As the school is on half term this week I have had some studio time to reflect on additional elements to introduce into our sessions. I am now thinking about the view of the audience when they watch the film and spinning plates from floor level at our upcoming event at Manchester Art Gallery. Could it be fun and another way of seeing to have something to look through like a tube or tinted colorful acetate? I played around with materials that where in my studio space such as metallic sheets and yarn cones that could be made into spectacles. I really enjoyed looking at the textured colours of the image at the end of a tube with the light being refracted back inside the metallic cardboard cylinder. There was a tube I had used in one of my last sessions that I wrapped around the outside with textured glow in the dark tape that was of interest to some of the children, which has got me thinking about inside and outside textures.
Thinking beyond these small frames I am now considering how the children and there families enter the performance space and leave. From my experience of working at Grange School with Sarah she introduces the work we will be doing before the children enter the space verbally and visually. Last week I attended autism awareness training for the arts session at Manchester Museum with Nadia Peters and Lorna Downer and one of the main points I took away from this was the importance of social stories for the autistic community by using images to introduce the sequence of activity for that day. This has got me reflecting on my responsibility as an artist to the people I am working with and how I lead them into a new, unknown space. In my performance practice I often use sequences although the communication process of visual stories is making me expand this sequence further beyond the studio to the other side of the door. How will people move from one space to another within the art gallery and through the visually busy hallways, which lead to the studio entrance? How can I incorporate this into the lead into the performance?
