8. Flute Theatre with Kelly Hunter

Paul speaks with actress and founder of Flute Theatre , Kelly Hunter MBE, about using Shakespeare to engage with young people living with autism. 

Transcript

Paul Edmondson:

Hello everybody. And welcome to Shakespeare Alive, a podcast of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. My name is Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare Alive hosts conversations with people who work with Shakespeare throughout the world. I'm delighted to be able to speak with Kelly Hunter, MBE. It's been my pleasure to see several of her Shakespearian performances here in Stratford-upon-Avon, Lady Constance in King John, Hermione in The Winter's Tale, Goneril in King Lear. In 2016, she produced her own version of Hamlet and played Gertrude on an international tour. But back in 2002, she started to work with young people on the autistic spectrum and eventually founded Flute Theatre for which she is artistic director. Kelly, welcome to Shakespeare Alive.

Kelly Hunter:

Thank you so much for having me.

Paul Edmondson:

So Flute Theatre, when did it actually start and why?

Kelly Hunter:

I actually founded Flute in 2014. So Christmas 2014. As you said, I had been working with people on the autism spectrum, well, for a long time, since 2002, but the actual founding of Flute Theatre, which was to be my own baby where I could really push my creativity as a director and as with this pioneering work, that started six years ago.

Paul Edmondson:

Why did you choose to work with people who are autistic?

Kelly Hunter:

Yeah, well, it was actually around 2000, 2001 when I was playing Constance at the RSC. And the thing I kept hearing was Shakespeare is for everybody, Shakespeare is universal. And that's true, but I wasn't really seeing it. I wasn't seeing that that was true. I was actually seeing something that seemed to me rather inward looking and not really delving into the infinite possibilities of what you can do with Shakespeare in the 21st century. And I became increasingly frustrated. I wasn't really the person I wanted to be having a fantastic time being an actor, but it wasn't enough. It just wasn't enough for me. So at the end of that season I took myself off and worked at a special school and I offered my services to explore how to use Shakespeare with people with no access to the arts.

Kelly Hunter:

That's what I really wanted to do. I knew that there was this universality in Shakespeare, but I couldn't bear any more just to hear this plaudit about it without it being really explored. I understood the power of the iambic. I really understood that. I understood that I could stand on a stage and I could fill that space where there were 2,000 people just by landing on a strong heartbeat. I knew that power. I knew that there were what I call the four keywords of Shakespeare, which comes from Louis Zukofsky's exploration in Bottom on Shakespeare, which he wrote in the early 1960s. The eyes, mind, reason and love were these four incredible repetitive keywords that create this exploration of seeing, looking, loving and feeling.

Paul Edmondson:

Eyes, mind, reason and love.

Kelly Hunter:

Yeah. So, Zukofsky in his book Bottom on Shakespeare, he literally goes through each play and he shows where these words collide and how they make a seeing brain and a loving eye. So, "Love looks not with the eye, but with the mind", says Helena. I see a voice, so the idea that the eye is active. "The first sight, they have changed eyes", says Prospero as he sees Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love. Lear's question of Gloucester to which he answers, "I see it feelingly. I only see it when my eyes have been taken away." And then obviously the mind's eye. Two of these words colliding together in Hamlet. This coinage, these phrases just really fired me up. So the things that people have said that they enjoy my performances, Constance, all of this was bubbling away inside me. It felt like that, it felt like a wellspring of creativity for me at that time. So I landed in that special school with all of this bubbling away, wanting to explore it.

Kelly Hunter:

And they were quite surprised to see me and said, "Well, yes, of course you can come. You're very welcome. You can play with anyone here, but you can't play with those people behind that door." And they pointed to a door behind which were the autistic kids in a particular unit who were kept separate from the rest of the school. In the rest of the school where people were down syndrome, cerebral palsy, all kinds of conditions that made them difficult to educate. But I was interested in getting behind that door. I had never met anybody with autism before and I didn't understand what could be so scary about a group of young adults and why I couldn't play with them. And I guess I was on that kind of role. I did want to push down many doors and many barriers at that time. So after a little bit of persuading, they let me behind the door.

Kelly Hunter:

There were 12 autistic individuals in that first group, 11 boys, one girl. And I played with them everyday for three years without fail at 9:00 AM on a Thursday. And they taught me how to teach them. I found that these fascinating collisions of eyes and mind and love in Shakespeare defined the very struggle of autism, that making eye contact for somebody with autism is almost impossible. So at the first sight they have changed eyes or love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, suddenly felt different when I was in a room with autistic people who couldn't use their eyes in the way that a neuro-typical person would do. So it's as if Shakespeare's very essence is exploring the human experience and someone with autism struggles with communicating their human experience.

Paul Edmondson:

So, Kelly, just for the record, I remember attending an early workshop it must have been in Stratford-upon-Avon in what is now called the Clore Learning Center on Waterside, the studio space above those shops. But I remember you going around the room where the iamb, with the heartbeat saying, hello, hello, which is something that Flute Theatre I think still does as a warmup. When would that have been and can you tell us about what you learned about working with people with autism?

