The “innumerable hand” and the shared voice: elements for thinking about creativity
The XIV International Meeting on Art for Children and Social and Human Development took place on 23rd November at the Gulbenkian Foundation, inspired by freedom. With a megaphone in hand, we talked about music, children, learning, listening and the future.
2024 was not just any year. And to say so goes beyond any rhetorical impulse. 2024 was the year in which the April 25th Revolution celebrated its 50th anniversary, and for this reason thinking about the importance of freedom is now more urgent than ever. At the start of the XIV International Meeting on Art for Children and Social and Human Development, Helena Rodrigues — a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Sociology and Musical Aesthetics (CESEM) at the NOVA University of Lisbon and one of the organizers of the initiative — said it loud and clear, emphasizing the fragility of a freedom “that we must care for and preserve”. “These are the values we want to bring here: freedom, affection, care, love.”
In addition to the half-century since the April 25th took place in Portugal, another important date has been set for this event. It’s the 25th anniversary of the Companhia de Música Teatral (CMT), which organizes it with the support of the Gulbenkian Foundation. 25 years that constitute “a celebration that we want to share, thanking all those who, in different ways, have been part of the journey”. The “innumerable hand” of Ruy Belo’s poem represents the many bodies involved in the project over the years.
According to Paulo Ferreira Rodrigues, a professor at the Lisbon Polytechnic Institute’s School of Education and also one of the organizers, this meeting invites us to start over each year. “We ask the same questions again”, he says, also recalling the many contributions that have constantly ensured its realization. There have been some losses along the way, and this time we want to remember one of its great inspirers, Colwyn Trevarthen, who passed away on 1st of July 2024.
Listening to the world
The first speaker is João Maria André, presenting a paper entitled ‘Listening, hospitality and the art of dialogue’. The retired full professor of Philosophy, who holds a doctorate from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra, wants to address some of the misconceptions around working with children, “often associated with concepts such as education and teaching, as if those who do it are the holders of a supposed knowledge that can be taught”. This model, which prioritizes the receptive dimension of learning, “has been questioned lately”, he recalls, inviting older people to “come down from their pedestal”.
Because that’s what the first of the proposed terms is about: listening, which is not always considered to be a skill on the same level as looking. “Sight has had primacy in Western culture. But vision is a dominating sense, at the service of concentrating universes. It is through looking and surveillance that power is exercised”, says the lecturer, adding that the gaze “drowns out the other senses” and how education has become linked to surveillance.
João Maria André contrasts this model with that of listening: “Listening is welcoming, it does not impose. It opens you up to the world holistically, enhancing communication with others. The gaze makes the other an object, the ear makes the other a subject.” Listening, however, is a mechanical action. To practice listening – “the resonance of what is heard within the subject” – you must take a step forward. Who or what is being listened to? The word extended outside of itself, a word that is open and not an exercise of power”. Silence is also listened to, because without this reverse, “enunciation is unthinkable”. We also listen to music and to the world, as well as the thoughts they generate — because “listening is not limited to the physical materiality of sounds and words”. This is proven by childhood itself, which has not yet mastered them rationally and nevertheless manages to listen to them.
And how do you listen? “With availability, with the feeling of encounter, with humility.” And with what do you listen? “With all the senses, listening as one sees, synesthetically. Because listening is not a temporary, occasional act. It is a condition that shapes the other senses. The condition for learning and art to be fulfilled in us.”
When João Maria André moves on to the second of the concepts he presents in the title of his speech, we are already warned. This is an invitation to thought. Defending the primacy of listening in the formative and creative act “is an exercise in hospitality”, which becomes an attitude of welcoming the other. For Epistemology, “hospitality” implies “that the search for truth is carried out through complementarity and not through exclusion”. If nobody possesses the whole truth, “each person in their difference can have their share of truth”. In this sense, “a hospitable Epistemology knows that truth is stereoscopic” in its many aspects.
From an anthropological point of view, hospitality “is based on the relational structure of the human being”. This means that our existence, by nature dialogical, is above all a “being with”. Far from being atoms or closed spheres, we are in communion with others — that is our identity. From an ethical perspective, hospitality works as an ‘ethic of care’, attentive to singularity, which “calls for a preventive practice and a therapeutic and restorative dimension”. In turn, care has four different stages, which João Maria André prefers to quote in English – ‘caring about’, ‘taking care of’, ‘care giving’ and ‘care receiving’ — and which he considers to be fundamental in the learning process.
