Participants
Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This
Children & young people with complex needs in hospital settings and their adults.
I Am Baba
Babies in hospital settings and their adults.
The project is led by Anna Newell (Anna Newell Theatre Adventures) and a small team of performers / singers with originally composed music by David Goodall and costume design by Jen Shepherd.
Aims
Driven by a vision of an Ireland which recognises the power of human connection and the right of each and every child to experience the unique ability of the arts to create this connection, I aim to ignite the imaginations of extraordinary audiences through responsive, beautiful, connective theatre adventures made especially for them and with them.
My commitment, my passion and my mission is
- Creating high quality theatre adventures for all of our children, however young they are or however profoundly disabled they may be perceived to be.
- Developing these theatre adventures in close creative consultation with these under-served audiences and the adults who live and work with them, so that not only do these experiences connect with them and how they experience the world but that they are directly informed and inspired by them.
- Advocating for this work and these audiences.
- Building networks and partnerships that extend, enrich and embed this work in our society.
Methods
Both I Am Baba and Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This were created as touring shows for, respectively six babies (and their adults) and three children/young people (and their adults) at a time. They were developed in close creative consultations with their respective audiences, the former in residency at St Catherine’s School, Co Wicklow, and with invited audiences of parents with babies under one.
The shows create the optimum environment for audience members who rarely have agency (because of their age or their perceived ‘ability’) to genuinely have that agency. This careful creation of the immersive multisensory environments of the shows and the low performer-to-audience member ratio (internationally accepted as good practice for these audiences) create a situation where the audience members, both as individuals and as a group, can become ‘active’ audience members, tacitly asking for their own bespoke journey through the adventure that is one of these shows.
The performers have been trained over a substantial period of time (some of them have been working with me for more than seven years) to be able to read these non-verbal cues and respond minute-by-minute within the structure of the performance.
With each of these shows, there is a set musical score of original harmony singing that remains the same. There is a nominal journey through various sensory objects but ultimately, both shows are inherently super flexible and are nuanced moment-by-moment in response to each audience, both individual audience members and the tiny temporary community created for each 20-minute performance.
An initial spoken introduction to the shows indicate to the adults accompanying our audience members that there is no ‘right’ way to respond to the show, inviting them to leave their audience member to find their own way through the journey of the show – should they wish to watch it from a distance or up close and in a tactile way, should they wish to vocalise or remain silent, should they wish to stay or to leave.
In 2023, we were approached by Fiona Smith, Arts in Health Programme Curator with Children’s Health Ireland, to bring I Am Baba to babies in hospital settings. The ultimate flexibility of the shows meant that the transition to these tiny individual bedside performances was simply an extension of their way of being. The following year, in partnership with The Gate and CHI, we took our show for audiences of children and young people with complex needs, Sweet Dream Are Made of This, into hospital settings.
With both shows, we performed at bedsides, in corridors, at the doors of rooms where children / babies could have no-one in their rooms and even in the ICU. Often, one performer would take the lead of direct interaction with the audience member whilst the other two simply sang and remained in the distance so as not to overwhelm. As we had during our tours in the Covid-19 pandemic, where requested, we wore masks with clear panels (created by Clear Fáilte Mask) so that our audience could see us singing and smiling.
Originally, with the first I Am Baba performances, we had anticipated that we would find somewhere in the hospital where we might set up the usual performance tent and bring families to it (as we would do in theatre venues).
My ongoing methodology is to bring shows to audiences on their terms and on their turf; for example, most of our touring for our complex needs audience goes directly to schools, and I Am Baba partnered with CYPSC to bring the show to venues with which families were already familiar (libraries, family resource centres, community halls).
It quickly became apparent that, in the hospital setting, abandoning the tent and being able to be ultimately flexible and go directly to the bedside, to the corridor, to the ICU is what was needed. We also discovered that the weekend worked really well in this setting – less happening medically and also a time where something different was welcome to fill the long anxious hours of parenting a sick baby / child.
Our CHI contact, Fiona Smith, would visit the setting the day before to see who would be around and to liaise with ward staff. However, as it is a constantly changing environment, we would arrive the morning of a day of bedside shows ready to go wherever / whenever with everything possibly changing at the last moment.
Artistic Outputs
- As part of a 14-week tour in late 2023, we brought I Am Baba to hospital bedsides across Dublin.
- In 2024, for A Month Of Sundays, we brought Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This to hospital bedsides across Dublin. This will be repeated in late 2025.
- This ongoing synergetic relationship organically developing between my work and CHI is evolving. We are applying for funding (as part of my Arts Council of Ireland Arts Grant annual funding) to co-ordinate with the long-awaited opening of the new Children’s Hospital with a week-long residency of my blissful watery adventure for children with complex needs (Sing Me To The Sea) in the hydrotherapy pool in the new hospital. Physiotherapists and Occupational Therapists will be invited to observe the show and be part of a day-long workshop exploring the methodologies and creative strategies in the show.
