INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 38 No.

4, December 2013, 321–34

Imagining Otherwise: Autism,

Neuroaesthetics and Contemporary
Performance
Nicola Shaughnessy
University of Kent

Perspectives on the phenomenology of the autistic experience are presented

with particular reference to the imagination in autism and what may be
conceptualized as ‘neurodivergent aesthetics’. Drawing upon a research
project that explored the potential of drama as an ‘intervention’ in autism,
an attempt is made to de-mythologize the condition by challenging stereo-
types and by suggesting that the multimodalities of performance offer an
appropriate space for ‘encounters’ with autistic states of being while also
questioning the dualisms which distinguish between the aesthetic and
non-aesthetic.

keywords drama, autism, neuroaesthetics, performance

The blind spot in the cognition sciences of the 20th century is that we do not have
a method of properly accessing experience. (Varela 2000)
If a Martian spoke, would we understand it? Only if we shared or came to share
some ‘forms of life [. . .] That is precisely a problem for a person with severe autism.
But the evocative phrase, form of life, is never more than a pointer; we shall need
to be more specific about what is missing. (Hacking 2010, 196)
The enigma of autism, much discussed in cognitive science, presents
particular challenges to researchers seeking methods of accessing different
kinds of experience. In this study, I consider how the multimodalities of
performance can be used to engage with what is variously referred to as
‘atypical’ ‘neuro divergent’ or ‘neuro-cosmopolitan’ cognitive profiles.1
Autobiographical testimonies from high functioning individuals such as
Temple Grandin (1995) offer some insight into autistic perception, but autism
continues to perplex scientists because of the difficulties of engaging with a
condition which can be non-verbal and solitary in its manifestation. Autism
is most frequently defined in terms of ‘otherness’, as a state of being which
departs from social and behavioural norms and where the perception and
processing of relations between self, others and the world differs from the
‘neurotypical’. Conversely, the concept of neurodivergence has emerged as a
means of defining ‘atypical neurocognitive makeup’.2

© Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining 2013 DOI 10.1179/0308018813Z.00000000062

Published by Maney on behalf of the Institute
322 NICOLA SHAUGHNESSY

In this study, I offer new perspectives on the phenomenology of the autistic

experience with particular reference to the imagination in autism and what
I conceptualize as ‘neurodivergent aesthetics’. Drawing upon my experience
of a research project exploring the potential of drama as an ‘intervention’
in autism, I am seeking to de-mythologize the condition by challenging
stereotypes, by suggesting that the multimodalities of performance offer an
appropriate space for ‘encounters’ with autistic states of being whilst also
questioning the dualisms which distinguish between the aesthetic and
non-aesthetic.

Myths of autism
Autism is topical within both the humanities and sciences as a source of
debate, controversy and research enquiry. Increased rates of diagnosis
contribute to its prevalence as it touches more lives, provoking fascination
and fear. The powerful affect of autism as a cultural phenomenon is evident
in the controversy surrounding the MMR vaccine where anxieties concerning
a much disputed association between the injection, bowel disease and autism
is considered to have impacted upon public health. Although there is
no ‘cure’, a booming autism industry sells interventions in the form of
behavioural therapies, diets and drugs, and books are also big business.
Autism is part of popular culture: films such as Rain Man and the UK
National Theatre’s adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel about Asperger’s
syndrome (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time) are all indicative
of its topicality within the arts and humanities. In terms of cognitive science,
autism is also a dominant field of enquiry, associated with theory of mind
research and often discussed in conjunction with studies of empathy,
attention, intersubjectivity and emotion.
When we think of the multi-faced-ness of the autism spectrum we might
refer to savant representations in literature and film as well as contrasting
stereotypes associated with what is referred to as ‘classic’ autism: head-
banging, hand-flapping, self-rocking bodies, vocal gesticulations with
Tourette-type tics, self-stimulatory habits and unpredictable, disturbed or
disruptive behaviours. The autistic state is associated with isolation and
withdrawal from the social world; the container is a recurrent metaphor in
writing about the condition. Those with the diagnosis are locked in their own
worlds while ‘neurotypicals’ search for the key to open the doors to access
and understanding. Such metaphors are problematic, however, reinforcing
negative and ‘deficit’ models of disability and compromising personhood by
reducing individuals to a condition. Thus autism continues to trouble and
excite as a state of being which is pervasive and perplexing. Theory of mind
is often discussed in conjunction with autism as the condition is considered to
cause difficulties in understanding and interpreting the perspectives of others.
This is, however, a two-way mirror as ‘neurotypicals’ are also encouraged to
demonstrate theory of mind, to engage imaginatively with autism and to try
to perceive from the perspective of the autistic other.
In ‘The beautiful otherness of the autistic mind’ (2010), Francesca Happe
and Uta Frith ask ‘what can science tell us about autistic savants’ (xi),
discussing the well-documented predisposition to scientific and artistic talent
associated with autism. Here, I look at a related aspect and consider what art
can tell us about autism with particular reference to performance as a mode
of neurodivergent expression.

