Ben Fletcher-Watson’s research while affiliated with University of Edinburgh and other places

... A mother of an autistic child describes the challenge: "I don't think you can underestimate how excluding it can be to do things and just worry about people disapproving of your child" (Kempe and Gregson, 2019, p. 292). This sense of exclusion underscores why many individuals living with disabilities, along with their families, refrain from participating in cultural activities and avoid going to the theatre (Fletcher-Watson, 2015;Fletcher-Watson & May, 2018;Hadley & McDonald, 2018;Kempe & Shah, 2015;Simpson, 2018;Unge funkskonshemmede, 2014). With our research, we assessed the situation in Tromsø to explore how the disabled community in this city had experienced going to the theatre both prior to and after the introduction of RELAEXT. ...

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Relaxed performance

... Intermediality as constitutive of an intercultural pedagogy: the case of theatre for early years TEY is a fairly recent arena of the theatre, first emerging as a European phenomenon in the late 1970s (Fletcher-Watson, 2018;van de Water, 2012) and then ramifying across the globe since the 1990s (Miles & Nicholson, 2019). Despite its coincidence with the experimentalist rise of intermedial art around the same period, the theoretical link between TEY and intermediality is rarely articulated, much less explored. ...

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Intermedia and interculturalism: practitioners’ perspectives on an interactive theatre for young ethnic minority students in Hong Kong

... This rise in technology usage has sparked increasing interest among researchers in how caregivers support children's engagement with technology. However, most studies on technology usage are centered on White, European families (Chaudron et al., 2018;Geurts et al., 2022), leaving Latine families underrepresented in technology and mediation research (Connell et al., 2015). ...

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Sustaining Latine Families’ Cultural Values Through Technology Mediation Practices

... In contemporary life across the globe, singing remains a common element of caregiver-infant interactions despite the prevalence of recorded music (Mendoza & Fausey, 2021;Yan et al., 2021). Likewise, the popularity of baby musical programs (e.g., Kindermusik, Music Together) has steadily risen (Drury & Fletcher-Watson, 2017), although many programs were canceled or moved online during COVID-19 lockdowns. Annotations of visual attention during live musical performances suggest that infants are generally highly engaged (Barbosa et al., 2023) and that their visual engagement is modified by music with different emotion-regulatory goals (Kragness et al., 2023). ...

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An Itsy Bitsy Audience: Live Performance Facilitates Infants’ Attention and Heart Rate Synchronization

... With regard to these challenges, national and international research shows that more and more children are born into homes where digital technologies feature prominently in their families' everyday lives (Marsh et al. 2020;Chaudron et al. 2015) and they engage in diverse digitally mediated activities, such as watching TV programmes online, reading digital books, playing with digital toys and games, finding information online, and interacting with distant family and friends via social media platforms (Arnott et al. 2019;Griffith and Arnold 2019;Zhao and Flewitt 2020;McArthur et al. 2022). These everyday digital practices offer rich opportunities to promote young children's social, cultural, educational, and developmental rights (children's participation rights) yet also raise concerns about the longer-term impacts of inequality of access (children's provision rights) and about the potential harms to child development and wellbeing associated with 'digital exposure' (children's protection rights). ...

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The Rights of Very Young Children in the Digital Environment of the Family Home: Findings From a UK Survey of Children 0–36 Months and Their Parents

... The overall goal of both approaches is to secure human and cultural rights for everyone by making professional, high-quality theatre experiences accessible and enjoyable, with specific accommodations for audiences with disabilities who might otherwise experience barriers to access. To achieve these goals in practice, theatres implement various measures to accommodate different disabilities, whether the physical adaptation for wheelchair users, adjustment of sound and lighting, provision of information before and during the performances and, most importantly, fostering a permissive, welcoming, and inclusive environment around the performances (Fletcher-Watson, 2015;Kempe, 2015aKempe, , 2015bSimpson, 2018). HT established RELAEXT as part of their long-term work to promote access and inclusion for disabled members of the community in 2020. ...

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Relaxed performance

... th it and also because it provides a common language and guides our creative team with an early childhood lens to develop meaningful collaborations with very young children so well. As theatre makers and researchers, we are familiar with a wide range of other theories related to dramaturgies for very young children (e.g., Fletcher-Watson 2013, 2016Fletcher-Watson et. al 2014;Hovik 2015Hovik , 2019Nagel and Hovik 2016;Patel 2020;Patel, Schnädelbach and Koleva 2018;Wartemann 2009), and a range of relevant theories and approaches related to play and playfulness. 3 Given our context in Alberta, however, where early childhood educators use Flight to develop their emerging curricula and to understand children's me ...

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Creative Process and Co-Research with the Early Years through Flight

... Europe and the USA (Fletcher-Watson et al., 2014), along with productions designed to engage people with dementia, profound multiple learning difficulties (PMLD) and those on the autism spectrum (Brown, 2012). Performances may reduce audience size to ensure comfort and engagement (Belloli, Morris and Phinney, 2013), provide participatory experiences such as communal eating or dance (Nerattini, 2009), employ kinaesthetic and other sensory stimuli (Brown, 2012), and tour to non-theatrical venues, including special schools, care homes and nurseries. ...

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Relaxed performance: audiences with autism in mainstream theatre

... Data were processed following the method of Bernard and Ryan (2010) and Fletcher-Watson (2013). The vivencias were audio-recorded. ...

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Biodanza and the Implementation of the Principle of Biocentric Education in Kindergartens