Performing Psychologies: Imagination, Creativity and Dramas of the Mind

Performing Psychologies offers new perspectives on arts and health, focussing on the different ways in which performance interacting with psychology can enhance understanding of the mind. The book challenges stereotypes of disability, madness and creativity, addressing a range of conditions (autism, dementia and schizophrenia) and performance practices including staged productions and applied work in custodial, health and community settings. Featuring case studies ranging from Hamlet to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the pioneering work of companies such as Spare Tyre and Ridiculusmus, and embracing dance and music as well as theatre and drama, the volume offers new perspectives on the dynamic interactions between performance, psychology and states of mind. It contains contributions from psychologists, performance scholars, therapists and healthcare professionals, who offer multiple perspectives on working through performance-based media. Presenting a richly interdisciplinary and collaborative investigation of the arts in practice, this volume opens up new ways of thinking about the performance of psychologies, and about how psychologies perform

Imagining Autism: Now I see the World

‘Imagining Autism: Now I See the World’ is a film emerging from the University of Kent’s AHRC funded project, in which an interdisciplinary team of drama and psychology researchers pioneered novel ways of interacting with this hard to reach condition and in so doing revealed new insights into what Francesca Happe describes as the ‘extraordinary otherness of the autistic mind’. As a dialogue between documentary film and participatory performance arts, Nicola Shaughnessy (Principal Investigator and Producer) and Sarah Turner (Film Maker) create a window into the imaginative world of autism and the perceptual experience of the participants. As an experimental film artist, Turner sought ‘to keep the documentary real, but to privilege the more feeling space.’ The project’s practical methods facilitated communication (verbal and physical), social interaction (with practitioners and peers) and imagination (pretence and play), the key diagnostic elements in autism. Multisensory scenic “environments” (e.g. forest, arctic, space) functioned as intermedial encounters; the film is similarly positioned between two worlds, a key to an alternative sensuality and a means of imaginatively walking in the shoes of the other. The sub-title (Now I see the World) comes from the words of the boy who is centre-stage, discovering his voice through the microphone and his mother’s testimony closes the film. The participants in the film are co-producers, working through improvisation and intensive interaction with specially trained practitioners. Whilst the impact narrative as reported in the New Scientist ascribes ‘value’ in terms of empirical evidence of efficacy (statistically significant improvements in language, emotion recognition, empathy and socialization), the film’s exploration of the affective journeys for participating children, teachers, and practitioners, articulates complementary perspectives, valuing agency, self-expression and aesthetics

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

Learning with labyrinths: Neurodivergent journeying towards new concepts of care and creative pedagogy through participatory community autism research

This paper arises from a UK research project, Playing A/Part, which explores the identities and experiences of autistic girls through creative practices and the implications for pedagogy. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project was an interdisciplinary collaboration using mixed-measures and a creative and participatory approach to co-produce new knowledge about this under-represented group. The research engaged 77 girls, aged 11 to 16, in a range of educational settings: Special Educational Needs, mainstream, and selective. The focus of discussion is the emergence of the labyrinth as a creative tool for learning and well- being and the implications for care and learning in neurodivergent contexts. After contextualising the study in relation to research on autism and gender, the paper explains how labyrinths offered an appropriate ethical, aesthetic, and sensory space for the creative pedagogic practices within the research programme. The paper also considers the implications of the study for higher education in terms of teaching neurodivergent learners, and research approaches to autism

Wreaking havoc: the feeling of what happens in Katie Mitchell’s Cleansed

This essay addresses three themes identified in the 'On Wreckage' volume through its focus on the staging of physical and psychological wreckage, the ethics and agency of spectatorship, and what might be of value in the embodied remains. The paper is drawn from my recent research on Katie Mitchell’s theatre directing and her turn to affective neuroscience, which shifted her attention to spectatorship: ‘It was no longer necessary for the actors to feel the emotions, now what mattered was that the audience felt them.’ Having experienced Mitchell’s controversial staging of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (2016, National Theatre), a performance that left me deeply affected and is described and remembered in terms of wreckage, I draw upon practitioner interviews and archive research to trace the composition of this creative carnage and its exploration of what Sianne Ngai refers to as ‘ugly feelings.’ Some audience members are reported to have fainted, assaulted by the escalating body mutilation. Critics refer to the play’s visceral power, but for many the catalogue of horrors was overwhelming, ‘a sense-numbing effect that outweighs its redemptive lyricism (Guardian)’. Mitchell, however, describes the play in very different terms as a ‘beautiful artefact’ and a ‘tender’ piece of writing. The acute detail of Mitchell’s realism contributed to the rawness of the sensations experienced, whilst the metatheatrical abstraction of Kane’s postdramatic style creates self-awareness and agency for the spectator, a consciousness of being present as a co-producer of meaning. I consider this in relation to Jill Bennett’s conceptualization of “critical empathy” which she distinguishes from “crude empathy” in her discussion of trauma and contemporary art. My discussion is informed by feminist, phenomenological and affect theory in considering the cultural politics of emotion, engaging with what emotions do and how they circulate as well as what they are. In this body of work there is a critique of accounts that emphasise positive and empowering forms of emotion at the expense of the “ugly” and an endorsement of the ‘need to think about how histories of injury stay alive’ as articulated by Sara Ahmed. This, I suggest is important to the value of the wreckage of Mitchell’s production. My account brings first and third person perspectives into dialogue in its form and content as, a witness to a trauma that was and wasn’t mine. In questioning what Antonio Damasio refers to as ‘the feeling of what happens’ I investigate the traces of what happened, how and why it matters

