Contribution short abstract:

This paper asks if there is a way to unwrite the non-verbal and the sensorial. Drawing on making theatre for toddlers, this paper asks if anthropology can entail a process of unwriting to communicate that which is already experiential, sensorial and the non-verbal.

Contribution long abstract:

While being an anthropologist, I am also a theatre practitioner making non-verbal/sensorial theatre for toddlers, i.e. creating plays for toddlers and adults to watch. In creating anything for a toddler we have to use a tangible material as toddlers do not have the faculty of language as yet and they respond to the world sensorially and through the tangible real. Toddlers experience and communicate joy, suspense, pathos or anticipation but only if they can touch, feel, see or smell something rather than talk, write or read about it. Language of the material tangible creating an aural, visual and a tactile principle is at heart of toddler theatre. As adult creators of this form, I consider making such plays an anthropological endeavour as ethnography too is in a sense an assemblage of the visual and the aural in a discrete relationship. I want to now write ethnographically the process of creating and working on this artistic practice to think through the making of anthropology but I feel writing may not do justice to the process of this creation. Toddlers in receiving this work share the joy of the discrete, the repetitive and the mundane and but how can I reflect on this process sans writing. Can I engage in an unwriting of the non-verbal and the sensorial? What will that entail if I do not wish to create a parallel register of the sensorial to talk about the sensorial?