Finally, the philosopher delves into what he calls the ‘art of dialogue’, the last level of reflection that only happens thanks to the previous ones. But ‘dialogue’ is a term that has two components: dialectic and dialogic. And it is not the former — which emphasizes contradictions and confrontation — that should be the basis of art and education. These should be guided by ‘dialogical dialogue’, focused on the mutual enrichment of the parts, as well as the uniqueness of each position. “This is where educational processes are played out” – a dialogue in which the cognitive dimension is interconnected with the affective one, to the point where there is no one without the other. And which is not reduced to language but opens up to the body and its multiple expressions.
There are, therefore, eight principles to take into account: openness to the other and their welcoming as an imperative of an ethics of hospitality; horizontality as a way of correcting asymmetries; the humility that comes with finding one’s own limits; the activation of listening; the elimination of prejudices and stereotypes that bias mutual understanding; memory and imagination as operators of artistic creativity; attention to the multiple languages in which human beings can express themselves; and, finally, synaesthesia, which brings together all the previous principles, contemplating the interaction of all the senses.
Sowing bamboo
The more than 70 people present in the Gulbenkian auditory and the 45 participants via Zoom could then listen to Angelita Broock, a professor at the School of Music of the Federal University of Minas Gerais and coordinator of the Bambulha group, a collective of students and trainees linked to the Integrated Musicalisation Centre attached to the music school, where they teach classes, supervised by their teachers. But that’s not all: the group has a community service component that gives it its very own identity.
“It’s not just a bamboo tree, it’s a bamboo field”, explains Angelita Broock, adding that the metaphor has some reality considering that Bambulha was actually born in a bamboo grove adjacent to the school, in the large green space that surrounds it. “And new plants are growing” in it, both in terms of new participants and projects, integrated into the discipline of Children’s Music and Cultural Production, which is optional and freely taught, and which is seen as “a space for discussion about what music for children is, attended by people with various backgrounds and training”.
As part of these classes, she says, there is also a creative laboratory, which includes a final presentation. “Some students take the course several times. Because there is no unified process: each class completes its own”. At the end, she will tell the story of an eight-year-old who once created a song about a shooting star. When she presented it to the other children, they didn’t stop there, adding the theme of death and time. And she’ll sing to those present, asking them to join her.
Shaping (our) childhood
Pamela Burnard arrived from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, immediately inviting us to take action. The professor of Arts, Creativity and Education distributed metal wires in the room that are used to clean narrow cannulas or straws and whose manipulation offers the pleasure of shaping, merging intention and spontaneity in this movement. “I was in this same room a few years ago, before Covid, and I was amazed by the space. Being here on a Saturday morning and being able to celebrate what it is to be human and what nature does in us is something very special”, she began, explaining that the idea of shaping those wires is related to the idea that listening is accompanied by manual fun.
This spontaneity is the foundation of all art for children and the work that can be developed around it. What do we value when we think about art for children? The metal wire is a metaphor to signify that the act of sculpting, done in the singular by each one of us, will represent the collective memory that we will extract from it. Pamela Burnard, whose intervention was entitled ‘Let the arts transform: Defending implosive educational practices’, is also referring to the publications being made at the institution she represents. Jane Bennet, for example, has written about the power that simple things hold in childhood and the way that children play.
“Materiality itself has a vibration, colors have a vibration, sensation has a vibration that acts on us and tunes us as bodies”, reflects Pamela, an Australian living in the UK and mother of five, whose parents, she says, had children at a young age, with her being the last-born. “My mum used to say that I changed her life” and babies “change mums’ lives”. Of the six siblings, Pamela was the only one to leave the Australian village where her family lived and the only one to get a university education. “I was born thirsty; I had a fire in my belly and in my guts. And I wanted to change things”, challenging the myths about what women and children can and can’t do.
Pamela Burnard’s aim is to “celebrate what children can do” and to do this she shares a video she considers “a great idea”, about a transgenerational project promoted by the MyMachine Global Foundation, focused on three aspects: how children’s ideas are applied from a transdisciplinary group perspective; how their ideas unite, co-operate, inspire and innovate in all sectors of education; and how trust is built when we allow children to make a difference with their ideas. In the video presented, we can see them building machines that replicate their thinking, helped by scientists and digital designers. “A great idea can bring generations together. And it’s not enough just to listen, you have to be consistent in your listening”, concludes the researcher, inviting us “to revive our childhood creativity”.
