For the Love of Play

Ep 3. Emma Watkins - Play Is The Most Important Learning Vehicle Of Life

• Playgroup Victoria • Season 1 • Episode 3

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"Play is the most important learning vehicle of life..."
 
 

In Conversation with Emma Watkins – Children’s Entertainer, Singer, Dancer and Author

In this episode, we speak with beloved children’s entertainer, Emma Watkins, better known as the Yellow Wiggle and Emma Memma.

We discuss play as a vehicle for early learning and talk in depth about Emma’s passion for visual communication and her endeavour to create interactive spaces that connect us through dance, movement and Auslan. 

We ask Emma about her experience with the Wiggles and her love of performance, but we also learn more about her life outside her characters and costumes.

A quick heads up: We recorded this interview over Zoom, and you'll notice the audio has a few minor blips.

About Our Guest

Emma Watkins, who rose to international stardom as the Yellow Wiggle, is a dancer, filmmaker and a passionate Auslan advocate. Her work and performances shine a light on accessibility in visual communicative. 

Show Links

Learn More About Playgroup Victoria

Episode Credits

Hosted by Mylie Nauendorf and Sinead Halliday.

Interview conducted by Sinead Halliday.

Edited by Jonathan Rivett.

Mastering by James North Productions.

Music by Selina Byrne.

And thanks to our little friends Toby and Adelaide for voicing the intro.

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Mylie:

Playgroup Victoria acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia and their continuing connection to land and community. We pay our respects to them, their cultures, and to their elders, past and present.

Kids:

For the love of play. For the level play.

Mylie:

For the love of play, an exploration of childhood, family, community, and belonging.

Emma Watkins:

You want children to feel excited and part of the adventure. And how does that play extend the time of the child's attention enough to inform what's going on behind it? And so play is used as a vehicle, obviously, it's the most important learning vehicle of life, regardless of age, but in terms of entertainment, if it's playful and fun, then you've got everyone's attention.

Sinead:

Hi, welcome to For the Love of Play.

Mylie:

I'm Sinead. And I'm Miley. We're from Playgroup Victoria, and on today's episode, we are talking to someone whose yellow bow we have all come to recognise. She was the reliably cheerful Wiggle, she was bright, light on her feet, the yellow wiggle, Emma Wiggle, Emma Mema, known by many names.

Sinead:

Emma quickly rose to superstar status in the world of children's entertainment, and yet we knew there was much more to Emma as a person. Emma is a passionate Oslan advocate and is helping to shine a light on accessibility and powerful visual communication tools.

Mylie:

Yeah, this was such a great um enriching conversation. And something that stood out to me in this conversation was that Emma talked a lot about being this conduit of communication. And I just absolutely love that phrase. And she talks about how important that is as being part of a community. And, you know, through dance and movement and song, Emma is creating space for people of all abilities to learn and to grow.

Sinead:

I love how she's branching out to connect with all sorts of different people in all different walks of life. And we wanted to learn more about Emma's Life Act side of her characters and what's important to her and what she wants to share with families.

Mylie:

Yeah, we're super thrilled to dive deeper into Emma's world, so stay tuned. Up next for our conversation with Emma. Cha-cha-cha-cha.

Sinead:

Much like Mozart reached for the notes of music to paint pictures of life and feeling, Emma Watkins expressed herself through moving stories. Emma went to a performing art school where she received a scholarship to study dance. After a bad accident falling on her coccix, Emma suffered a crack at the base of her spine. Wading through the disappointment of injury, Emma found her way to film studies, molding the medium to incorporate the musicality of movement that she loved, drawing forth her creative capacity for choreography, colour, connection. While most people know Emma as the sunny yellow wiggle or the incandescent Emma Memma, beneath there is a steely determination. Emma has persevered through the trials and tribulations of auditions, health challenges that left her in great pain, and most recently completing a PhD, all while returning to her long held love from childhood, and that is to dance. Emma, welcome to our podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's so nice to be here. Emma, what early memories do you have of play and performances?

