Hand and Sky Project

BLOG PIECES WRITTEN BY RUTH SOLOMON

Practice-Research: Learning Together

Notes to New Trustees 

January 2019

Neurodiversity covers autistic spectrum, ADHD and dyslexia and can cover a wide range of experiences in communication and sensory processing. Some of its gifts include “thinking out the box”. Yet it can have mental health implications of sensory and/or emotional overload that to a greater or lesser extent can be incapacitating. My incentive for starting Memory Gardens was to figure out together, working models for thinking, learning, feeling in community, as layers of experience that evolve through shared practices over time. In this sense these practices do not cause overload because at a deep level of inner value, we experience them together- since we make them together- whether art-making, music-making, therapeutic touch as a practice of embodiment and movement/gesture. A lot of the project is about tuning our shared capacity to be present together- so as to be present to ourselves- whether we are verbal or non-verbal, or viewed by society as “High-functioning or “low-functioning". What can we learn from one another in company? 

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View from the Inside Outside

A Score for autism and beyond

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An exercise in Collaborative Composition through 

Repetition and Change

May 2025

The Hand and Sky Program is a practice 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 in the chosen room- 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.

(Objects have included slinky coils, wooden bamboo sticks, rope, fabric, teapot, baskets, gym ball, xylophone, thumb piano and drum. This is not a conclusive list).

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Family members -parents, cousins, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, carers, friends- or sometimes just a parent/carer are invited to sit on cushions around the edge. This includes the practitioner who is already seated on one of these cushions when the child and family enter the room. 

I will call all these people who begin seated on the cushions, "Attendants". We have well known roles which each person is invited to inhabit by the Practitioner and later encouraged to swap between them as they like.They are modalities- single strands of heightened sensate experience towards hearing, seeing, speaking, touching and being silent. There is also a bell ringer to highlight valued moments as if from the vantage point of the child. 

In the roles we take up, we inhabit only this role as long as we keep to it. We do not double up on these modalities. 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 somewhere specific on the child’s body 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 and the creative dramatist/mover.

Out of the spaciousness and timing that comes from this score, the child learns to pattern objects and people together. It is a long playing memo, winding and unwinding through each meeting- repeating, updating and recalibrating the patterning of the room throuogh all who take part in this.

Out of the continual re-visits and updates, an accumulation of sense and perceptual impressions are stored as possibilities in our shared memory- in continual contrast and counter-point to one another.

There is a sound element too and we can purposefully enhance this through rhythm, melody and song. We take notice of the accidental or background- which for an autistic child is never background. We notice the footsteps he/she makes across the floor, the rustle of clothes or fabric, the plonk of shoes taken off, the breath directed into utterance, the sounds reaching us from the corridor, the traffic outside, a bird tweeting through an open window, the wind, the rain. The musician/practitioner may engage by using these casual sounds. At first this is a rhythm, a pulse and a child will often pay close attention to this and begin to interact sonically with it, tapping surfaces, moving, stopping, listening and waiting for a reply. As this develops into something concrete and shared, the rhythm may be worked by the practitioner/musician into a cyclical melody riding on this  banter. This melody, through guitar, voice, flute or other means, may come and go weaving in and out of the textures of the individual roles; the one who touches, the one who speaks, the one who observes, the bell-ringer.

The Roles

The one who touches creates a specific point of attention for the child on their felt body. It is a still point which transmits warmth through the open palm of the hand onto an area on the surface of the child's body through their clothes or skin. It then reaches deeper into their flesh creating a rooting point through this still place on their back, chest, head, foot or any where that this attendant is drawn towards and is in reach.They are attentive to how the child leans into this touch or pushes off from it; to the breathing, muscular tension, sound-making and facial expression of the child. The touch is only active as long as the child engages with it. The connectivity between the hand of the attendant and the body part of the child creates a hinge where two bodies act as one. Through this hinge both child and attendant feel and feel back, understanding and fine-tuning each other's position. It is a method of deep orientation that describes channels inwards within the body through the fascia, flesh, bones and organs, and outwards into the performative space of the room as this is dramatized by the child. Sometimes this first still point of touch may lead to another chosen area as the child moves and adjusts their posture in relation to the touch. These points come alive to the child and may lead to more dynamic ways of supported touch through lifting, swinging, rocking and holding. But equally significant are the patterns of movement made throughout the room when the child is no longer in physical touch with the attendant. In a sense the brief moments of touch can charge and invigorate this proprioceptive patterning through the child's body which is a going forth into this shared space in many chosen and precise placements. The warming hand on their body from back to chest, to head, to foot to arm to fingers and so on is a micro sketch felt within, of this wider locomotion that they carry forward into the total space of the room.

The one who speaks, speaks about small incidents that come to their attention from their specific position in the room. This will be in relation to the child's engageent with objects- stretching, holding, putting inside, taking out, tipping, spreading, throwing, covering- and in their total bodily movement- across the floor, jumping, sliding, rolling, rocking from side to side, reaching and curling up. These are descriptive pointers told in such a way that the voice aligns to the speed and rhythm of the child's enquiries. They are word-sounds that at a certain point may cross more into the sound vibrations that the doing entails. The utterances may say and sound out the "plonk, rattle, squish, boing and thud" of the body and objects. Like the bell-ringer, these word-sounds have their moment of sounding and then a fade out, making space again for the actions of the child . 