Give the birds a say
And nothing could be more pertinent, after this sentence, than to review the Mil Pássaros project carried out in Coimbra by Ana Isabel Pereira, co-coordinator of CESEM’s Education and Human Development Group and co-coordinator of the postgraduate course in Music in Childhood: Intervention and Research at the NOVA University. One of CMT’s many artistic-educational constellations, Mil Pássaros travelled to Coimbra and was attended by 48 classes in 31 kindergartens. It began in January 2024 with the Art-Environment Meeting, continued with T.Lab Mil Pássaros (six hours of transitive training), Canto dos Pássaros (25 hours of training), PaPI [Peça a Peça Itenerante] Opus 8, which is the central piece of the project, several Oficinas dos Pássaros, as well as the online support provided by Gabinete do Pássaro. Finally, there was an installation at the Convento de São Francisco that remained open to the public until September.
“We had a very strong team on the ground”, says Ana Isabel Pereira, referring to Rita Roberto and Mariana Vences, who organized the training sessions at the Convent, to Patrícia Costa who led Canto dos Pássaros, and to Inês SiIva and Mariana Caldeira Pinto, who took PaPI Opus 8 and the Oficinas dos Pássaros to the schools. The whole community, educators and children alike, were involved in making the ‘orizuros’ — birds crafted using the Japanese origami technique — which became part of the final installation, an interactive construction featuring a sensory part reactive to movement.
As part of the project, the Gabinete do Pássaro was also present, an idea that emerged in 2021, when Mil Pássaros made its debut in the online training experience. This new space was launched with the aim of keeping participants connected after the training itself, and in which ‘guardians’ — members of the team — take care of a certain number of trainees, providing them with personalized support. In Coimbra, five cabinets were set, named according to the ‘orizuro’ painting technique used by each of the groups: the nest of the mandrions, inspired by Mondrian; the nest of those who draw and dare (“os que riscam e arriscam”), for those who painted with pencils and pens of different thicknesses; the nest of those who lost their way, who were asked to paint with toy cars; the nest of the sprayed, who used spray cans; and the nest of the divers, who dipped in paint the tips of the ‘orizuros’.
The Gabinetes do Pássaro were available throughout the programme for the educators to contact their guardians via e-mail. One aspect of the project that “was very important”, says Ana Isabel Pereira, to study its impact on the educators in terms of personal and professional development, i.e., “what kind of impact this awareness process had on their work with the children”. A questionnaire was distributed to them to collect data that will help to evaluate the results. One of the questions asked was how useful this consultation space really was. A few sentences left by the educators, presented below, show that it was crucial.
“Gabinete do Pássaro made me feel that I wasn’t alone in this project, clarified doubts and solved problems”, said one of them. “The guardians were tireless”, said another. “The Gabinete was availability, support, friendliness, creativity, motivation, and kindness.” said yet another, in an overview that reflects an attempt to care for those who care, those who are on the ground and have a demanding job on their hands, like the kindergarten teachers. Ana Isabel Pereira also showed the Diary distributed at the beginning of the project, with blank spaces to be filled in only at the end. They wrote what was on their minds. They spoke of dreams, delicacy, surprise and imagination. It will be a testimony for the future.
A year of non-stop constellations
As usual at these meetings, Paulo Maria Rodrigues, one of CMT’s founders, spoke about what the company has done over the year 2024. In a presentation entitled ‘Tuning people, birds and flowers’, the composer and assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Art at the University of Aveiro began by explaining the fundamental ideas on which CMT’s work is based, mentioning, as the first point, “an artistic work conceived as if it were taking place in a laboratory”. The term ‘laboratory’ is used here to represent experiments that result in artistic works, which “are also opportunities to observe issues related to human communication through art”.
Another key concept is that of ‘constellation’: “We come from a musical root, but we have the appetite to reach installations, workshops, training, conferences, publications. And the most practical way to imagine what we do is to talk about constellations, which is basically an idea developed in various ways.” For Paulo Maria Rodrigues, better than talking about a work in the field of music or the arts is to talk about “the making of constellations and the tuning of people, birds and flowers”, in a sense in which artistic work corresponds to an ethics and carries the intention of provoking through art a ‘tuning’ with the world around us.
Also in 2023, after the previous Meeting, CMT returned to the “Pianoscópio” in Marvão, an installation made up of “old and completely decrepit pianos” and approached as a laboratory — that is, as a “place where you can make music”. In December of that year, on this instrument made of discarded instruments, an album entitled “DBW 25” was recorded, which, according to the composer, “is a little strange, because on the one hand it is about music supposedly for children, but on the other it is about sounds that we tend to put in that box of experimental music”. DBW means ‘from the trunk’, a reference of the chest of musical memories “from which we bring elements to make a performance”.
In 2024, CMT returned to Fundão, which alongside Famalicão and Loulé, is one of the municipalities with which CMT maintains a special relationship. The purpose of this return was to share a documentary film by Luís Margalhau about the project “Com Palavras Amo”, which took place in 2023, based on the poetry of Eugénio de Andrade in the year of his centenary, and calling both young and elderly people to take part in an installation that was exhibited at A Moagem do Fundão.