Emma Watkins:

Oh goodness. I feel like a lot of my early memories would have been at preschool. And I remember loving going there. And one day mum came to pick me up and I refused to go home because I just wanted to play dress-ups. And I do remember that very, very early on. I must have been about three, and then watching dance on TV and asking mum if I could go and be part of dance class. And so I think I was fairly determined even at a young age.

Sinead:

While researching for this interview, I couldn't help but be reminded of a quote from The Alchemist. That quote is, When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. There's footage of you, Emma, and your sister dancing about seven years old at a Wiggles concert in 1996. You auditioned for a range of different musicals and then it was the Wiggles who welcomed you and allowed you to be you. Did that feel like a full circle moment?

Emma Watkins:

Oh, absolutely. And to be honest, I think, you know, as a child, obviously I had no idea that I would then audition later for the Wiggles and be successful. And I guess what is amazing about you know that part of my life was that, you know, who knew that the Wiggles would go on for that long? And so I think between the time that I was at the concert and the time that I auditioned was probably about 20 years. So in the meantime, you know, the Wiggles had been giving music and, you know, the joy of education to so many families worldwide. Um and so when I was successful and actually got the job as the ballet dancing fairy, I thought that was uh very typecast for me and the perfect role that uh I was able to play.

Sinead:

As part of the Wiggles, you could perform to up to one million children a year. What has this taught you about children? What surprised you about the experience?

Emma Watkins:

Oh, that's a good question because I think a lot has surprised me, and I've learned so much. I've been performing for children for over 15 years now, and even before that I taught dance, uh, especially ballet for primary school students. But I think in my position as a performer, watching audiences from the stage, that is quite unique. You know, you don't really have a lot of data on, you know, what do performers take in from the audience from the other side. But I've definitely learnt how to use language and whether that's visual or spoken and music and movement to engage an audience. And I think that that's only become more refined in my craft, I guess, as a performer, the longer that's gone on. And even though I had, you know, the most amazing time performing with the wiggles, you know, that's you know, you can't really parallel that. It's just been that was a wild time and amazing. But I think in my last three years as MMMA, I've taken that on board a lot. And I really try to watch the audience and find the magic moments every single time we perform.

Sinead:

It's been an amazing, wide-ranging journey for you. And you could wake up in a different city every single day.

Emma Watkins:

Yeah.

Sinead:

What was that like travelling the world as a young woman and outside of the performing days, what did you get up to?

Emma Watkins:

Um well a lot of it was performing because we at the time were doing four shows a day, six days a week. So the travel day or the day off was actually most of the time spent in a bus, you know, driving across many, many hours. Or sometimes the cars or the buses would drive overnight and you would sleep in the bus. And, you know, there it was really what you could imagine, you know, any kind of pop star at the time was doing. Uh, but most of the time you didn't see a lot outside the venue and the hotel. And so I got really used to being a better traveller. I remember growing up being super motion sick, like on every kind of transport. And, you know, my first year travelling overseas with the wiggles, that was gone. And I think maybe the excitement and the joy about being on tour, maybe that got rid of it. I don't know, but I'm definitely a better traveller now. But most of the time, you know, we would have moments where we would be embraced by different cities or community groups that would either take us on a tour around the town uh or show us the sites. So I've had an incredible opportunity to see lots of different cities across the world.

Sinead:

Growing up, you had two family friends who were deaf. Can you tell us about how meaningful those relationships were and how influential they were for you?

Emma Watkins:

I guess at the time I didn't really think anything, you know, much of it. I had uh a beautiful friend at primary school and her brothers are deaf, and so we would drop her home from school, and they were actually at a different school at the time, and then we would meet up and play after school every afternoon, and that was essentially my first exposure to sign language. And then little by little I'd taken on a few different workshops through my schooling time, but essentially I was a very, very lazy learner and never put the time into learning sign language properly when I was at school, which I regret now. But after school and during my time with the Wiggles, I tried to do many different community courses for Auslan and was successful to do a few. And then when the Turing got so busy, I had to quit my Auslan course because I wasn't able to pass by not being there face to face. And so when the pandemic hit, they changed that course to become online. And that was the case for so much education. You know, I think really one of the positives of, you know, having to work out how to digitally present education was the fact that sign language really took on board a new adventure. And I started my studies back up again while I was with the Wiggles, and then through that was actually focused on my PhD research at the same time, which again probably seems like a lot, but there we weren't performing at all. So actually a lot of my time was taken up with research, and I felt that my AusLAN course was really helping support my PhD research, which was about integrating sign language and dance for children's screen media. And so over the last couple of years I've done my Auslan certificates and have become a qualified interpreter, and I use sign language every single day with my colleagues, whether that's in you know, in real life, face to face, or over Zoom for lots of different meetings.

