Hand and Sky Project

An exercise in Collaborative Composition

A score drawn from autism practices through

Repetition and Change

The Hand and Sky Program is an experiment in performative enactments between children on the autistic spectrum and parents, family members, allies and friends.

It offers a mode of practice that avoids overwhelm and allows the play to continue. However it is not just a safety-net. In the process of this practice we have found it to engender powerful and unexpected aesthetic patterns which are valued by all. In this sense it is a tool which could be shared with dancers and actors as a real-time compositional score which offers up fresh material.

A description of the sessions with autistic children, family and friends

We begin where we are- the child moving freely in a clear space with some objects to the side. The child discovers what these can do in simple manual interactions in any way she/he pleases.

Family, allies and friends sit on cushions on the outskirts to this mid space.

We have well known roles which we share and swap between us by agreement. They are modalities- single strands of heightened experience towards hearing, seeing, speaking, touching and being silent. There is also a bell ringer to highlight exceptional moments as if from the vantage point of the child. We do not double up or cascade into these modalities, at least not in the beginning. The one who speaks- describing the motioning of the child- only speaks. The one who observes only does this. The one who touches- creating a warm anchoring point with the open palm of their hand on the child’s back, foot, arm or head does only this. The bell-ringer is concentrated only on bell-ringing.

The child is the link-piece moving between objects, people, furnishings, window, carpet and floor. They are the care-taker of the space, the gardener, the cook.

Out of the spaciousness and timing that comes from this score, the child learns to link objects and people together. It is a long playing memo, winding and unwinding through each occasion- repeating, updating and recalibrating the pattern of the room. This is the space including all the objects, people, temperatures, moods and outside conditions- traffic, bus routes, shop visits, pollination count and time of day, month, year.

Out of the continual re-visits, an accumulation of sense and perceptual impressions are filed and held in abeyance- in continual contrast and counter-point to one another.

There is a musical element too. Underlying the roles is a cyclical melody that may come and go, to weave together the textures of the roles. It is the flow, the sea, the undulating grassland with sudden rises and falls like mountains and valleys. It is played live, by guitar, voice or any other trusted instrument brought into the room. It is a journeying.

All the roles including the textured music, come and go. Gradual accumulations amount and dissipate as the child touches back into consistent themes that interest him or her; of stopping and starting, hiding and tumbling, of going up and down on the furnishings, in and out of sight and of circling into spins that suddenly collapse as their body falls to the ground, then jumps up again. There are casual visitations and avoidances at all times. All these things are the chorography which the circle of attendants attend to, sometimes joining and sometimes simply noticing or missing through a moment of absent-mindedness, what is happening.

The child becomes adept at cut and paste, inviting participation and an up-tick in playful encounters, so that friends and relatives are invited in to the themes of up/down, in/out round and round, to pick up, spin, put down or en-wrap and rock the child. There is always the possibility of a break, a cut, a temperance, a shift in gear from engagement to resting apart. Waiting is the wild card. This our shared time-piece even in impatience as we wait in the repetition and let it slowly affect us; change us.

The roles my begin to overlap, nudge and span over one another. They act like windows that hold a colour or a design that morphs and inclines through one another until a rich aura begins to bloom- becoming the space we are in, not simply a looking glass. It is a garden waiting its turn, let in from the outside; the inside becoming nursery. We are all in the glass-house.

So the roles, the capacities and limitations these bring up, begin to be held collectively as a playlist that echoes into one another. The separations begin to blend. These are enacted by the child who lights these memory traces by use, refreshing them. They are cards that continually shuffle until nothing is ever flat again. Through duration they grow thick, slipping into one another becoming porous, riveted with pock marks, effervescent and humming with all the repercussions of those distant associations. Yes we are cherishing the ancestors in the here and now.

The roles are always collectible, reducible back to their theoretical states of purity. Separated out again and assigned anew to the people in the room. That is why they can be mixed anew each time in the concrete situation as it unfolds where they are never estranged, always mixed and in association. Neighbourly if not friends.

Application in performance scores with dancers, musicians and actors

In a score that draws on the clarity of these roles in the midst of the child, a group of artists can try them out between them, including that of “child”. It may be that there could be several “child” players all at once which I will call “actors”. People can elect themselves or others into the roles of actor, the one who observes, the one who speaks, the one who touches, the bell ringer and the musician and so by a form of co-witnessed democracy it is the composition that takes precedence over roles and people who are in fleeting yet secure constellations.

This is the idea of a score that begins with constraint and structure as a route into openness and complexity. It is singular and multi-layered, simple and entwined. We are no longer bounded selves. We are flavours, colours, moods and tendencies. These come and go. The cycles between action and rest, tension and release, crescendo and dissipation informs our participation investing and dis-investing energies that run through us like lightening, animating and putting to rest one affect after another.

In the score for artists, we can do away with the objects or use just some of them and participate in the space, contours and surfaces of the room. All roles and dispositions are interchangeable through transaction but cannot be accumulated into one person at one time. This keeps a spaciousness to change viewpoints and roles and so an attendance to what is occurring.

Space/place/

Choose a quiet space with windows, with soft mats, some slidy floor space and cushions.

*Objects used in children’s sessions have included slinky coils, tactile pin sculptures, wooden bamboo sticks, rope, fabric, wooden utensils, teapot, baskets, dolls, tents, gym balls, xylophone, shaker, thumb piano and drum. This is not a conclusive list.

Note:

Musical scores can be adapted to leave pauses where the speech modality is put on hold and percussive sounds take its place or verbal counting. Choruses can also be introduced by the musician who can invite all witness-performers to join an ensemble with the main theme of what is occurring as noted by the speaker. This chorus will cycle for as long as the musician deems it satisfying and then on a second break with a count and/ or percussive intermission, the chorus will be signalled to pause. When the descriptive speech comes back in it can flow like a rap over the low level musical riff until another break is signalled by the musician.

This is how the performance builds up in relation to the actions in the room, like an updated musical news story. The only necessity is that these news clips do not contain the opinions or suggestions of the speaker, only the descriptive and felt essence of the actions- stretching and folding, travelling and stopping, jumping and burrowing, leaning and falling etc.. In this sense the “one who speaks” is the less personal of all the roles. They are the tool of all that is occurring and do not hold the directive, only the choice of selection according to their viewpoint.

The modality of speech therefore has a place in pacing and syncing action but it is not the creative authority to the operations which flow and filter through from a deeper collective ground. It records these in an exercise of concentration and humility.

It is also a way to sidestep the tendency of choreography to be in a vaulted time-scape oblivious to the conditions internal and external that make it so on this particular day. Letting these affects into the room- affects that are always an accompaniment to the autistic sensibility, lets in the surprise in the midst of repetition. It lets in the setting- the space which is made by all as composition and in which gestures and sensibilities occur in and through the bodies’ present state.

Ruth Solomon