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My discussion is informed by speculations emerging from a practice-based

research enquiry. Imagining Autism is a UK-based interdisciplinary project
using interactive, multi-sensory, immersive installations, in conjunction
with play-based performance, puppetry and digital media as a means of
facilitating language, attention, empathy and imagination for children with a
diagnosis of autism.3 The methods used challenge the behavioural and skills-
based emphasis of traditional interventions, emphasizing autonomy and
authorship, and a licence to play creatively (often overlooked post diagnosis).
As a proof-of-concept study, we are seeking evidence that participatory
performance can address the ‘triad of impairments’ (the current diagnostic
criteria for autism) through activities that develop communication, social
interaction and social imagination. The research, moreover, is leading to new
understandings of the imagination in autistic children: how it is differently
inflected from the neurotypical child and how it might be shaped by
environmental and cultural contexts.
Although the nature of the research is experimental, with a relatively
small sample group (twenty-two children), it offers credence to theories from
cognitive neuroscience concerning the ways in which the brain processes the
world and how this might be different in autism (Frith 2003, Baron-Cohen
1995, 2009). This has crucial implications for the cognitive processes involved
in perception, play and imagination. As Bruce Mills has suggested, ‘the
nature of play- and its symbolic and imaginative dimensions-might vary in
relation to the particular manner in which the “player” processes the world’
(2005, 118).

Neurodivergence and difference

Autism is increasingly defined in terms of difference rather than deficit, with
Simon Baron-Cohen suggesting that we redefine the terminology and refer
to autistic spectrum condition in preference to autistic spectrum disorder,
recognising that some of the differences which characterize the non-
neurotypical individual are in fact abilities (2009). Discussion of autistic
poetics, however, risks exoticizing the otherness of autism, celebrating
differences that also present considerable difficulties to the person with a
diagnosis for whom communication and social interaction are considered
‘disordered’. The struggle to engage with and understand neurotypical
languages, codes and conventions perceived by many as foreign territory
is evident in the numerous autobiographical narratives produced by high-
functioning autists. Moreover, there is a risk of voyeurism associated with
what Roger Cardinal describes as ‘outsider art’ (1972, 1994, 2010), protesting
against a tendency to perceive the work as interesting in the context of
the artist’s biographies and/or symptomology rather than appreciating its
distinctive aesthetic qualities and integrity. In his discussion of autistic art,
Cardinal comments on the beauty of ‘strangeness’, the ‘detail’ and ‘delight’ in
Gregory Blackstock’s drawings: ‘here, we confront the reproduction of objects
that bear witness not so much to the proliferation of things in the actual
world, as to the artist’s alertness in noticing and documenting all the aspects
of difference that distinguish them’ (Cardinal 2010, 189).
This attention to detail (associated with gestalt perception), the appreciation
of distinctive and unusual properties and qualities in objects (making the
familiar strange) are key features of autists’ engagement(s) with their
environments. Attuned to sensory explorations of the world around them,

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their mental architecture is differently configured to normative neural

structures so that they draw upon atypical and non-habitual combinations
of visual, auditory and bodily modalities in making and using meanings and
feelings (Gallager, 2004). As Happe and Frith have observed, the difficulties
autists have in processing, contextualizing and interpreting social situations
may predispose them to ‘true’ originality (2010). As autistic individuals
interpret and respond to experiences as they occur, often without
preconceptions or recourse to priors, their perspectives are fresh and
unencumbered.
The landscape I have explored in my encounters with autism has,
moreover, felt strangely familiar as a consequence of my previous work on
Gertrude Stein’s theatre and Robert Wilson’s productions of her texts.4 This
has contributed to my formulation of the concept of the neurodivergent
aesthetic as a phenomenon which has synergies with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s
conceptualization of ‘postdramatic theatre’ and the categorization of
performance art developed by Anthony Howell and Fiona Templeton (1976).
Lehmann differentiates postdramatic theatre and performance from the text-
based, illusionist dramatic tradition: ‘dramatic theatre proclaims wholeness
as the model of the real. Dramatic theatre ends when these elements are no
longer the regulating principle’ (22). Crucially, his thesis is predicated on
changes in perception which, he suggests, are affected by the pervasive
influence of media technologies, shifting theatre beyond text into mediatized
visual and aural cultures so that ‘a simultaneous and multi-perspectival form
of perceiving is replacing the linear-successive’ (2006, 16). As Lehmann’s
translator, Karen Jurs-Munby has summarized:
Lehmann sets out to find a language for the new theatre forms but does so by
systemically considering their relation to dramatic theory and theatre history,
including their resonances with (and divergences from) the historical theatre avant-
gardes[. . .]He systemically considers the new theatre aesthetics in terms of their
aesthetics of space, time and the body as well as their use of text’. (1)
Lehmann’s theoretical model has synergies with the practical approaches
developed by Howell and Templeton during the 1970s, which are the basis
for our practitioner training methods in the Imagining Autism project. In
Elements of Performance Art (1976), a series of exercises are organized into
categories which correspond to and anticipate the postdramatic paradigm;
namely: ‘conditions, body, aural, time/space, equipment, manifestation’.
The remainder of this article uses these categories to explore the relationship
between contemporary theatre practice and a neurodivergent poetics.