The one who observes allows their eyes to soften so that they take in the total scene. They also listen, smell and sense the general atmosphere in the room. They are attentive of their own posture- the openness of their chest and their breathing and they maintain this opennness as much as they can whatever is happening in the room. Unlike the other roles they are not there to specificy unique events and highlight these moments. They are there to attend in a wide sense to the total goings on- the sounds, movements and comings and goings within a shifting landscape of engagements and intervals. The pulse they operate on is slow and even, yet even as their attention is outwards, their capacity to take in everything and not to react or do anything, rests on their own discipline to be attentive to their own interior body state. Their role is to carry this wider quietude within them not by what they do but by how they are. Should the child glance at them or approach them, they are of course available within their quiet role to smile, engage, hold and generally be attentive to the child. The child often comes to see this attendant in their role as a trustworthy witness. They may serve the function of ally, protector or someone who cares often because they are not involved in the intricacies of the procedure, but let things pass through.

The bell-ringer by contrast is involved in the grainy details of the child's practice as it unfolds. This attendant highlights a point of extreme interest for the child according to their manoeuvres. These are often moments of synergy and high charge in the handling of objects and their potential to go one way to an extreme and then to reverse. For instance, the bell may be sounded just as the child stretches the slinky to its full length and before this high tension is released into a buckling and contractive implosion. A child may use their total body to explore these moments of physical epiphany, in how they crouch within a basket and then jump up stretching their body upwards. It marks then a moment of change within the physical and kinaesthetic practices of body and objects within the space, from high to low tension or from low to high tension both in the body's state and in the performative showing. The bell follows this crescendo sonically through a point of maximal sounding to mark that threshold and then to fade out as this ringing dissipates back into silence. 

So this excercise of gradual attunement from many points of view and according to seperated modalities of perceiving, attending and registering, creates different time variables that all operate within the same score. 

The Child 

All the roles come and go to support and accompany the child in their probings. The child touches back into consistent themes that interest him or her on each visit- of stopping and starting, hiding and being found, of going up and down, expanding and contracting, of circling and reversing. The child performs casual visitations and avoidances towards and away from objects, areas in the room and people. These are always subject to change, reversal and review. All these are the choreography of the child. The attendants bear witness to this, participating at apt moments through the roles assigned to them or chosen by them.

The child becomes adept at bringing out themes from moment to moment, inviting participation and an up-beat in playful encounters. In this way friends and relatives are involved by the child more and more directly in the themes of up/down, in/out, round and round through short bursts of physical encounter. These may be duos or group scenarios involving the child and others in swinging, bouncing, falling and catching. In this way the attendants catch, hold, rock and swing according to the child's enjoyment in these activities. There is always the possibility of a break, a cut, a temperance, a shift in gear from embodied engagement to resting apart and from a crescendo of sounds and words to dissipation and pause.

As play continues and a demonstration of affiliation and co-partnering between the attendants is apparent to them and to the child, a relaxed atmosphere may develop where roles can begin to overlap, nudge and span over one another. They act like frames that morph and incline through one another until a rich aura begins to bloom. It is a garden set loose through cross-fertilization of all the elements so carefully held apart and tended at the beginning.

So the roles with the capacities and limitations these bring up as individual frames, begin to be held collectively. They begin to echo through one another creating a unique atmposphere which becomes a shared mood which is spacious and specific both in our felt bodies and in the room as the site for the play and for this tangible shifting interest. The child lights these frames up one by one, touching in on objects and persons; what they can do and how they can be. The roles then are like playing cards which continually shuffle. Over the time of the session and through the weekly sessions, they grow thick, slipping into one another, effervescent and humming with all the repercussions that run through them.

Where we need to simplify or remind ourselves of the specificity of our roles or to de-escalate an emotive charge that is felt as a tipping into overwhelment by the child, we may return to the cushions, clearing the centre-space for the child to take stock, rest or make a choice in the direction of their interest once again. In this way we can use this "rewind" technique to return to how it was at the beginning of the session. This gives us all space and time to reflect.

Application in performance scores with dancers, musicians and actors

In a score that draws on the clarity of these roles and their admixture, a group of artists can try out the roles between them; the one who sees, the one who speaks, the bell ringer, the one who touches and a practitioner-musician. They can also inhabit the active place of the “child” and it may be that there could be several “child” players known in this context as “actors”. The first set of roles is allocated by volunteering. After that, people can elect themselves into any of the given roles by approaching and touching someone’s shoulder. In this simple approach the two swap roles. It is the composition that takes precedence over roles that people fill and vacate in fleeting yet precise constellations. Change then is marked by a series of stances or postures in a shifting scene, bringing the performance on a little further in each new set of positions or roles.

This is the idea of a score that begins with constraint as a way to explore openness. It is singular and multi-layered, simple and entwined. In this score we become tendencies playing on and off of each other through the roles. It is the change in occupancy of these fixed roles and the different translations that each of these generate which is our embodiment/disembodiment at the same time as thresholds of change. There is a sense of levity after a role occupies us fully and then is let go of which allows us to savour it and to fully experience it in its bearing as a relationship with others. It spills passed itself, breaks free, and lingers in a transitional space. This can be a moment of spontaneous co-creation. It is the space itself holding the memory in multiple takes through this ensemble. Through these transitions, it sparks a movement of give and take that is parsing between us. It passes through us as a sense of contagion and of rapt attention made possible through our differences. We are carried on the wind of these comings and goings. This is our performance.

The actors entwine, break free, slam and absorb into one another finding momentum and stillness through proximity and distance with or without the objects that may become other actors in the room. How much of this can be spoken about by the “one who speaks”? Can he/she keep up with it or even register all of it? How do we select, edit, remember and forget as a description bound to fail and bound to throw up new scenarios?

Summary

This score is a way to side-step the tendency of choreography to be in a vaulted time-scape oblivious to the conditions internal and external that make it so. 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 and in which gestures and sensibilities become articulate through the bodies’ present state, moment by moment.

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