How to be a good supervisor: my top tips

In this short overview I offer suggestions for making supervision engaging, enabling and inclusive. It's all about agency and helping students to develop the confidence to steer their research. The work of a research supervisor is rarely in the academic spotlight, but what we do can make a world of difference to a new generation of academics and practitioners. My research interests in autobiography, participatory arts, and mental health have attracted increasing numbers of postgraduate students who identify as neurodiverse, leading me to develop creative and interdisciplinary approaches to supervision. In this piece, I have identified eleven top tips that could be used with any student, particularly if they are encountering difficulties in their approach to research

The dramatic writings of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, 1913-1962 : theatres of identity.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN003182 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Autistic phenomenology: past, present, and potential future

We are now at a transition point in autism conceptualisation, science, and clinical practise, where phenomenology could play a key role. This paper takes a broad view of the history of phenomenological perspectives on the autism concept and how this has evolved over time, including contemporaneous theory and methods. Early inquiry from a clinical perspective within the tradition of classical continental phenomenology, linked closely to the consideration of schizophrenia, is contrasted with emerging observations of child development and a period in the second half of the twentieth century of scientific inquiry into a behavioural autistic phenotype where there was little or no phenomenological aspect; a phenotype that has determined the recent scientific and clinical conceptualisation of autism within current nosology. We then mark a more recent reawakening of interdisciplinary interest in subjective experience and phenomenological inquiry, which itself coincides with the increasing prominence and salience of the neurodiversity movement, autistic advocacy, and critical autism studies. We review this emerging phenomenological work alongside a contemporaneous clinical phenomenology perspective and representations of autistic experience from within the extensive literature (including life writing) from autistic people themselves; all perspectives that we argue need now be brought into juxtaposition and dialogue as the field moves forward. We argue from this for a future which could build on such accounts at a greater scale, working toward a more co-constructed, systematic, representative, and empirical autistic phenomenology, which would include citizen and participatory science approaches. Success in this would not only mean that autistic experience and subjectivity would be re-integrated back into a shared understanding of the autism concept, but we also argue that there could be the eventual goal of an enhanced descriptive nosology, in which key subjective and phenomenological experiences, discriminating for autism, could be identified alongside current behavioural and developmental descriptors. Such progress could have major benefits, including increased mutual empathy and common language between professionals and the autistic community, the provision of crucial new foci for research through aspects of autistic experience previously neglected, and potential new supportive innovations for healthcare and education. We outline a programme and methodological considerations to this end

Neurodiverse Worlds: Articulating the Subjective Experience of Autistic Girls Through Music and Sound

Background: Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC) in women and girls are frequently under-recognised or misdiagnosed, as diagnostic criteria derive from observations of core behaviours of autistic males (Carpenter et al., 2019). An accumulating body of research supports a “female” autistic phenotype, where distinctive neurodivergent characteristics are masked by intentional imitation of neurotypical behaviours (‘camouflaging’) (Bargiela et al., 2016). Although a number of projects within autism research centre on benefits of participatory arts with relation to diagnostic criteria (deficits), far fewer profile/support qualities of autistic subjectivity per se (including lived experiences of autistic females), reflecting a medical rather than social model of disability. Aims: The study reported (a pilot project exploring the use of music, sound and movement as creative tools for probing the lived experience of autistic girls, together with their perceived value in negotiating everyday life) is part of a larger AHRC-funded mixed-methods interdisciplinary project, informed by an ecological approach, exploring the identities and experience of autistic girls through participatory arts (drama and media arts). The project’s overarching aims are to explore: 1) what participatory arts can contribute to understanding/ documenting the subjective experiences of autistic girls; 2) the role participatory arts practices play in enhancing psychological well-being; 3) how autistic experience can gain visibility through arts and media practices. Method: 6 girls with an ASC diagnosis (aged 11-16), from a specialist school (UK) for autistic girls participated in an 8-week workshop series (including ensemble music-making, foley and sound design, sound walks, multisensory den-making) led by two experienced arts practitioners (a music specialist and a physical theatre/movement specialist). Semi-structured interviews were conducted at start/end points of the project (analysed via inductive thematic analysis). Standardized baseline measures were collected at start/end points. (Social Self-Efficacy Scale (SSES); Creative Self-Efficacy (CSE); Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS); Healthy and Unhealthy Music Scale (HUMS))