Imagining the Ecologies of Autism

Imagine a child who does not communicate verbally, does not engage in eye contact, meaningful interaction with their physical environment, families or peer group, and who apparently displays no imagination. Imagine a child engaging in repetitive actions such as rocking, hand flapping or spinning, seeking sensory stimulation through head banging and tasting non-edible items (pica). Imagine a child locked in their own world. This is classic autism, an enigma which continues to frustrate, frighten yet fascinate. Yet this condition is not ‘beyond remediation’ (Baron-Cohen et alia: 2009). This article is the story of a cross-cultural exchange, perhaps better described as a mutual imbrication, between the ‘neurodiverse’ community of autists and the ‘neurotypical’ communities most of us inhabit

War, Revolution and Design: exploring pedagogy, practice based research and costume for performance through the Russian avant-garde theatre

This article recounts an edited conversation that took place at the V & A symposium ‘Russian Avant-garde Theatre: War Revolution and Design’ held on the 24 January 2014, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name. Fashion historian Amber Jane Butchart (V&A and London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London) led Melissa Trimingham (University of Kent) and Donatella Barbieri (London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London) in a conversation discussing the relationship of Russian costume design with the avant-garde in early Modernism across Europe

Objects of humour: the puppet as comic performer

Many of the studies that explore the fascination audiences have with puppets have focused largely on the relationship between the operator and the object and the illusion engendered through performance. Those that attend to the issue of humour, such as Dina and Joel Sherzer’s Humour and Comedy in Puppetry in 1987, tend to address generic comic components of specific puppet practices, and only minimally engage with the more fundamental concerns about how the object may be viewed humorously by audiences. This article intends to bridge this gap in scholarship by exploring the similarities between spectatorship and humour in relation to puppet practices. Drawing links between the incongruities inherent within puppet forms, particularly those revealed through the juxtaposition of object and human operator, and theories of humour, I argue that there is amusement to be found in seeing the inanimate animated, which is similar to the pleasure found in incongruous humour. While not all puppets are used for comic purposes, my argument suggests that the fundamental collaboration required for an audience to appreciate a puppet performance lends the form a particular comic specialism which may help explain why, historically, puppets appear to thrive in comic contexts

The affective Bauhaus 1919: 2019

Bauhaus artists László Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer dominate the opening exhibition of the year-long celebration of ‘100 Years The Bauhaus’: ‘Licht. Schatten. Spuren’ (Light. Shadow. Traces) (Kunsthalle, Berlin, January 2019). The curators cite these artists as driving forces behind the contemporary visual art and performance pieces, many specially commissioned. This suggests that both artists demand a more nuanced appraisal 100 years on than they have hitherto enjoyed. Part 1 of this article re-evaluates the history of the Bauhaus ‘gestalt’ thinking in relation to creativity; part 2 asserts the absolute modernity of Bauhaus thinking within contemporary performance. The two artists’ work and ideas in every medium were so far ahead of their time that only now are their ideas able to be (if only partially) realised, exploited and developed to create a strong and affective art for the twenty-first century

Imagining Autism: Feasibility of a Drama-Based Intervention on the Social, Communicative and Imaginative behaviour of Children with Autism

We report the feasibility of a novel, school-based intervention, coined ‘Imagining Autism’, in which children with autism engage with drama practitioners though participatory play and improvisation in a themed multi-sensory “pod” resembling a portable, tent-like structure. 22 children, aged 7–12 years, from three UK schools engaged in the 10week programme. Measures of social interaction, communication, emotion recognition, along with parent and teacher ratings, were collected before and up to 12 months after the intervention. Feasibility was evaluated through 4 domains: (1) process (recruitment, retention, blinding, inter-rater reliability, willingness of children to engage), (2) resources (space, logistics), (3) management (dealing with unexpected changes, ease of assessment), and (4) scientific (data outcomes, statistical analyses). Overall, the children, parents and teachers showed high satisfaction with the intervention, the amount of missing data was relatively low, key assessments were implemented as planned, and evidence of potential effect was demonstrated on several key outcome measures. Some difficulties were encountered with recruitment, test administration, parental response, and the logistics of setting up the pod. Following several protocol revisions and the inclusion of a control group, future investigation would be justified to more thoroughly examine treatment effects

How to Think a Puppet

There is a growing awareness of the relevance of cognitive neuroscience to performance studies, but little attention has been paid to puppetry in this context. In an attempt to open up the field of puppetry to McConachie’s’cognitive turn’, a cognitive approach is here taken to Blind Summit’s ‘The Table’. The solo puppet protagonist Moses is described here as a ‘brain on legs’, a lively, funny and poignant figure who hovers on the brink of epic greatness but remains forever fixed to his table top. ‘The Table’ is analysed from three angles : firstly the use of environmental ‘affordances’ in James Gibson’s sense ; secondly kinesthetic empathy as described by Antonio Damasio, Shaun Gallagher et alia ; and thirdly,intimately linked to both, emotion. It is by virtue of Moses’s limitations that we are able to glimpse our own potential as human beings, richly embedded as we (and his operators) are in a world of limitless ‘affordances’ or ‘opportunities for action’ in James Gibson’s sense ; and able to grow cognitively and emotionally through our contact with others