Neurodivergent aesthetics in theatre and performance

Although the terminology of the postdramatic is most readily identified with
Lehmann’s thesis, it has appeared elsewhere, most significantly in relation
to Samuel Beckett’s work, which has also been discussed in terms of autistic
aesthetics (Glastonbury 2006, Mooney 2010). Sinead Mooney uses the term
‘post-drama’ to refer to Beckett’s late work in theatre: ‘Rather than making
revelations, they operate via truncation, repetition, concealment and
circularity; in all, the protagonists appear strangely onstage “not quite there”,
“slightly off centre”, asking questions about theatrical power and authority’
(Mooney 2006, 66–7). There are synergies with autism as well as the
postdramatic in this description in terms of language, the body and attention.

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In Beckett’s work, synaesthesia and prosthetics feature prominently,

challenging and transforming our conceptions of reality and artifice.
Similar linguistic and visual elements are features of Wilson’s postdramatic
aesthetic and, moreover, derive from his experience of working with the
neurodivergent imagination through his adoption of the autistic teenager
Christopher Knowles. As Jonathan Harvey says in his commentary on
Wilson’s ‘protolanguage’, ‘the words themselves are meaningful but the
meanings are totally uninteresting. The point of interest lies in something
underneath the words, portrayed by “musical” prosody, movement and
gesture’ (2011, 181). Wilson’s productions of Beckett’s Happy Days (2008) and
Krapp’s Last Tape (2009) use similar performance vocabularies in terms of
language, scenography and physical work to make the familiar strange. In
Wilson’s theatre, according to Giusepe Frigeni, ‘the performer doesn’t represent
but presents himself in frictional confrontation with the scenic apparatus and
character’ (2011, 207). The visual element, so frequently foregrounded in
discussions of Wilson’s theatre simplifies the complexity of Wilson’s work
which, as in autism, involves divergent and multiple sensory perspectives:
it is not theatre of images so much as ‘theater of perceptive strategies’,
Frigeni suggests. The responses of the autistic participants to our various
environments (forest, sea, space, undercity, arctic) were almost invariably
sensory, differently inflected according to the individual’s unique profile.
As Hacking contends: ‘the “inside the mind” metaphor is problematic, ‘as if
“the autistic mind” were a species of mind [. . .] Mukhopadhyay is dominated
by sounds. Tammet sees abstract objects in colour’. Although it is possible to
identify features which proliferate in autism, the spectrum, as the metaphor
associated with the condition is multi-coloured and multi-dimensional, with
‘greater sensory perception in ASC across multiple modalities’ (2009, 1381).
Although dramatic theatre might be seen to represent normative
consciousness and perception, in Wilson’s theatre there is no sense of interior
subjectivity (which requires ‘theory of mind’ to generate meaning) and
no requirement to engage in the conceptual processes we associate with
narrative, character and the ‘traditional’ perceptual experience, where
‘the interactions between spectator and performers are modulated by
our conscious reception of everyday experience that creates a personal
understanding of the characters and the situations in which they are involved’
(Di Benedetto 2010, 113).
Wilson’s understanding and creation of different perceptual experiences
may also stem from his early work with brain-injured children: ‘whose motor
skills he aroused with endless patience by simple means — hold chalk to
paper and slowly, slowly, eventually draw a line, splash paint over
newspaper-covered floors and walls, crawl inch by inch’ (2007, 4). This is
‘action in perception’, as the children developed sensory motor understanding
through physically and creatively engaging with their environment (Noe
2004). It has also been suggested that ‘development of perceptual and
cognitive abilities is enhanced in correlation to a greater amount of crawling
and mobility in infancy’ (Thelen and Smith 1995). Thus, Wilson’s crawling
on all fours as part of a picture-making process demonstrates understanding
of the relations between the body, movement, cognition and perception.
Cognitive theory suggests that we make meaning, conceptualizing identity
and subjectivity through a series of primary metaphors whereby ‘spatial
relations’ and ‘bodily action’ schemas are fundamental to our understanding
of ourselves and our experiences. As McConachie and Hart explain in their
overview of cognition and performance: ‘most cognitive scientists would