Kelly Hunter:

Yes, absolutely. So that was September 2010. I remember it very, very well. So I'd gone back to the RSC as an actor and I was part of that three-year long ensemble when I was playing Hermione and Goneril, but I did some negotiating with the RSC. And when I went back into that company, I said I'd like to work within the education department and continue this work that I've been making for now nearly 10 years on my own. And what you saw was actually the beginning of me working out how this could be a production. I was taking it from games that I was playing inside a school workshops to how can I make this into a theatrical experience for those kids? So we had a wonderful crew of actors, Greg Hicks, Katie Stevens, Sam Troughton and we did indeed begin that session, which was like a half performance, half workshop, with sharing our heartbeats.

Kelly Hunter:

So Shakespeare as you know, Shakespeare's language is based on that iambic, is based on the rhythm of a heartbeat. So one iamb, boom, boom, is the rhythm of our heartbeats. Now I know that the heartbeat is the barometer of your feelings. So whatever is happening to you in the world, either in your memory or your imagination or externally is registered by your heartbeat almost before your brain, almost before you can think, oh, there's someone there at the door who I really love and they don't love me. Your heartbeat is registering that fact. Your heartbeat cannot lie. People with autism struggle with the very concept of time, struggle with the idea that next moment in their life is safe, so much so that for some people on the spectrum life is akin to a panic attack that never finishes. And you can understand autism in that way.

Kelly Hunter:

And when you have a panic attack, your heartbeat is going fast. Your adrenaline is pumping and consequently you're never in a calm state so much so that very often you're never sleeping properly. So many, many people on the spectrum and their families never get a good night's sleep. So critical thinking, critical decision-making goes right out the window. You're in a state of panic. So I use the heartbeat to create a womb like feeling because the heartbeat is the first sound you hear in the womb before you're born. It's arguably the most nurturing, most calming rhythm that you will be akin to. And I use that to try and speak without the spoken word to the interior rhythm of that person to share my calm heartbeat and offer it to that person as if to say, it's okay, the next thing is just the next heartbeat. And that's what those shared heartbeats are actually doing. And often with non-verbal autistic people, we sit in a circle for hours at a time just making our heartbeats and offering the, hello, but they don't necessarily come back with a hello. They're just able to share the calm space. Remarkably some non-verbal people on the spectrum have made their first words, have spoken their first hellos with us in these circles.

Paul Edmondson:

And at some point from the, hello, you go on to name the person or encourage the people to say their names and music is very important, isn't it? The singing of the person's name. Can you tell us about that?

Kelly Hunter:

Yes. So when I started, it was much more of a spoken word, hello, hello. Seems so alien to me now to do that, but that's how I began. And I did that for quite a long time. I went to Barcelona and I took this work to the Catalan people. I was very lucky. I worked at Tiatre Lliure which is one of the biggest theatres' in Barcelona. And when I offered this work to the Catalan actors, they went, hello, hello, and off they went. They flew. They had no time for speaking. They had this musicality, this rhythm, and the thing just flew. So they took what I had made, they made it their own. And then I have always, since that experience with them a long time ago made harmony because it seems to me if I'm exploring what this womb feels like, then let's add harmony, let's add as much harmony and offer the harmony.

Kelly Hunter:

So it's the music of the womb that we're offering, the music of the heart. The naming of the person, again, instinctively it seemed to me very, very obvious and very crucial to have the respect for this autistic person, especially if they were non-verbal to know their name and to say their name. We do a research project with UCL neuroscientists and a couple of years ago, one of the research projects that we did was actually seeing what happens in the prefrontal cortex when you hear your name. So we haven't done this with autistic people, but we've done this with neuro-typical actives. So the neuroscientists put mobile MRI scanners, rather expensive Japanese things, on the heads and brains of the actors. And they started playing these games. And then we were calling out their names as they were playing the games. And, oh my God, we could see it on the data readout. When the actors had their name, the thing flooded with red, which means the oxygenated blood.

Kelly Hunter:

So it's obvious, but it shows it scientifically that when we hear our name something happens and you feel recognized, you feel known, you feel loved. Shakespeare seems to me in Pericles, to really understand this. The coming together of Pericles and Marina, right at the end of that reunion scene when they finally hear the name of the other person. God, and he lands it in those strategic places and we find ourselves so moved. So it seemed to me that singing the person's name, whether or not they react back, somewhere inside they know that they are being recognized.

Paul Edmondson:

You've started to answer the next question a little bit already, but why choose Shakespeare to work with autistic people?

Kelly Hunter:

I feel this almost mystic power of Shakespeare's language. I really do. I hear it when I look at the words on the page. I hear what I call the emotional alphabet, the humming of the mother sound, the swearing of the F sounds the negativity of the M sound, the silence of the Ss. When I look at a page of Shakespeare, right, I hear it and see it. It sings and speaks to me. I don't feel that sort of rather severe analytical approach. I need to know what words mean, but it's filling my senses in a way that no other playwright does for me.

