ABSTRACT
In a nursery class some music is playing and children are dancing to it. One child, in particular, is moving to the music in a particularly sensitive way – her movements being sinuous and complex and highly patterned and directly related to the rhythm of the music. Beside her, another child makes the movements of break-dancing. Later an adult talks to the child about what moved her to dance when she hears that particular music and she says it is because the music makes her want to make fast movements. Later the same adult asks her to talk about some of her paintings that are displayed on the walls of the room. Like her dancing, the paintings are full of movement, with snaking and voluptuous lines, and the dramatic use of space and colour. The child then tells us that her father is a painter. Later in the sequence we see her and some other children sitting at a table on which is a mounted butterfly in a case, together with paper, brushes and watercolours. The child spends a very long time in creating an incredibly beautiful and sensitive painting of the butterfly. The marks the child makes on the paper are clearly drawn from what she sees on the butterfly and show her preoccupation with colour and pattern and sequence and rhythm. The camera, focused on her, shows her looking at the butterfly, and down at her painting; up at the butterfly and down at her painting. It is clear that she is assessing her own work as she paints. Aeryn is clearly a privileged and gifted child.