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agree that language has a role to play in the construction of thought, but
its role derives from the embeddedness of language in the workings of the
mind/brain. . .in the making of meaning’ (McConachie and Hart 2006, 3).
In contrast to the low-arousal learning environments recommended for
autism, participants in this project, responded in surprising ways to highly
stimulating multi-sensory experiences. Working as co-performers in
participatory performance, we discovered new languages, new insights into
the imagination, new perspectives on the relations between self, other and the
world and new understandings of how these are processed in autism.

Space and time

Perceiving differently involves an engagement with the environment borne
out of atypical developmental patterns. This has implications for the
perception of space and time in autism. The detailed processing style
associated with autism and the ‘enhanced perceptual functioning theory’
(Happe and Frith, 2010) involves the ability to process local detail so that,
for example, Christopher Knowles is reported to have been able to walk into
a theatre and identify how many chairs were in the auditorium instantly.
The majority of people with autism perform better than neurotypicals on
picture pattern visual tests whereby shapes, objects or words are hidden
against a complex background. The connection between this mode of
detailed perception and Wilson’s postdramatic theatre spaces which are both
systemizing and imaginative are evident in Lehmann’s account, which refers
to the ‘sculptural precision’ of his staging, his use of framing, tableau and
ceremony as part of an aesthetic which challenges the homogeneity of the
mirroring structures of dramatic theatre:
The actors ‘sharing’ the stage often do not even enter into the context of an interac-
tion of any kind [an autistic feature]. And the space of this theatre, too, is discon-
tinuous: light and colours, disparate signs and objects create a stage that no longer
signifies a homogeneous space: frequently Wilson’s space is divided ‘into stripes’
parallel to the apron of the stage, so that actions taking place in different depths of
the stage can either be synthesized by the spectator or be read as ‘parallelograms’
so to speak. (Lehmann 2006, 79)
This non-mimetic scenography requires new modes of theatrical perception,
described by Lehmann as a ‘different kind of seeing’. Wilson’s work
challenges the perceptual boundaries between subject and object, artist
and audience, demanding a form of participatory spectatorship.
Within the postdramatic space of Imagining Autism (the portable pod) we
find the dynamic Lehmann describes: the moments of ‘shared energies instead
of transmitted signs’ (2006, 150). The immersive environments facilitate a
‘level of commonality’ between performer practitioners and participants. The
environments offer a space to explore, play and to hide. The children are free
to move inside and outside, bringing the space to life through their physical
interaction and experiencing themselves ‘inside of a time space’, to use
Lehmann’s terms. Spatializing in performance art might involve spectators
spending ‘the whole of the performance walking around the performance
space, catching aspects of as many different dramas as there were points
of view’ (Howell and Templeton 1976, 10). Our approach works with these
ideas whereby ‘performance is the action of art’. Many of the participants in
Imagining Autism seek a sense of the whole space initially and explore its

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parameters before finding a focus and developing a personal choreography.

Emily, for example, was a nine-year-old girl in a school for children with
profound and multiple learning difficulties.5 She had very limited language
and her engagement with our environments was initially physical and
sensual. Thus on entering the ‘Arctic’ (a bare white landscape, with an icy
pond, paper snow and an interactive polar bear, snowman and penguin),
she threw herself onto her back in a star-shaped position, experiencing the
environment upside down. In the ‘Space’ environment, Emily interacted with
her shadow against a projected moon, waving both arms above her head and
slowly swaying in relation to the visual stimuli before her voice emerged as a
chanting andante: ‘picnic on the moon’, [pause], ‘in out of space’, and another
pause before the repeated phrase with a slightly different intonation but
identical beat: ‘picnic on the moon’.
Spatial and temporal dimensions are intimately connected through practices
whereby ‘performance art [makes] enquiries about the nature of space and
the nature of time’ as part of the process of perceiving differently (Howell
and Templeton, 12).
‘Without time there is no space’, Wilson reminds us, referring to Einstein’s
relativity theories: ‘for me, a horizontal line is space, and a vertical line is
time [. . .] it is this cross of time and space that is the basic architecture of
everything’ (2008, 25). In Beckett’s plays, similarly, the interplay between
time and space is part of their postdramatic aesthetics contributing to the
spectator’s experience of ‘presentness’ in the moment. Happy Days has
been described by Albright as ‘a parody of good Aristotelean practice’,
demonstrating unity of place by virtue of Winnie’s immobility, unity of action
as nothing meaningful or consequential actually happens, and unity of time
through the liminality of the two clock systems Winnie struggles to mediate,
creating the chronology of a continuous present (2003, 74). This temporality
is a contributory factor to the landscape of performance art as discussed by
Adrian Kear: ‘the time of the present replaces representational time as the
currency of performance; performance becomes less an art of narrative
presentation than an art of being in the present’ (1999, 49).
In the autism environments, similarly, past and futures coalesce into the
presence of the present; a consciousness of being ‘in the room’ as part of
the blurring between the fictional world the participants inhabit within the
pod (and help to create through their interactions) and the reality of our
awareness of the process of making performance. We call this pretending to
pretend. This intermedial ‘blurring of the borderline between real and fictive
experience’ is also associated with the postdramatic aesthetic and involves
the fictive world becoming a continuation ‘apart and continuation of the
real theatre space’ (Lehmann 143). Liminal temporality is crucial, offering a
time and space in between neurotypical and neurodivergent realities where
encounters can take place ‘in the moment’.

