Online talk & workshop: Listening Before Words – Creating Sensory Performance for Young Audiences
The Nordic-Baltic ASSITEJ Network (NBAN), together with ASSITEJ Iceland, invites you to an online talk and experimental workshop with Icelandic theatre maker, director and visual artist Helga Arnalds.
Listening Before Words – Creating Sensory Performance for Young Audiences
How do we create performances for children and young audiences when we don’t begin with words, a script, or even a clear idea of what we want to say?
In this online talk and workshop, Helga Arnalds invites participants to explore sensory and embodied approaches to artistic creation.
Date: 27 October 2026
Time: 11:00 GMT / 12:00 CET / 13:00 EET
Place: Zoom
Duration: 1.5 hours
More about the workshop:
Helga Arnalds is an Icelandic theatre maker, director and visual artist, and the artistic director of 10 Fingers. Her work explores visual and wordless performance, material-based creation and embodied approaches to the creative process.
Drawing on more than thirty years of creating visual and wordless theatre, Helga will share approaches developed through her work with 10 Fingers, an evolving collaborative artistic practice that brings together different artists for each project.
Taking the wordless performance LIFE – a Mudpie, created with soil for children and families, as a starting point, Helga explores listening — to materials, the body, collaborators, the work itself and the young spectator.
How can sensory and embodied experience become a starting point for artistic creation? And what changes when we shift our attention from what we want to tell children towards what we want to make possible for them to experience?
The talk draws on Helga’s practice of Listening to the Material and her research into embodied thinking, Focusing and the felt sense — a form of bodily knowing that can be present before we have words for it.
At its heart is a question: What does it mean to trust the child as a spectator — to create space for young audiences to sense, imagine and make meaning for themselves?
The session concludes with a short guided Focusing experience, inviting participants to move from talking about listening to experiencing it for themselves.
Helga Arnalds / 10 Fingers
the10fingers.com
Join us to learn more about Helga’s practice and discover new tools and approaches for your own artistic practice!
Registration form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe1CNSzU-U7E40x7PH9Rz5VboLUJAwHdqkKvXgSJV47Rha2Dg/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=117153372985799845101
Registration deadline: 22 October 2026
Please note that the workshop is limited to 50 participants.