Enquiry

Human acts will be looped as repetitions until the background affective context shifts or creates a contrast that registers as difference. The practitoner, tutor, parent, therapist can act as this background context for an autistic child so that they act like the ground or wider field feeding in and mediating sensory spectrum shifts that create micro levels of interest and sensitivity, contrasting base sounds with high frequency sounds, "On" touch with "Off" touch, spaciousness and wider peripheral movements with direct contact and physical dynamic supportive lifting, spinning and  setting back down. Concurrently the practitioner can become a site for more and more subtle energetic connections- micro touching-in through alignment down the spine with the pads of ones fingers and core body support through open palms that warm but are undemanding and with no agenda of their own. Sounds and melodies crafted directly out of the moment by moment response and interest of the child can begin to manifest almost as leanings that go so far and then fall into a paralel harmonic or a counter rhythm. Where gaps and holes appear these may become moments for pause and quietude or invitations for the child to jump in and fill the gap furthering or intensifying the pattern in their unique way from within its very texture and through listening and atuning to the conditions of its arising.

In this sense there becomes a listening contact where mediation occurs across the threshold of the contact itself as the child leans in or moves away from touch contact, settles into positions or stances or melds and adapts around the seeking out or avoidance of particular areas in a room. The practitioner becomes simply a series of surfaces that respond as they prompt into a series of certain shadings as  an escalation or diminishment in the affective space between one to another, where a gulf is bridged, beckoning flight or is curtailed as phases demarcating a staccato or even an intake of breath back in to a wider movement.
All objects, surfaces, textures, sounds- whether in the room or beyond the room- as well as the child and practitioner- become actors in this ritualised dance between relative placements and intervals and this starts to draw the pulse of  the interaction into a momentum that begins to take on a life of its own.

A thinking body of material arises and is shaped in the process of its beckoning into something usable, playful and balanced lightly between a memory and repetition of what has gone before; a framework that holds fast as an idea or as a room, a garden, a backyard, and the bending, scuppering and reinvention of these guidelines in each new and fresh moment of interaction between living beings.