Language/text
Lehmann cites Giorgio Barberio Corsetti’s thesis: ‘the theatre needs the text as
a foreign body’ (146). The autistic child’s relationship to language corresponds
to this; language is an artificial structure which the autistic child experiences
from the outside and struggles to embody. ‘Frequently’, Lehmann writes,
‘we are made aware of the physical, motoric act of speaking or reading of
text itself as an unnatural, not self –evident process’ (147).

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The non-semantic possibilities of words were a source of fascination to

Wilson. His creative engagement in linguistic experimentation and word
play is also a feature of autism and is evident in the writing of Christopher
Knowles, a formative influence. For many autistic individuals the semantic
meanings of words are of less interest than their phonetic qualities and
acoustic patterns. Autistic children often enjoy repeating words and phrases
even if they don’t comprehend the meaning (echolalia); and prosodic ‘deficits’
are a characteristic of the condition. Autistic individuals often respond to
language musically, developing particular kinds of intonation, enjoying
rhythms, repetition and alliteration. Many enjoy ‘nonsense verse’ while one
of the skills noted in autism is for rote learning of disconnected word strings.
Maria Shevtsova’s commentary on Wilson could be read as a summary of the
aural dimension of autistic creativity:
A Letter for Queen Victoria. . . . probably Wilson’s most exuberantly verbal piece, is
full of random sentences, odd collquialisms, grammatical errors, slipshod punctua-
tion and play with syllables that change according to changes of a letter in them
(‘HAP’, HATH’, ‘HAT’) and are repeated again and again. It has non-sequitur mon-
ologues and bits of dialogue, some of which are nonsensical, others like overheard
conversation and still others like trivia pretending to be formal speech. Numbers
replace characters. (2007, 12–13)
Words have the same status as objects in Wilson’s theatre, existing as part
of a ‘visual and spatial conception of language’. We encountered similar
relationships to language in our practical research. Whilst language was one
of the deficit areas the project was seeking to address, the vocal responses
of participants to the stimuli were sometimes extraordinarily creative. An
example was Matthew, who, to some extent, discovered his voice through the
microphone. Before the project, Matthew’s verbal repertoire was extremely
limited and confined to functional language (e.g. mum, juice, bed). In the
space environment, Matthew found the microphone and began a repeated
interaction, akin to theme and variation. He played with sound and voice,
enjoying the microphone’s reverb feature and interspersed this with a
repeated walking journey around the interior of the pod, inside and outside
in a circular progression (carrying his moon puppet). His vocalizations were
similarly repetitive, rhythmic and cyclical, becoming more extended and more
complex. His initial articulation played with sounds and pitch interspersed
with occasional recognizable words of which ‘space’ was the clearest. This
was a form of word painting, and the intonation sounded like descriptive
story telling even though the words were invented. As the sequence
progressed, the amplified sound became more dialogic in terms of rhythm
and tone, with a sense of turn-taking between voices and registers. In many
respects, the language was musically structured; repeated phrases emerged
and were played with through crescendos and rising registers. The
recognizable language increased as the thirty-minute sequence progressed
with phrases such as ‘I am in the world’ and ‘I see the world’ delivered to a
beat. ‘Place’ also emerged as a repeated word to rhyme with space. In the
‘Arctic’ environment, the following week, Matthew played with different
voices and appropriate recognizable jingles ‘Sponge Bob come back here’, he
repeated, developing it into a rap with the performers. Like Winnie’s bag of
quotations in Happy Days, Matthew’s voices were pastiches, using his
echolalia in a Beckettian fashion ‘negotiating a path around a (something) of
verbal tags’ (Albright 71). By the end of the project, Matthew was using found
objects (e.g. cardboard tubes) as pretend microphones and was experimenting