Evaluation Methodology
As I am present at all of the performances of my work (as performer) there is a dynamic and iterative detailed ongoing evaluation process informed by feedback from parents, hospital staff, our CHI contact (and their observations of the tacit feedback from our audience members) and the other performers. We reflect on:
- The tiny nuances of this particular setting and how we might continue to create the optimum conditions for connection in this very specific yet diverse setting.
- The transformative potential of beauty and of calm in this context.
- Further projects / developments for this context and the relationship with CHI.
Evaluation Outcomes
When we first met with medical staff from the relevant hospitals, there was, unsurprisingly, a trepidation around our visiting, particularly as we were an unknown quantity, and particularly as it was late in the year and the incidence of RSV was very high with many babies / children needing to remain in isolation from others. This need added to the drive to focus on individual bedside performances even sooner than we might have.
Clearly word of mouth about staff’s experience of I Am Baba spread both within and between hospital sites very quickly and we went very rapidly from being told that there might not be any babies that we could visit to there being more requests for performances on the day than we could facilitate and multiple staff stopping in the corridors to watch through the windows as the performance unfolded!
I strongly believe (or at least hope) that the very gentle, calm, responsive and (never to be underestimated) beautiful nature of the experience felt like a tiny momentary transformation of the space, meeting babies, children and (just as importantly) parents where they were in that moment – asking nothing of them, always respecting the situation that they (and the hospital staff) were in – created a unique oasis of shared respite and connection.
In relation to how the performances have been received in the hospital environment, the Principal of the Hospital School, CHI at Temple Street, shared this feedback about Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This:
‘The pupils attending the Hospital School are in-patients, many of whom have complex learning, physical and medical conditions and are at the very earliest stages of learning. Anna’s performances are so carefully and meticulously created and designed for this cohort of children.
She has a keen understanding of how these children learn, how to create a space, materials and props but above all, how to interact with the children in such a beautiful way so as to gain their trust, attention and reap the reward of their positive responses.
Our school staff, hospital staff and parents were blown away and brought to tears, watching children interact and respond in quite different ways. The lasting effect of the performance was not only felt by the children themselves but also by the staff.’
Audrey Messitt, CNM2 with the Children’s Hearth Centre, CHI Crumlin, added:
‘Our little babies and their parents thoroughly enjoyed the theatre show on Sunday. The parents expressed how emotional and relaxing it was. One of the mothers said she hadn’t seen her baby interact so much ever before and it brought her huge joy.’
Fiona Smith, CHI Arts in Health Programme Curator, notes that bringing these theatre shows to CHI and in particular, bringing I Am Baba to the bedside of the tiniest and often sickest patients, sets a standard for how the arts, creativity and the highest quality of practice and performance aligns to a world class model of care for babies, children and young people in acute paediatric settings in Ireland. She says of the partnership with Anna:
‘The arts are often seen as the nice to have, and it is often left for families to find ways to bring the joy and pleasure of creativity to these spaces. But we know that when the offer is high quality, thoughtful, flexible and meeting our children and young people where they are at, it is intrinsic to their wider health and wellbeing outcomes here.
As we build towards an excellent creative offer in the new children’s hospital, the work of the CHI Arts in Health Programme in fact extends beyond the role that the arts have in supporting better health outcomes and aims to create very real opportunities for the voice and value of children and young people’s creativity to be central to how we create and deliver our work. The ways in which work like Anna’s carves out a small but profound moment of joyfulness, connection and selfhood align to this ambition, and it is exciting to see how this will support, improve and build the arts in health offer in CHI into the future.’
Documentation and Dissemination
Politically, it is crucial to me that this work and these audiences is seen as art, and as high quality, rigorously created art. To that end, leading Irish PR consultant Conleth Teevan is working as a freelancer with us through the year to ensure that this work in tiny, private corners is profiled publicly and alongside other more visible professional art.
Obviously, the hospital context is charged and complex and we are intensely aware of this.
As a result, we are working long-term with Conleth and Fiona Smith (CHI) to find a time to profile this work more publicly in a way that is responsible and respectful.
Partners
I work in ongoing co-production with Riverbank Arts Centre and with The Network For Extraordinary Audiences – an artist-initiated network of 10 theatre venues across Ireland who collectively commit to programming, profiling and advocating for this work and these audiences. All of my work is generously funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.
The ongoing relationship with CHI, and in particular Fiona Smith, continues to develop and grow and we are excited about future possibilities particularly in the context of being a tiny part of setting the culture of the new Children’s Hospital as one where the arts have a crucial part to play in this diverse and complex environment.
