Faculty of Fine Arts & Communications

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14078/14

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Browsing Faculty of Fine Arts & Communications by Author "Ayles, Robyn"

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    Flight paths and theatre for early years audiences
    (2021) Ayles, Robyn; Fitzsimmons-Frey, Heather; Mykietyshyn, Margaret
    This article proposes using the holistic play-based goals and model of co-inquiry discussed in Flight: Alberta’s Early Learning and Care Framework (2014) as a way to interpret very young children’s responses to theatrical experiences as theatre criticism. The process encourages wondering and reflecting on multiple possible meanings of children’s embodied, vocal, and play-based responses. Through an exploration of documentary evidence from The Urban Wildlife Project, our immersive theatre research outlines how the early childhood education processes can be adapted to a theatre context to listen to children’s responses on their own terms.
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    Harnessing the power of flight: devising responsive theatre for the very young
    (2022) Ayles, Robyn; Fitzsimmons-Frey, Heather; Mykietyshyn, Margaret
    Successful theatre hinges on relationships. In our research, we devised an immersive theatre piece about urban wildlife through key early childhood education concepts outlined in the Canadian document Flight: Alberta’s Early Learning and Care Framework. The project’s guiding question was: How could we better understand audience engagement in the early years demographic by using the reflective process, rights-based perspectives, and holistic play-based goals of the Flight framework to interpret children’s experiences? Our creative team aimed to develop democratic and playful relationships with children during theatrical exploration, and using the Flight framework to analyse what children were communicating grounded our theatre creation and dramaturgy in respectful and agentic relationships between actors, theatrical objects, and young children.