Sinead:

So those visual cues, the playfulness, colour, your tone, you are so expressive in everything that you do. In what ways did this does a perceived light touch dig deeper to connect and create opportunities for children with additional needs?

Emma Watkins:

I think really over my time performing, particularly with the Wiggles, we would have sessions where we would do meet and greets with families. And that became more and more apparent when we would tour in North America. And when we would tour, any time a family that used sign language or was part of the deaf community was kind of shuffled over to me. Even though I didn't know American Sign Language at all at the time, um, you know, it was kind of understood that I would be able to communicate, which I'm glad that I was thrown into the deep end because that really taught me how to let my guard down and take upon the challenge. And I started to notice on stage when I was watching that family then watch the show, that most of the time there was a broken sense of communication. As in it wasn't um it wasn't problematic, it's just that I noticed that different family members were um not understanding our show properly by ways of interpretation, or that we weren't delivering our communication that clearly for the interpreter to then interpret that to the family. Um, and so that kind of got me thinking about, well, why can't we just make the show accessible and then we won't have to worry about this? Um and that's essentially where my curiosity started. And also I started to notice that lots of different families were not actually all using the same form of communication. And in most cases, in particular with um people that might be deaf or low-hearing, most deaf children are born to hearing parents. So there's already different languages going on.

Sinead:

So we've visited a playgroup held at the John Pierce Centre for the Deaf in Melbourne a few times, and it's an incredible group. It may be the child or the parent or the carer that may have low hearing or no hearing. So you being a role model for that, how can we get more people interested in aware to harness those communication tools and communication systems in order to help a child that also may have sensory overload with autism or they might be feeling anxious? How can we break down those barriers so that all children can benefit from the beauty of performance and music and dance?

Emma Watkins:

You hit the nail on the head. It's really how do we provide these experiences? And I I guess you could argue not just for arts, but for everything. Like it seems crazy that we are exploring this nature of visual language in art, and that makes sense, which is why we do it at MMMA, because it's it's a very young age group, there's music and dance already involved, there's movement, choreography, and gesture and expression, and so that kind of feels natural, which is essentially where my research project kind of headed. It was like this preschool age group is the perfect age group to start these conversations. But really, why is this not accepted or possible in all areas of um education or information? I think I've learned more specifically over the last couple of years that I'm not necessarily a role model for the deaf community, but I am definitely seen as a gateway. And I really love that expression because most of my days I end up connecting people to amazing deaf teachers in Australia. So a lot of people come to me for advice on sign language and Ausline, which is beautiful, but actually it's not my primary language. And so I basically open the gate and I'm like, you should talk to that person, that person should talk to you, and this is going to be a great situation. So I feel like I'm a I'm a train station with lots of different people coming from all different angles. But I think, you know, what you mention is really the responsibility as a human. It feels that we as a community member should take on the responsibility of learning lots of languages because I do have hearing uh and I do have sight. I should be able to learn as many things as possible to help other people or to be a conduit of communication. And I think in our society we don't tend to do that, or if it's not a part of our immediate family, people feel that there is no reason. But as you mentioned, we now know that visual communication is helpful for everyone. And ironically, everyone's already using visual communication. It's 90% of our communication regardless. So why we don't do it, I don't know. But it means that everybody is capable of doing it.

Sinead:

In an interview, you said the minute that you start to change the register of your voice, children start to go, oh, hang on a second. That's not real. In what ways have children encouraged you, Emma, to be your authentic self?

