At the same time, it also made sense to have them from very early on in the rehearsal because that’s the only way to learn from them and test out ideas. At first I was a little surprised as I felt that we had not created things to show to them. We had different groups of young people on the autistic spectrum working with us in short bursts from the first week of the devising process. Watching Amanda Baggs’s “In my language” was also an eye-opening experience, and I am now reading the book “The Reason I Jump” written by a young Japanese autistic author, Naoki Higashida, that continues to open up my horizons and makes me think about the societies we live in. It is easy to fall into this though especially in a performance setting as the time we have is very limited and we will meet with young audiences we had never met before. I think this applies to everything in life, not only to this performance (including raising my own daughter!?) because as soon as we try to chase “the moment”, it stops becoming genuine.Also it raises the question of what is a meaningful interaction/collaboration for them. This was something that I had not really thought about before somehow, I had not thought about how autistic people are expected to adapt for others in their daily lives.Being in a performance space, experiencing a performance and being a collaborative part of the performance should be a situation where the autistic person isn’t having such expectations put on them.” “most autistic people are used to adapting for others constantly or being expected to.I resonated a lot with this idea because as an ex “hikikomori” person in Japan, this was one of the big factors to feel ok about myself again and live in/with a larger community of people.“creating a space where different ways of being hold equal value”.I don’t know what kind of expectations I was putting on myself already back then but I realised it made me feel more at ease about the idea of performing for/with autistic young audiences.“nobody does anything for no reason and you’re not always going to know the reason”.Things I found particularly helpful from Max’s notes were: I found the training with Max Alexander, a play worker and autistic consultant ( ) really useful and philosophically stimulating not only for working in this production. Throughout the process, we had various opportunities to familiarise ourselves with the worlds of the autistic young audiences we would encounter during the shows. I really appreciated this, and each time we had discussions I felt more passionate about it, and very happy and lucky being involved.
Ellie was always open to questions, suggestions and discussions. What I loved working with Ellie (our director) and all of my colleagues for the production was their enthusiasm and openness. Therefore, I found that working in the devised theatre really fun and felt that it was much closer to my intuition towards the way I would like to work. So I find the rehearsals and premiere of my work always incredibly intense and an emotional experience. I often work with a group of people, most of whom I had never met or worked with before. Usually the performers have about two 30-minute rehearsals with the composer present before the premiere of new work. If I am lucky, I get to have one or two workshop sessions with the performers/orchestras or have some email exchanges with them. As a composer, I normally spend many hours imagining, experimenting and composing by myself. It was my first time working in a devised theatre context.
In this blog, I would like to reflect back on some of my experiences throughout this journey. It has been such a rich, intense, joyful, heart-warming, eye-opening and colourful experience for me as a performer, composer, improviser and above all, as a human being. I remember the feeling of excitement when we all met on the first day of the rehearsal for “Sound Symphony” and imagining what we were about to create together. Here she blogs about her experience working on this theatre production for young audiences who are profoundly autistic. Shiori was composer and performer in Sound Symphony by Ellie Griffiths.