On a different front, another edition of “O Céu por Cima de Cá” (“one of Companhia’s most complex projects”) took place in Aveiro. This is an initiative whose final show depends on the place where it’s performed, preceded by two weeks of deep immersion in the sounds and images that characterize it — including an expedition to the highest point in the city, the Social Security building, or a boat cemetery in Ílhavo —, listening to its typical voices and noises, and exploring its archives. The result is a new score that is added to an existing one. “Maybe you recognize the influence of Wim Wenders and ‘Wings of Desire’ here”, says Paulo Maria Rodrigues, mentioning one of the inspirations behind the project.
In Barcelos, “Ornitópera” took place again. But before, “sometime in September”, and for this same piece, CMT was honored with the Best Opera and Audience Choice Award at the Young Audiences Music Awards (YAMAwards) 2024, after being nominated in the Best Opera and Best Chamber Music Ensemble categories. “I don’t really know what to say about it being the best opera, because it’s not an opera at all. It’s an opera only in the sense of global art, in the sense of music, with its connection to movement, staging and scenography”, the composer clarified, adding that this is one of the Company’s pieces created for very young children and their caregivers. For that reason, “it works just as well for the little ones as it does for adults”.
In Évora, the “PaPI Opus 7”, initially developed at Gulbenkian years ago, has also been produced. Likewise, in Famalicão, there is still an installation planted in a public park – Parque da Devesa — where workshops called “Murmúrios das Árvores” (Murmurs of the Trees) continue to be held, in an attempt to give life through art to a tree that died during a storm. “We transformed the tree into a set of sculptural elements that produce sound, so anyone can use it”, explains Paulo. There is a whole programme for schools and kindergartens, with the aim of “developing listening skills, the relationship with the environment and the sound that surrounds the space”. In the same spirit, the Gamelão de Porcelana, which was exhibited in the Gulbenkian garden in 2011, has continued to circulate this year, having found a home in Oeiras and Estarreja.
Some of the objects created by the Companhia were also shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Chiado, as part of a wider exhibition that aimed to explore the relationship between science and art. “‘We’ve been trying to observe children’s behavior in the face of artistic experience, and this work is called ‘Tuning the Eye’. Over the course of several years and plays, we’ve filmed the children’s reactions, trying to catalogue and understand what these reactions are”, explains CMT’s founder. The result, recently published in a paper, has also been made available on video, “for those who work with children to become more aware of the relationship the child has with the artistic experience”.
Returning to Mil Pássaros project in Coimbra, already described in this meeting, Paulo Maria Rodrigues took the opportunity to recall how it came about: “Birds are a good indicator of what’s going on around us. Until 1940, miners would take a canary with them, and when it died, it meant that the mine had too much carbon monoxide. Another example is the book ‘Silent Spring’, written by Rachel Carson because one spring she didn’t hear any birds around her. Investigating the phenomenon, she realized that pesticides had killed a lot of insects that year.” In 2024, a Mil Pássaros installation was placed in Fundão, in addition to another as part of SenseSquared, an Erasmus project that CMT has been part of for the last two years.
Two projects remain for the end of Paulo’s intervention. One of them was carried out in partnership with the NGO Vida, entitled “UrGente”, which led the members of the Companhia to work with young artists from Guinea-Bissau, culminating in the creation of the first transdisciplinary Arts Center in that country, in an old warehouse that has now been completely renovated. The other is a new constellation born in 2024, whose title, “A Liberdade a Passar por Aqui”, evokes the 50th anniversary of the April Revolution. It includes a show premiered at the CCB, an open creation session, an installation called “Mural da História Comum” and a PaPI. “Freedom can be as much a part of a Sérgio Godinho song as an excerpt from a Beethoven symphony. And so, for this exercise of freedom, we called on various influences we’ve had over time.”
Seeing to transform
In the afternoon, it’s time to watch the documentary “Mil Pássaros em Coimbra”, directed by Luís Margalhau. Pedro Florêncio, who is also a filmmaker as well as a professor of Communication Sciences at Nova FCSH, will be presenting the film. “Cinema makes me think a lot about life, and vice versa. It’s a complicated marriage, just like the one between documentary and fiction”, he explains. Author of a doctoral thesis on Frederick Wiseman, he recalls that this American documentary maker, born in 1930, always claimed to make fiction instead of documentaries. This blurring of boundaries is not what one feels in Margalhau’s film, “which had an assignment and, in the best sense, just followed it”. “Luís makes it sound like it all happened in a week, but it took months to capture. And what he did was open the doors to a world different from the everyday one,” Pedro Florêncio said.