Emma Watkins:

I guess that's also changed over time too, because I notice when I first became a wiggle, I had no idea how to use my voice. And and predominantly because I grew up as a dancer. So I just thought that, you know, body movement and expression would just do the job. And in most cases, it really did. But actually, I learned that my voice was a really integral part of the group, and so I really love storytelling, so I thought that was a good angle. And when I was able to harness that a little bit better, I understood that the audience was more responsive. And yet I have received different feedback around this point. So I ended up being a little bit too um energetic or a bit too over the top right at the start when I was Emma Wiggle. And then I received lots of feedback to calm down. So then I calmed down, and then lots of people were like, No, we need more energetic. So I think really I've learned to modulate my voice um according to the situation. And I think after 15 years, I can regulate that better now and feel what the audience is feeling. And I think that's that tends to be the reason why we can evoke a certain response at a show now. It's something that when you are with the audience and you know what they're doing, you can change the way that they respond to you. I think that only comes with time. Whereas at the beginning, I watch early videos of myself and I think, what am I doing?

Sinead:

That means that you're growing though, isn't it?

Emma Watkins:

Yeah. Like we I had to start somewhere. And I honestly, the first time I heard my voice on a microphone, I was crying. So it was so overwhelming. I didn't want to even hear my voice. Um, where now obviously I have to learn to use my voice in a positive way and to bring children, you know, together to share music and dance and song. And I can embrace that a lot more now because I'm not worried about myself. Whereas before I was obviously very young and I was caught up in what people would think of my singing ability.

Sinead:

One of my favorite authors, Elaine Divitton, he says, if you don't look back and you're not a little bit embarrassed about what you did the year before, then you're not growing enough.

Emma Watkins:

So It's a great one. I don't and I obviously it comes with age, but you know, I never had that ability to reflect. And that's scary because I was put on an international stage. And I think at the time I didn't know how to reflect because I was also scared and I was embarrassed. But as the years have gone on, you're absolutely right. The more that you can look at yourself and change what you're about to deliver the next time round means everything. And with the MMM shows in particular, we actually receive feedback either from what I see or from what our team sees in the auditorium or from what people write to us on social media, and all of those notes uh change the show the next time it happens. And I think that's the reason why our show has grown so much because we've taken on board every single piece of feedback.

Sinead:

Do you have a bit of an appetite for risk, Emma? Because you've continued to launch yourself into all manner of different things. Like when you talk about Lego Masters and different radio and video and film and all of these things. What's driving you?

Emma Watkins:

Oh, that's such a good question. You know, I've never been asked that question ever. I don't know, and I'd like to know what people around me would say. I think it's really this notion that I want to learn as much as I can. Also, with a project like MMMA and my PhD, there is a real need for justice is too strong, but there is a real issue around accessibility for people that use sign language and um that might be part of the deaf community for so many things. And I don't know, for me it just feels really weird that a lot of our media doesn't cater for that, but it has the ability to, but for some reason we don't think about it. And I think that's really helped me choose the projects that I do, and you know, lots of different things come our way, but we want to make sure that everyone can be involved and everyone can access the project, and that's been really important. But I yeah, I'd risk, I don't know, they some of those projects are risky. I yes, leaving the wiggles, I think for a professional reason was super risky. But at the time, I felt that I really needed to do the research for the PhD, and it was super important. And now, three years on, yeah, it's just been everything. Everything around the research project has taught me so much.

Sinead:

Can you tell us a bit about your friendship with Elvin Melvin and the power of creating a community built on support and trust?

Emma Watkins:

