinburgh Arts Centre  is great - bright, modern and airy - the Cafe looked swell too - passable coffee, clean floors and lots of toys.  The performance itself was just plain weird.  

Weird, in itself, is not necessarily bad.  Three performers - one of whom om-ed and played a child's xylophone, a shaker and a couple of big brass pots.  The other two were silent and moved a lot - think backward rolls and bottom shuffling.  Sometimes the adult audience laughed.  The babies stared.  I think they were thinking: "what are these wierdos up to".  The only props were some egg rattles and some knitted blankets, which they sometimes nursed like a newborn, or threw up in the air, or climbed into bed with.  It was weird.

Madeleine stared a lot.  And, as the other-mummy pointed out, none of the babies cried or had to leave.  Were they having fun?  Not discernibly, it has to be said.  Certainly Miss M has seemed more excited by The Singing Kettle or Blitzy Boy.  Actually, to be totally fair, she appeared a lot better entertained by my neighbour's preschoolers pretending to be lions the other day: RRROOOARRRR.

I'm going to sit on the fence.  I could be persuaded that whilst it raised no laughs, perhaps it is important to have your cultural boundaries pushed (even if you are only 9 months old).  Certainly, it was an experience.  Possibly not a delightful one - but an experience never-the-less.  And to be fair, if the brief was to produce a performance of gentle movement and sound for young babies - which it was - I'm not sure you could come up with anything much better than this.

So we've been.  We're glad we saw it.  It wasn't awful.  Just don't make us go again!

This (Baby) Life is showing until Saturday at the North Edinburgh Arts Centre.