Experiencing, a primal feeling!

School Years: Creative Experience

Topic: MDVI              

Patrick Meuldijk

Music teacher

Sensis Onderwijs Breda

Galderseweg 65

4836 AC Breda

Ph. 00 31 76 561 37 39

Ph. 00 31 165 39 30 21

e-mail: meuldijk@home.nl

Sensory perceptions, body-related experiences, consciously offering stimuli and paying attention to the tempo in which this takes place, together with sounds and music, form the basis of the experience projects. The experience activities that we do with the participants arise in advance from the combined play between the players. This introduction, together with the experience activities, render it into experience theatre.

As a music teacher working with children who are seriously handicapped, both visually and mentally, often with a motor handicap as well, I have noticed that music can be used as a tool to stimulate these children in all developmental areas. By now, this is an established fact in special care and education. The children can learn all kinds of skills in an easy way. Apart from the pleasure that they get out of singing together, clapping to the beat, making music with a tubular drum or doing listening exercises, children who have serious handicaps with regard to communication and motor skills, cannot learn musical skills. This will lead to frustrations in both the child and adult. The child will seclude itself from musical activities which will lead to less initiative in the area of making contacts.

Musical experience instead of teaching musical skills should be the basic principle for this target group. In other words: the emphasis should be on experiencing music during the music activity or music lesson: being tickled with a spider of wool while listening to a music fragment of André Popp, feeling the wind of a Spanish fan during a song about Santa Claus or letting the child feel the resonance of a singing bowl in a music activity as a preparation for Christmas.

Performing a musical with these seriously handicapped children and having them act like a water plant or sea anemone is going too far. People have good intentions when trying to give the children an impression of the musical business as they experience it, but because of the hectic nature of musicals, the spectacle is experienced by most of these figurants as if a bucket full of stimuli were poured out over them. Instead of enjoying they withdraw even further into their own world. They are not addressed at their own perception level and as a result, interaction in these chaotic circumstances is missing.

For children with serious handicaps, it is very important that activities are geared to the perception of their environment so that communication can be brought about.

On the basis of these experiences, I started to search for a form which allows these children to really experience, and in which experiencing music is an important part of the activity. No massive event such as a musical but working in little groups of 6 to 9 children in which they can join in experience activities in a relaxed way, activities which are geared to their own perception level and which contain a physical element.

In this way, “East wind” has been created. An experience project in which the wind is central and in which large fans, massage oil, incense and music form the setting. The participants - the children are actually participating - lie in a circle, all on their own mats. The experience activities take place around the mats and in this way, the participants become part of the setting.

The sound of the wind can constantly be heard and while the music is playing, a number of experience activities are carried out. After the greeting with cymbals and flute, the wind can be felt by the movements of the bamboo fan. Hearing the flapping of a spinnaker, feeling the wind and smelling the incense can be experienced individually and in the child’s own tempo. Rubbing a participant with almond oil and covering him or her with a piece of satin which is slowly pulled away towards the feet, are experience activities that stimulate the child to become aware of its own body.

The music for “East Wind” was specially written and arranged for this. The pentatonic scale and the timbre of trombone(s), flute, koto, xylophone and strings lend it the specific Eastern atmosphere. Specific parts of the arrangement are connected to the various experience activities. Since there are six to nine participants, this music motif is repeated a number of times so that each participant can undergo the same experience activity and can hear the same music fragment. Repeating these music fragments creates a certain rest so that the participants get the opportunity to get used to the music and to the specific sounds that are connected with the experience activities. So, five different experience activities means that there are five different music motifs following each other. The experience project lasts about 30 minutes.

The same principles of “East Wind” are used in the experience projects “Wet Rain” and “Hello little Sea Sun”. “Wet Rain” is an experience project about autumn in the forest. A thick carpet of 80m² of dried leaves and enormous branches that function as trees, allow the participants to experience the forest with all their senses. They experience the rain from close by through the use of a rainmaker and spray-gun. Of course, the little rain drops are brushed away by a feather duster. The music is arranged in the same way as in “East wind”. The melancholic atmosphere of autumn with showers and thunder storms are expressed in the timbre of the musical instruments and  the arrangement of the music.

In “Hello little Sea Sun”, it is the summer and the lively beach activities that the children can enjoy. Five m³ of playing sand where the bare feet are tickled by the sieved sand, lying on the towels, rubbing with sun lotion, listening to the ocean drum and caressing  the little cuddly sun are the ingredients for the experience activities complemented with the tropical sounds of cabasa, marimba and steeldrums.

As a “voice over”, the breakers of the sea can be heard. As opposed to the previous experience projects, this experience project has a simple plot. It is daytime and the sun is shining on the beach. Everyone enjoys the activities on the beach. In the evening the sun goes to sleep in the four-poster bed and it is getting dark. Then, it is night-time and you hear the breakers of the sea. The next morning, the sun wakes up and climbs into the air and there is a new day. This is visualised by the use of a halogen spot with a dimmer. With three music motifs, I sing a song that matches the plot of the story.

In these experience projects I missed the theatre aspect. I think you can only speak of experience theatre if this element is added. In the last project, “Dabberlappen”, the introduction to the experience activity is carried out in theatrical form. The experience activity, complemented with the experience activities of the participants, has been given shape in close co-operation with Lien de Vries, who designed the costumes for “Dabberlappen”. By using a co-performer, the possibility is created to achieve experience activities with the participants through combined play. Because of this, a touch of theatre is added!

In the experience theatre performance “Dabberlappen”, experience activities with pieces of cloth form the basis. The participants are plunged into a world of cloths by two rag doll players from an island called “patchwork island”. The addition of cartoon-like sounds, the cartoon-like music and the stylised setting give the performance a special and strange magic.