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with sounds through this as well as the microphone itself, and his language
base had extended considerably through creative borrowing and original
blending. Thus he entered the ‘Underwater’ environment for the second time
and set the scene: ‘Now I see the world, don’t let me forget the past’.
The autistic child often enjoys a relationship to language through word
play, nonsense, rhymes and puns. ‘Instead of a linguistic re-presentation of
facts’, in Lehmann’s postdramatic poetics, there is a ‘position of tones, words,
sentences, sounds that are hardly controlled by a “meaning” but instead by
the scenic composition, by a visual not text orientated dramaturgy’ (146).
Polyglossia is evident in autistic speech as children play with the sounds
of words, experimenting with noises, utterances and enjoying echolalia. This
typifies the objectification of language and texts as objects, speech as motoric
action and links to Lehmann’s autonomization of language and his concept
of the ‘body-text’. In Wilson’s theatre, similarly, we find the forms of
verbalization Matthew developed as a performer artist: ‘speech, its syllables,
and accents divided in unexpected ways, its running on and repetition, small
alterations that transform intelligible speech into noise, chains of phonemes of
which every now and then we catch an intelligible phrase’ (Lehmann, 33).

Body
The fourth aspect of postdramatic performance defined by Lehmann is the
body. ‘Theatre represents bodies and at the same time uses bodies as its main
signifying material’ (162). Lehmann stresses the importance of new energies
and gesture, making reference to autism: the body ‘becomes its own message
and at the same time is exposed as the most profound stranger of the self. . .
impulsive gesticulations. . .autistic disintegrations of form’ (163). Autistic
features can be physical as well as verbal, as is evident in an individual’s gait.
Allain Berthoz engages with this aspect of the condition and its profound
implications: ‘how is it possible to imagine that children can coherently
evaluate the people they see if they cannot evaluate relationships between
their own bodies and the environment?’ (2000, 96) The disengagement
associated with physical and verbal interactions in autism is attributed to
being ‘wired’ differently. Cognitive neuroscientists speculate that mental
simulation of movement through ‘mirror neurons’ is instrumental to
interpreting and understanding gesture and body language and hence
contributes to social cognition and intersubjectivity (Gallese, Berthoz, etc.).
Although the role of mirror neurons is a contested and controversial topic,
difficulty in understanding non-verbal behaviours and the body language
of others is considered to be central to autistic symptomology. Although
theatre is a medium through which social interaction can be rehearsed,
role play exercises and simulation do not necessarily facilitate embodied
understanding. In our experience, it is the materiality of the immersive
environment and its affordances which develop deeper levels of empathic
engagement. Movement and the body are central to this process. When the
children encounter Foxy (a larger-than-life masked performer, wearing a
padded fur coat with a long tail) they respond in similar ways, imitating his
swaying dance and moving eventually to taking his costume by reaching for
the mask. This will cue the performer to respond to the request by offering
the fur coat and dressing the child as ‘Little Foxy’. This sequence has to be
cued by the participant and has resulted in remarkable transformations as
the children embody the fox’s otherness and begin to move and vocalize

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differently, entering into role through the haptic experience of wearing the
costume (Trimingham, 2013).
The post-theatrical performance vocabularies of both Wilson and Beckett
involve particular modes of physical work and comedy, reflecting the shared
influence of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin (Krapp’s Last Tape opens with
a slapstick mime with a banana). The physical knockabout, turn-taking,
repetition and comic predictability of slapstick has been central to the body-
based features of Imagining Autism. Slapstick, we have found, is a means to
communicate and interact with even the most profoundly affected non-verbal
children who delight in understanding the rules of the game and being able
to participate. Comic interplay through body-based interaction is also a
means of facilitating understanding of the relations between self and other.
Slapstick requires theory of mind, to anticipate the responses of the other
and can also be used as a means of developing empathy, particularly if the
slapstick becomes hurtful.

