We love dancing babies. Their uninhibited enthusiasm makes them an evergreen draw on social media, the most popular people on a wedding dance floor (watch your feet!), the stars of the family-friendly daytime dance parties that have proliferated over the past few years.
But some artists are taking that love a step further: making very young children a part of the choreographic process, or creating music designed to get them moving. They’re considering why these tiny dancers bring us such joy, and what lessons they might have for grown-ups.
Like Amanda Pintore, an assistant professor at Arizona State University. Earlier this year, she and Olivia Herneddo, an artist and researcher, hosted a toddler dance party that doubled as a choreographic brainstorm.
A handful of young children and their caregivers entered a dance studio in Mesa, Ariz., as a musician played soothing chime-like tones on a synthesizer — shades of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Pintore and Herneddo sat invitingly on the floor in the middle of the studio, swaying gently.
A small boy in a yellow shirt started skipping around them. The musician accelerated the beeps and boops of the synthesizer, following the boy’s lead. Herneddo got up and began to skip, too. Before long a towheaded girl was jumping along, adding the occasional twirl, and delighted shriek, for good measure.
This “play lab” helped shape Pintore’s recent show “Red.” Performed in November for multigenerational crowds at the Mesa Arts Center and the Children’s Museum of Phoenix, “Red” was created both for and, in part, by children from 12 to 36 months old. The final show incorporated movements and ideas gathered during multiple play lab sessions, leaving room for young audience members to add their own touches.
Pintore, who studies dance education for children newborn to age 6, sees extraordinary richness in young children’s curiosity-driven, anything-goes approach to dancing. “It’s a kind of beautiful, limitless possibility,” she said.
To approach dance the way babies and toddlers do, said Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, a movement artist and therapist, is to return to our roots. “It brings us back to our own intelligent bodies, our own basic understanding of what it is to be alive,” she said. “Babies don’t perform movement — they discover it.”
Dance and theater for very young children is a relatively new academic field, Pintore said. But recreational dance classes for toddlers abound, and creative movement has clear benefits for babies, too. Bainbridge Cohen, the creator of a somatic practice called Body-Mind Centering, has worked with infants for decades, using movement therapy to help deepen their perceptions of the world and their relationships with others.
“The brain, as well as the body, develops through movement,” Bainbridge Cohen said. Dancing can help young children figure out how the world looks, feels and sounds, and begin to identify connections between those sensations.
Pintore said the “Red” play labs underscored how powerful dance-based discovery can be. Though the sessions were deliberately wordless — some of the participants were pre-verbal — Pintore described having “movement conversations” with toddlers. The children would communicate ideas through their bodies (“I think we should twirl in a circle!”), she would respond in kind (“Yes! And what if we put our arms up while we twirl?”), and the volley would often result in something remarkably beautiful.
“These young children are incredibly dynamic artistic partners,” Pintore said.
Outside of therapeutic or research environments, when babies dance, they’re almost always responding to music. The Australian D.J. Lenny Pearce — who started out as B-boy in a crew that won “Australia’s Got Talent” — began making techno remixes of nursery classics like “The Wheels on the Bus” about three years ago, after his daughter was born.
He was sick of more traditional, folksy children’s music. “I’ve always focused on music that can make you dance,” he said, “and who wants to dance to that?”
Pearce’s clubby songs exploded online, boosted by the fact that his twin brother is a member of the popular children’s music group the Wiggles. And it makes sense that very young dancers would love techno: Our earliest soundtrack, in utero, is the basslike thump-thump of our mother’s heartbeat and the oontz-oontz of her circulating blood.
Over the past year, Pearce has been hosting “baby rave” and “toddler techno” parties all over the world, with children and their parents dancing to his versions of “B.I.N.G.O.” and “Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes.” His young partygoers routinely achieve the kind of complete abandon that adult-club D.J.s dream about. On the dance floor, nobody is more punk than a toddler.
“They don’t care how they look, they don’t care if their dancing is ‘bad’ or ‘good,’” Pearce said. “They’re just there to have fun, and they’re always right in the moment.”
Babies might also have things to teach professional dancers, as the choreographer Alexandra Beller discovered. Like Pearce, she began thinking about very young dancers after the birth of her children. About 10 years ago, she found herself fascinated by the unselfconscious, idiosyncratic dancing of her son Ivo, then 14 months old.
“He’d never been to any kind of dance class,” she said, “but you could see him thinking about movement, and you could see him clocking the cause and effect of sensation and kinetics and his body.”
Beller brought both Ivo and her older son, Lucas, into the studio with her dance company. She filmed the adults attempting to follow the children’s movements, and posted some of the videos online. One especially charming clip of Ivo went megaviral. (It still occasionally pops up on social media.)
But Beller found that her professional dancers had trouble recreating the steps that came so naturally to Ivo. She examined a phrase of Ivo’s dance using Laban Movement Analysis, a form of notation that describes movement’s intention and quality. Then she examined the adults’ replication of the same phrase. The difference was striking.
“I taught the company through a lens of action and space, which is like a very adult way of thinking — what are you doing, where is it going, how are you doing it?” she said. Her analysis of Ivo, however, showed movements that fell mainly in the notation system’s “shape” category, which concerns the body’s relationship to itself and its surrounding environment.
“He was all about, why am I moving, why am I changing from this shape to that shape, from an inner perspective?” Beller said. “We’d lost the why.”
Professional dancers often lose the “why,” Beller said. Formal dance training can overemphasize an artist’s outer appearance. Today, many skilled practitioners are keen to explore movement that, instead, emanates from the inside. In that context, very young dancers make excellent role models. Like baby Ivo, they always follow their inner impulses.
Pintore said her research with babies and toddlers has changed the way she structures her college courses. She’s now more likely to emphasize play and creative risk-taking.
“When babies dance, it is very playful and also very serious,” she said. That’s a magical combination for grown-up students, too: “I want to make my college classes more like the play lab space.”
Watching babies dance can produce feelings of awe as well as joy. Baby Ivo is a teenager now, “a goth skater dude,” Beller said, less likely to break into impromptu dances. But Beller still feels a spiritual connection to those early videos.
“Whatever space we’re in before consciousness or birth, babies are as close to that space as anyone will ever come — and when they move, I think we see that most clearly,” Beller said. “Maybe watching them dance helps us learn something about the before, the between or the unknown, the thing we call the soul.”
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