So Elvin and I, our story is quite unique, but I had been hired by a theater production that wanted somebody to dance and sign in a performance. And so someone had reached out to me. And at that time, I had mentioned to the director that I I'm not the right person because I don't use sign language as my primary language, but I'm happy to help and I'm happy to search for somebody. And lo and behold, a friend of mine was teaching an adult ballet class in Melbourne, and she mentioned that she had uh a guy that was deaf in her class learning ballet as an adult, and I was like, this is awesome. So, with my very, very basic sign language skills at the time, I went to Melbourne to meet him, and we met in a dance studio and there was no interpreter because we couldn't get one. And I had obviously very basic skills. Um, but Elvin was so patient, he came in, and then most of our first meeting, which is super strange because it's on video, is not actually having a conversation. It's actually just dancing together. And we hired a studio at the Australian Ballet School and then just danced. I I it is so magical. Anyway, Elvin and I became the best of friends, and we just felt like we were meant to be friends through this meeting and that we both loved dance. Um, and I've always been inspired by his story learning dance and sign language as an adult. Elvin uh actually was born in Hong Kong and grew up in a hearing family, actually was at a regular mainstream school learning Cantonese, and I don't know how he made it through his schooling, but he did, um, with no sign language accessibility whatsoever. And then once he turned 20 something, 22, 24, he moved to Melbourne to learn sign language and ballet of all things. And then I just happened to meet him, you know, about 10 years after he arrived in Australia. But you can see that his personality is so um so inherently expressive. And he's obviously grown up with a sense of visual language and then acquired Oslan along the way. Uh, but that's how we became friends through this random project that needed somebody that shouldn't have been me, which was good in the end, because then Elvin played that role. And then when I left the Wiggles, I said to Elvin, you know, I'm researching more about sign language and how we can, you know, create more media that's integrated. And I asked him, you know, would you be on board? Should we do some should we do some trial videos? And then he's been with us since day one. And we're still trialing things.

Sinead:

Sometimes life leads you where you meant to go, doesn't it?

Emma Watkins:

It does. And our friendship is I'm you know, I can't take that for granted. I've learned so much from Elvin, but also, you know, as a person that uses sign language as his primary language, he's one of the most creative and expressive people, you know, in this country. And I think only once you start to watch him more or uh, you know, acquire sign language yourself, you're like, wow, he's hilarious.

Sinead:

Your new album, Dance Island Party, what inspired this particular theme? Did you have a vision? Where did it come from?

Emma Watkins:

Well, I mean, look, most of our brand, I guess the MMM brand, is of course focused on visual communication, but we know that a lot of people are connecting with the brand through music, and so we have actually used our musical skills to write original music to help gather the attention of lots of other people to come on board and learn sign language, and so music kind of helps that, even though I know that's ironic. So when we write any of the music for MMM, we have a bit of a workshop. So between myself, my husband, um Ollie, who also was at the Wiggles writing music there and now is a music producer, plus Elvin and our deaf director, Sue. And so actually going back and forward with Elvin and Sue, we kind of work out what signs are really important to bring to the community, what signs are really useful for a preschooler, and what signs are appropriate to learn and what did the sign look what does it look like? You know, a lot of signs are arbitrary and so they don't look like what they mean, which is super confusing for children. So we actually try and pick out iconic signs um and then write the music based on what time it takes to produce that sign. This has been really specific, but the PhD research um has led us into this process. So can the sign be performed in a certain way? What's the natural speed to perform that sign? And then how many times does that does that sign need to be repeated in the phrase and then in the song as a whole? And so most of our early songs only have two or three words in them, two or three signs. And a lot of the feedback at the time was like, she's she's become so basic. But that's not the point. Our our research was to see if we could break down the communication enough where everyone could jump on board from the start so that everyone could understand the sign that was being performed and the word that was being sung. And yeah, since there we've kind of grown our process, and the process is, yeah, a lot of back and forth between the team to try and figure out how the album should come about.

Sinead:

When I'm listening to you describe that, I'm thinking about the notion of play and how often play can be disregarded as something as an aside instead of a powerful learning tool. How have you incorporated a sense of play and playfulness?

Emma Watkins:

The biggest thing for um children's entertainment specifically is that notion of leveraging play because that's the exciting part. You want children to feel excited and part of the adventure. And how does that play extend the time of the child's attention enough to inform what's going on behind it? And so play is used as a vehicle, obviously, it's the most important learning vehicle of life, regardless of age. But in terms of entertainment, if it's playful and fun, then you've got everyone's attention. And then how long can you retain that attention? That's essentially children's entertainment.

Sinead:

It's beautiful.

Emma Watkins:

Is it? It's beautiful when it when it sings, right? Like when it's when it's all harmonious and it's working, you know, the subject matter's good, there's something exciting for people to do, it's catchy, they'll repeat it later, and that that kind of magical element is what you see in Bluey. Uh, that sense of play in the content and also the characters, that it's also replicable at home. Home, and that's why there is such a connection to a show like Bluey, uh, because the play is the number one concept in every single episode, and yeah, hands down, just a brilliant show.