Media
Lehmann expresses some concern about the role of digital media as an
emergent feature of the postdramatic: ‘will such an increasingly perfected
interaction in the end compete with the domain of the theatrical live arts
whose main principle is participation?’ (2006, 167) Imagining Autism uses
these vocabularies precisely for the purposes Lehmann identifies: to create
new meanings and understanding for performers and participants through
the creation and exploration of otherness. For one of our participants, the
relations between self and other were explored through his photography.
Harry, we speculated, insisted on authorship and was fascinated by our
cameras (mobile phone size flip cameras which were unobtrusive and
accepted as an integral feature of the environment). Harry had very little
language and associated behavioural issues. Self-expression was an area of
considerable difficulty and toileting accidents were a common occurrence for
this eleven-year-old. Harry’s first engagement with the environment (at his
insistence in the first session) was through the lens of a camera. He accepted
a stills camera, initially, moving to a video camera in the final week. He first
photographed objects, the play of light on a screen and his shadow in a
projection. As the author/artist, his photography framed his body as object
and subject (e.g. a picture of his hand making a bird shape, responding to the
stimuli within the environment). He moved onto direct others, shaping and
choreographing them (e.g. laughing and copying the dog who played ‘dumb’
to stage a photograph). In a particularly complex sequence, he directed the
practitioner documenting to copy the jumping of another practitioner, in
order for him to photograph himself photographing the photographer.
Media functions as a co-player within the environments, the equipment we
work with alongside the body, aurality, space and time as elements. Live feed,
microphones, lighting and sound interact with puppets, objects, found
materials and loose stimuli as a means of creating the transformations which
are the basis for new meanings. Seeing the self as other in the live feed aids
understanding of performativity; hearing the voice through the reverb of the
microphone is similarly a self reflexive estrangement strategy. Puppets serve
a mediating function, a means of communicating simply and emotively
through the not real. Objects are similarly used as in Wilson’s and Beckett’s
postdramatic theatres to transform, making the familiar strange, as in Happy

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Days where ‘each prop is altered so that its functional part is diminished,
while some conspicuous non-functional part is exaggerated’ (Albright 2003,
73).
Autism has been described as a ‘disorder of imagination’ whereby
‘impaired pretend play’ is a key feature in the development of the condition
(Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, 10). In our experience, however, the
imagination in autism is evidence of the originality Happe and Vital refer to
and is manifest across the spectrum (thus not confined to savant extremes):
It is notable that typically developing (TD) children lose aspects of originality in,
for example, their art as a result of acquiring stereotyped forms from their peers
(think, for example, of rays drawn on a sun or birds drawn as ‘ticks’), Without
doubt, the obligatory and automatic recognition of others’ mental states ,,,place
blinkers on most TD young people.[. . .]Thus, individuals with ASC are, perhaps
more able than TD individuals to think their own thoughts, regardless of what
others think. Whilst this contributes to originality, in the sense of a unique world
view’, however, it does not guarantee talent. (2009, 1370)
It is the ‘detail-focused cognitive style’ which Happe and Vital identify as
the ‘starting engine for talent’ (and which is associated with, but not confined
to autism). Crucially, they suggest, that ‘core components of ASC need not
be unique to ASC- since it is the combination of cognitive deficits and assets
that defines ASC uniquely’ (1373). This mixed or ‘spiky’ profile involves
perceiving each child as a spectrum (of difficulties, abilities and potentials)
necessitating flexible approaches to intervention. Hence the appropriateness
of the play-based and person-centred approaches we developed. Our
engagement in modes of play was crucial to the responses we elicited as this
is often neglected post-diagnosis in favour of skills-based and behavioural
approaches to ‘therapy’. The non illusory nature of the methods and materials
meant there was no fakery; the lighting and sound board was integral,
operated within the pod by a practitioner and participants were able to create
and recreate ‘special effects’ (e.g. nightfall, storms, hissing snakes or melting
ice). We sought to avoid recourse to stereotyped responses (e.g. association
with Disney and the naturalism of children’s film and television). The large
masks and oversized costumes worn by some performers were complemented
by pastiche styles of performance as well as the ‘not acting’ techniques of
non costumed performer/facilitators. Participants delighted in creating the
incongruous juxtapositions we associate with Beckett and Wilson’s aesthetics,
using found materials and loose elements in highly imaginative and unusual
combinations. We also observed a tendency to incorporate elements from
previous environments into new ones as participants sought pleasure in
memory and repetition. Thus the storm experienced underwater was
triggered in space (accidentally or deliberately by Harry at the soundboard)
and participants spontaneously followed the cue improvising with bubble
wrap. In a similar incident in our under the city environment, the siren which
triggered a blackout (marking the transition into free play where practitioners
play dead) prompted one of the children to exclaim ‘melting, melting’ as they
relived the ice collapsing moment in the arctic environment.
In ‘Toward An Outsider Aesthetic’, Cardinal suggests ‘the appeal of certain
artworks might lie in their capacity to inspire a fantasy of participation
whereby the viewer imagines joining in the very processes of their making’
(1994, 35). This perspective on visual art anticipates the turn to participation
in contemporary art forms (to encompass performance) and is also highly
pertinent to the participatory aesthetics discussed here. As process-based

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332 NICOLA SHAUGHNESSY

performance, our work is situated in a third space in between making and

performance, challenging the distinction between the aesthetic and non
aesthetic in its form and content.

