'Professional Love: The dance of reciprocity.' Research in Early Years education and embodied dance.
'This 8-minute film 'Professional Love: The dance of reciprocity' is based on a research project which focuses on exploring meaningful loving interactions between very young children (aged 0-5 years) and their significant professional adult (Key Person) in an Early Years setting through dance improvisation.
Currently, narratives around love/care are subject to lack of value and invisibility due to the increasingly formalisation of the Early Years Curriculum and the devaluing of care/love in policy making.
The project was led by Dr Jools Page, University of Brighton, who has extensive experience as a researcher on attachment-based relationships between early years professionals and young children in group day care provision and is a seminal researcher in the field of love - conceptualised as 'Professional Love' - in Early Childhood Care and Education.
In collaboration with Liz Clark, an experienced dance artist and artist director of Turned On Its Head, and together with a group of early years practitioners at London Early Years Foundation (LEYF) nursery in Soho, we sought to explore and extend Jools Page’s Triangle of Professional Love (ToPL) to address these issues of value and visibility.
The outcome of this innovative collaboration has culminated in the meeting of two professional practices and in the production of a film of improvised reciprocal dances. The film shows our process of working together and highlights how the embodied form of dance can make visible the minutiae of ‘critical Professional Love moments’ (Page, 2018). These duets between very young children, their early years practitioners and professional dancers help us understand the hallmarks of Professional Love which draws two people gravitationally into the dance of reciprocity.