The film is about “the practice of freedom and the creation of new possibilities”, showing how the different ideas of the project “entered the schools like viruses trying to be assimilated by the world around them”. And one aspect that catches the eye is “the teachers who are seduced into taking part in the project, how they become available and to what limits”. Pedro recalls that the value and purpose of this documentary, based on what was observed in 48 pre-school classrooms in the Municipality of Coimbra, is to “follow a project that restores a lost role to the school”, intending to leave a memory of it.
“Mil Pássaros em Coimbra” shows how the educators’ transformation is reflected in the children they meet every day, in a process that came from the outside to the inside, causing changes in routines that actually came from within them.
By babbling, you learn
“Curiosity and creativity in the development of vocal learning in birdsong and babies” is the title of the paper by Michael Goldstein, who took part in the meeting via Zoom. Goldstein, who has a PhD in Developmental Psychology and Animal Behavior and is currently an associate professor at Cornell University, noted that one of the topics his laboratory addresses is the development of communication in children, bringing parents and children together and observing how the latter learn to vocalize. They do so by imitation, as part of an interaction that gradually becomes more and more complex.
“The sounds made by the parents trigger development and maturation in the baby”, which in turn raises the bar and ‘pushes’ the parents to produce increasingly elaborate sounds. In this way, vocal progression depends on the child’s environment and is mainly related to “the reactions of adults to the baby’s reactions”. “What is the role of babbling?”, asks Michael Goldstein. “And how does the baby learn from the reaction he perceives in the adult?” Showing a video in which a five-month-old baby ‘talks’ to his mother, the researcher points out that the caregiver is unconsciously ‘in sync’ with the baby, and that communication and the consequent progression happen naturally and unnoticed.
In another video shown to the audience, the sounds of a ten-month-old baby are already similar to words. “Babbling is not a simple reaction: it’s a form of learning. Babies expect increasingly sophisticated sounds and parents synchronize this desire for maturation with them”, said the researcher, who then presented several quantitative examples from his investigation. The conclusion is that babbling “is not a simplified language” and that “vocal exploration creates goals for learning”. Above all, the predictability/innovation binomial must be considered : “If there is too much predictability and no innovation, the world becomes flat. If there’s too little, it won’t hold our attention.”
It appears that “children need some predictability”, at least in 50 percent of the communication established with them. “This keeps them in the game”, comments Michael, for whom the best learning results occur in the “medium predictability of impulses” group, i.e. where exposure to new phonological patterns is as important as the repetition of familiar ones. During the training, “neither the baby is trying to learn, nor the mother is teaching”, and the communication is both synchronized and progressive.
And if this is true for babies, it is also true for birds, says Michael Goldstein. “Baby birds also sing waiting for a reaction, and only the bird that receives contingent feedback learns how to sing.”
Listening again
And so, almost in response to this question, the launch of “DBW 25”, CMT’s new album. It is up to pianist and cultural manager Gabriela Canavilhas to pave the way for listening. Her first move is to praise the physical object, currently in disuse, which holds the music, complementing it with photographs and texts. “The strange title of this magical set of compositions, which alludes to a spatial exploratory device, has its drive in artistic creation”, she continues, referring to the 33 pieces that are part of it. It’s “an imaginative and innovative journey”, which is typical of a CMT that has long ceased to be a laboratory and whose musical vision “is consolidated”.
Gabriela Canavilhas will divide the compositions on the CD into five groups: the sound of nature, percussive words, dramatized narratives and theatricalization of the text, harmonic songs and multicultural compositions. And she will show examples of this categorization one by one, listening to different tracks from the album. Thus, the evocation of rain is able to reflect how much music reveals the world. A word can be seen as a rhythmic-musical element. Music can contain unsung words. “This record is an invitation to free creation and freedom, embracing complexity and the unforeseen, reducing resistance to the new,” summarizes the pianist.
All this before Mariana Vences, one of CMT’s artists, dared to recite a poem that perhaps summarizes the real purpose of our being here: “Once upon a time there was a country with blue skies, an unequal land where few had much.” A country “gagged, suffocated by the fear of censorship”. There was war and bare feet, and illiteracy, and children dying. Until carnations appeared instead of gunshots. And the today that is built upon that day.
At the end of the meeting, we were asked to build. We were given an object with precise assembly instructions: it was a megaphone containing a device capable of recording a message. As many messages were recorded as there were people in the room. If they all play together at the same time, the result is a shared common sound.