Conclusion
For Erika Fischer Lichte (2008), the ‘transformative’ potential of performance
lies in its capacity to trigger liminal and embodied experiences: ‘Essential to
this project and to the shift from art object to art event, is the collapsing of
binaries, headed by that of subject and object, or in the case of performance,
spectator and actor’ (8). Fischer-Lichte seeks the meaning or purpose of
performance in what she calls its ‘specific aestheticity’, and which she defines
in relation to ‘autopoiesis’, a term used to define and explain dynamic living
systems which are self perpetuating and interactive. For Fischer Lichte, this
conceptualizes the feedback loop between actors and spectators, producers
and products, collapsing the binaries between subject and object in the shift
from art to event whereby ‘perception turns into an entirely emergent
process’:
The more frequent the perceptual shift between the arbitrary order of presence and
the purposeful order of representation the more unpredictable the entire process
and the more focused the subject becomes on perception itself. In the process, the
spectators become increasingly aware that meaning is not transmitted to but
brought forth by them. (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 150)
This is extremely pertinent to our experience of working with autism as the
participants increasingly recognized that they were performers and authors,
that we responded to their cues and they were at liberty to improvise and
play. Thus Harry’s photography, like the theatres of Wilson and Beckett,
changes the relations between subject and object, exploring ‘perception itself’.
This exploration of the sensory experiences and perceptual worlds of
autism through contemporary performance helps us to understand that the
relations between a neurotypical and neurodivergent consciousness are part
of a continuum, whereby the notion of an autistic spectrum is no longer
defined by any sharp separation from ‘normality’. Or, as Hacking concludes
in his discussion of autistic autobiography:
suppose we are less concerned with whether as a matter of fact the child did
understand, than with a form of words that represents how the autist felt, or seems
to remember feeling. If we took this point of view, we might come to judge that
less gifted autistic children and adults, who communicate very little, also under-
stand, in a quite specific way, far more than is evident to the outsider. If we were
to take this route, it would be a shift, perhaps a radical one, in our conceptions of
and relationships to individuals on the spectrum. (2010, 205)
Cardinal makes a similar point in his concluding comments on autistic art:
in due course we will find that aesthetic pleasure has begun to coincide with our
poignant engagement with another sensibility, another personality; at which point
art appreciation is revealed not as a peripheral supplement to human experience
but as a privileged medium of human contact itself. (2010, 193)
It is in this context that the neurodivergent aesthetic can be further
investigated, evaluated and understood as part of a new performance poetics.

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 IMAGINING OTHERWISE 333

Notes
1
See Savarez, R and E.T Savarez (eds) (2010)
‘Autism and the concept of neurodiversity’,
3
Disability Studies Quarterly, 30(1).
2
My use of the term ‘neurodiversity’ refers to the
atypical neurological profiles and characteristics
associated with autistic spectrum conditions
(and which can be distinguished from ‘neuro-
typical’ features). The term is also used politi-
cally by autism advocates: ‘neurodiversity
4
activists assert that their neural differences are
not pathologies to be treated or cured but
5
are alternative ways of being that should be
accepted as neuroequal’ (Mackenzie, R and
Watts, J, 2011: 27–36).
Imagining Autism is an AHRC-funded interdis-
ciplinary research project at the University of
Kent (Oct 2011–March 2014). Investigators:
Professor Nicola Shaughnessy (PI Drama), Dr
Melissa Trimingham (Drama), Dr Julie Beadle-
Brown (Tizard Centre), Dr David Wilkinson
(Psychology).
Shaughnessy, N (2007) Gertrude Stein. Plymouth:
Northcote House.
Names of participants have been changed.

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Notes on contributor
Nicki Shaughnessy is Professor of Performance in the University of Kent’s
School of Arts and is Director of the research centre for Cognition,
Kinesthetics and Performance. Her research and teaching interests are in the
areas of applied theatre, contemporary performance, dramatic auto/biography,
cognition and performance and practice based pedagogies. She has been
Head of Drama in three university departments has managed drama projects
in a range of educational, social and community settings (to include work
place environments). She collaborates with researchers from other disciplines
to explore the processes of making performance and its affects on
participants. She is Principal Investigator for the AHRC funded project
‘Imagining Autism’. Her current research explores the potential of
performance to engage with atypical cognitive states (to include autism and
dementia).
Her publications include articles on gender and theatre, auto/biography
and applied theatre. Her most recent book is Applying Performance: Live Art,
Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice (Palgrave, 2012) and she is editor
of a forthcoming volume, Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body,
Brain and Being. Other publications include Gertrude Stein for the Writers and
their Work series (Northcote House, 2007) and she is co-editor of Margaret
Woffington: in the Lives of Shakespearean Actors series (Pickering & Chatto,
2008).
Correspondence to Nicola Shaughnessy, University of Kent, Canterbury,
Kent CT2 7NZ, UK. E-mail: N.Shaughnessy@kent.ac.uk.

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 38 No. 4, December 2013