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 speaks, the bell-ringer, the one who touches and the one who observes.
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”. 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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