Sinead:

It just got me thinking about how how much hard work goes into making things look simple.

Emma Watkins:

Yeah, which is why the feedback when we first started MM when it was like, ah, this song is so simple, it's like, oh we have no idea how hard it is to make sure that it is and that it's important because you want as many people as possible to be connected to it. And I think for my research as a whole, you know, we would love to be able to work out processes to integrate visual language with spoken language in a in a high-level scenario. You know, if we could do that, you know, as a news broadcast, you know, or a podcast, we would, but we can't because the language itself is so complex and we're not quite there yet. But in a preschool scenario, the language capability and concepts are simple enough for us to integrate visual language 100%. So in my view, there is no excuse for anyone now in children's entertainment to not make their content accessible, and yet we find ourselves still as one of the only organizations doing it. And that's okay, because we're just trying to work out the processes ourselves. But I think at a point, it's you know, what is the benefit then of children's education and entertainment if it's not providing you know valuable skills?

Sinead:

Well, and the thank you because you have made communication between all sorts of different children and families possible where they might have not felt included before. So on behalf of all those families, thank you. And another thing that you've done for families and particularly women is opening up and sharing your story of endometriosis. There's so many families who push on and will push through because you gotta keep on going, you gotta keep those home fires burning. What was the biggest lesson that experience taught you?

Emma Watkins:

If I had my time again and if I had one symptom that I thought was slightly serious, I should have gone to see someone earlier. Uh but in terms of, you know, once I realised what it was, and then, you know, in the sense that I wanted to be really open about what was happening, I probably wouldn't change that. And I couldn't see it at the time, but I knew that I needed to be up front to families why I wasn't going to be on tour. And at that time, it was taboo for, you know, Emma Wiggle to not be at a show. Um whereas now, you know, people are so much more understanding of performers, you know, taking different um positions or, you know, being able to take time off and you know, that's all fine now. But when I was there, that wasn't the case. And so I think being able to be authentic about it and you know, when we release the information, which was on a live TV broadcast, and now you're making me think of me being risky as a person. Um, I just we just felt that it was the right thing to do, to be really open and and authentic about the issue. And yeah, I'm so glad that we did because even to this day I still receive emails, social media, direct messages about women also suffering from endometriosis and not knowing what to do about it or not knowing who to talk to. Obviously, I'm not the right person to talk to, and you do need to go see a professional, but it is amazing how much that moment, which I think was in 2017 or something, you know, that has essentially changed the trajectory of the last eight years for me and has shaped a lot of conversation about being much more open about that discussion.

Sinead:

Once again, a gateway is starting a conversations.

Emma Watkins:

Like I'm not the actual professional, I'm just a very good intermediate. You know, like all trains change here. That's that should just be my middle name. All trains change here. All aboard, all aboard, come on board, or you need to go to that station over there.

Sinead:

Well, to the person who the blue wiggle described as the Albus of Children's Music. The Albus of Children's Music, Emma. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we look forward to coming to your concerts, and when we're not at your concerts, dancing around to your very catchy tunes in our homes. Thanks, Emma. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Emma Watkins:

We can't wait to see you at the show, and yes, you can listen to Emma Memma anytime.

Mylie:

Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Love of Play. And a big thank you to Emma for her time today. For the Love of Play is a podcast produced by Playgroup Victoria. This episode was hosted by me, Miley Naundorf. Sinead Halliday was my co-host, and as always, Sinead conducted our interview today. The episode was edited by Jonathan Ravette. Music was performed by Selena Byrne. This was the third episode of season one. In episode four, Sinead speaks with TV presenter, journalist, and author Paul Kennedy. We hope you can join us for that conversation then. Before we go, if you're interested in finding out more about Playgroup, head over to our website www.playgroup.org.au. And if you're in Victoria and you've got little ones and you want to go to Playgroup, take a look at our find a playgroup page, www.playgroup.org.au forward slash find. Cha cha cha.