Running time: 15 minutes

Age guidance: 0-18 months, with their adult

With special thanks to Anna Franklin and Alice Skelton for their advice. 

Thanks to Chris Elwell and everyone at Half Moon Theatre; Laura McDermott; Laura Gordon; Sally Rose; Rae Waldon Rose; Greg Syrett; Lutz Schönecker; Frederika Teverbring; David Thomas; Liv Billie Thomas; Fani Parali; Zephyr Austen Parali; Tara Lopez

Presented and co-commissioned by the Barbican. Developed with support from Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts and Half Moon Theatre

Photo by Holly Revell

 

All performances are relaxed. This means you can choose to leave the performance area at any point and re-enter during your allocated slot.

All performances of First Light are relaxed, which means you are welcome to move around and make noise during the show.

There is a Chill-out Space available should you need to leave the performance, and you are welcome to come back in at any point.

Relaxed performances are suitable for anyone who would benefit from a more relaxed environment and is particularly suitable for those with learning disabilities, sensory or communication needs.

If you would like to discuss the show further to see whether it is suited to your needs or if there is a specific requirement we can address to make your visit more enjoyable then please contact Mali Siloko on [email protected].

How and why did you start making work specifically for young audiences?

DN: Earlier in my acting career, I performed in an adaptation of Oliver Jeffers’ How to Catch a Star. The production was for 3-7-year-olds, but we also made a shorter version for 0-3 year-olds which we performed a few times a week. I’d never made anything for such young audiences before and I was blown away by how receptive they were to the work. This started my interest in work for babies. I love making work for children as they are such honest audiences, but what makes it even more enjoyable is how experimental you can be. There weren’t many people in the UK making work for this age group when we started, so it felt really fresh.

ML: There’s something really wonderful about a young audience that’s uncompromising: if they like something they’ll scream or squeal with delight; if they don’t, they’ll fall asleep or become preoccupied. Or, if they don’t understand, they’ll say so, and often quite loudly! It’s this immediacy that gives you as a theatre-maker such satisfaction, because you instantly know how your audience feel.

Can you describe the process and the way you have worked together to create First Light?

DN: For a while I knew I wanted to make a piece of work for babies using just sound and light. I’d been collecting sounds from all over the world for the past few years, hoping I could use them in some way. When the pandemic hit, I had time to think more about the project and it seemed like the perfect chance to make a piece where the audience enter a space alone, or in a small group, and have a personal experience without any performers present.

I’d worked with Marty a few years previously, and I knew he was a great lighting designer as well as a light artist, so I asked him to join the project. During our first research and development phase, we experimented with lights and sounds, exploring how they might work together and what we could create with them. By the second development phase, we had started to think about how babies’ vision and hearing develops and how we can recreate this development for the audience to experience as an installation. I created more soundscapes and simple tracks layered with beats and rhythms, and Marty responded to them visually. Slowly, we started to build up a vocabulary of lights and sounds which worked together. Over a two-week making phase we continued to develop this idea; I would bring sounds, and Marty would animate them with lights and colour. We dip-dyed light bulbs by hand to create the perfect tones and shades of colours. We also had a stunning piece of neon light commission to hand as the centrepiece. It was an incredibly collaborative process. 

ML: In our first stages of research and development we did a lot of chatting about young audiences and how they receive work. We did some practical exercises exploring how to animate sounds with light and found a common language to work from. We discovered the Guardian’s VR film, First Impressions, which documents how a baby’s vision develops. We decided to explore this further, and contacted the Sussex Baby Lab, whose research is primarily around babies’ vision and how colour reveals itself within their first few months of life. We decided to base the structure of the piece around this. With the research under our belts, we spent two weeks at the Half Moon Theatre, trying sounds and light together. Through a rather organic process we found that we had a shared creative vision, which has become the piece you can see.