CONCEPT: How dance can affect the autistic child’s sense of self, and whether this is more beneficial in a segregated or integrated setting
PHILOSOPHY: Sparshott’s A Measured Pace: Toward a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance, supported by such thinkers as Havelock Ellis and criticised by Graham McFee
SOURCES: interviews with teachers, factual research on Autism, case studies on dance for Autistic children, secondary texts on dance such as Thomas’ Dance, Modernity and Culture, and secondary texts on special needs children and the arts such as Roberts’ Encouraging Expression: The Arts in the Primary Curriculum.
Thesis: As an individual experience, dance can be the most direct way for the autistic child to access the self; giving way to more stable connections with the world and others.
The most central emotion for an autistic child is fear. The autistic child’s communication difficulties and confused concept of self means fear is associated with situations where the child has to apply the self to the world and to others.
Sparshott’s philosophy of dance argues when dance is done for its own sake, the individual is ‘self-transformed’ into the dancing body.
The most powerful and significant outcome of dance as an individual experience for the autistic child, above all the other arts, seems to be the potential it has to unlock something within their mind. As Sparshott says, it is in the immediacy of dance that engages the individual in a self-transforming experience where the self is in absolute connection with the body.