The Polyphony of Gestures

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The polyphony of bodies, the polyphony of gestures, the polyphony created by the multitude of individual worlds brought together.

“We make room for the individual—whether a child with special needs or a neurodivergent adult—to become our guide in the care process, to lead us to a realm that only they can know. We gradually let go of the idea that we are the ones who know, and in doing so, we make room for new languages and methods of communication to emerge.”

(choreographer Alexandra Bălășoiu)

We give visibility and a voice to an invisible and voiceless community. Here, our bodies, our dance, and our touch can encounter the Other—who is different from our own logic. We create a space of resonance, attunement, and listening for children and adults with special needs, as well as for their families and caregivers. We allow ourselves to be guided and inspired by their needs and bodies.

In our relationship with these children and adults, a form of complete presence and total focus emerges:

We observe without directing, we follow the pre-movement, we laugh, we change the rhythm, we listen to the inside and outside of our own bodies and the other person’s body.

We thus seek other languages and other modes of communication, in which listening and expanding our perception become the first rule. Training the gaze means a state in which the cognitive and the verbal do not dominate, but in which everything we see is felt in the body of the observer.

Polyphony envisions a shared space where we encounter authentic connections born of unique languages. At the heart of this process, we seek harmony between the caregiver and the child, where this harmony lays the groundwork for connection, discovery, and learning together.

It can be interpreted in many ways: as a playground, a school, a method, a community gathering, or a performance. In recent months, during the C.R.E.S.C. sessions and workshops held with children and adults with special needs, we shared in the play, the joy, and the affirmation of what was present, and together we discovered new vocabularies, new possibilities, and a shared space where people with special needs, teachers, and students found harmony and broadened their perspectives.

During this time, we often danced and moved outside of conventional dance spaces: at the Faculty of Psychology, in special education schools, psychiatric hospitals, and foundations. In these places, we experienced embodiment, dance, and authenticity as an endless process of opening up to the unknown, to what had not yet been felt, and to a new field of interactions created together, in the present.

We ventured into uncharted territories that demand to be reinvented, prioritizing the body and the bodily experience of all participants—whether they are service recipients, caregivers, or family members. Together with the children and adults, we incorporated sensations, shapes, gestures, and sounds into this process.

We worked from the paradigm of subjectivity: each child with special needs was considered a subject—a vital force that gives meaning to the world through his or her own sensitive body, which is in relationship with and integrated into the community.

CONTEXT

“The Polyphony of Gestures” is a multidisciplinary study on the therapeutic and creative aspects of touch, launched as part of the Entuziart Association’s project “The Curative and Performative Aspects of Touch—Artistic Residency,” co-funded by AFCN.

Based on this vision of life as a potential for action, and with the intention of introducing dance and movement as open and generative tools in the relationship between choreographers, children with special needs, therapists, and families, the audience member became an active participant, in the role of a witness, in a non-judgmental way of looking, in which “seeing” becomes a form of touching and of being moved.

Throughout the process, we raised questions, noting the gap in the educational system between the inner experience of children and adults with special needs and the possibility that their sensory perception and expression might be recognized as primary modes of learning.

The questions that guided our research were:

• How can I express myself if there are no words?
• How does touch speak?
• What do I feel when I make a gesture as if it were the first time?
• Can I learn without touch?
• Can I reinvent my body based on my uniqueness?
• Who can help me make the most of my imagination?