Kelly Hunter:

So to be able to pass that on, that experience of feeling more alive to people who all locked away by this autism, who aren't able to express easily how it feels to be alive, I've never found a better sea to swim in. I've never found a more rich place to explore. And I feel that I'm right at the tip of the iceberg having done it this long. There's so much more to find out about how I can use Shakespeare's language to allow people to express themselves, allow people on the spectrum to express themselves.

Anjna Chouhan:

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is the charity that promotes the life work and times of William Shakespeare. In his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, we look after five houses associated with Shakespeare and his family. We make freely available an internationally important library archive, and museum collection. We lead new research and we run an award-winning education program. In light of this podcast please consider making us a donation. You can do this by visiting shakespeare.org.uk/podcast-support. Your support goodwill really matters to us and we hope you'll recommend our podcast to your friends.

Paul Edmondson:

You mentioned Pericles and A Midsummer Night's Dream is ingrained in the name of Flute Theatre, Flute, the bellows-mender it was an enormous privilege for me to attend via Zoom one of your recent performances with a young man called Giles, and it was A Midsummer Night's Dream. Can you tell us a little bit about what happens in a performance of Flute Theatre, and maybe you can reflect a little bit pre-lockdown days and since lockdown?

Kelly Hunter:

Yes. So pre-lockdown, we would perform... We have three productions, Tempest, Midsummer Night's Dream and Pericles and for me, these are the best productions that I can conjure up. And they are specifically created for audiences on the spectrum. So there is a maximum number of 15 autistic individuals per performance. We have a beautiful painted floor cloth, which is eight meters by eight meters. So it's not very big. And we have seven actors sitting around that floor cloth, around in a circle. The 15 autistic individuals will come into theatre; they will have been greeted by me at the door. I'm usually on the street waiting for them. Sometimes it's a group of individuals who know each other with a special school. Sometimes it's families who bring their children. We've done this in many languages across the world, but the ultimate aim is for these people to come to the theatre, for the theatre to open its doors to them knowing full well that there's no other opportunity for them to come into the theatre space.

Kelly Hunter:

So a relaxed performance, as good as they are, is not enough for these families. These parents really suffer with the anxiety of how will it be when my kid comes, will it be okay? Will they have a tantrum? Will they have a meltdown? Will it be embarrassing? You have no idea how many parents just say, we're scared of the embarrassment that our family member might bring us and the shame. So we just don't go out. And that exacerbates the autism because it isn't itself a social and communication condition. I love the [Manushkin 00:18:56] idea that the theatre experience begins the moment you set foot in the space. And that means the box office, the actual place should be as welcoming and as different. It should be like Christmas, just everyday. Here we are in this amazing place where something unforgettable is going to happen. So having had my greeting, we go into the theatre space and the individuals meet the actors, and they're invited to join the actors around the circle and sit on the floor cloth with them.

Kelly Hunter:

So seven actors, 15 individuals with autism. So they make a kind of team, each actor teams up with two or three individuals, and they sit around the floor cloth. And that actor will get to know that there're individuals with autism very, very well as the show continues. So we settle, it doesn't matter how long it takes. And then we'd begin with our heartbeats. There's no rush to get through anything. It takes as long as it takes. Sometimes we find the heartbeats go quite quickly. Sometimes we just need a bit more time. And it's an opportunity for the actors to find out... It's like a sort of scanner. It's like reading, what does the person who's come into this space need from me? Can they make words? Are they going to need to jump up and down a little bit because it's all so exciting?

Kelly Hunter:

Are they going to need to be coaxing out of their shell? So with Midsummer Night's Dream, we begin with the actors taking center stage and acting out fairly small scenes from the play. It could be Puck making all the different shapes, the horse, the hound, the hog, the bear and the fire. And then each actor with that group has the opportunity to say coming in as Puck, jumps up, brings their autistic individuals with them and they do the same thing. It's very much like you saw way back in 2010 in the Clore. So in this way, the actors are playing everything and everyone has the opportunity to explore what it feels like to play all the characters. So you get to play everything. And we find that we can work through the points in the story where your eyes and your mind create a point of ecstasy, creates something that has to be explored.

Kelly Hunter:

Up until March 2020, this is how we were performing. We had a very remarkable experience at the end of 2019, where we took our Pericles to Poland and Romania. My English actors learnt it in Polish and Romanian and we were able to offer it, pushing through those language barriers knowing that actually the spoken word is not the most important thing. The most important thing is offering the embodiment of the game physically. So we were really on a roll. We were also really breaking through with our community project, which is based in Shepherd's Bush in London, where we worked with the same families every week. Some profoundly autistic kids there breaking through what's known as the proprioceptive system, which with people with autism hasn't really been switched on properly. Your proprioceptive system is literally your GPS. It's the bit of you that helps you balance, but more of the points, the bit of you that that helps you with your sense of direction. Helps you not bump into things.

Kelly Hunter:

And the simple chore of you and me going to the kettle and putting it on is all proprioception. If you don't have that, then you're stuck, you're clumsy. You feel scared of the world. People with autism don't have that system ticking away, but you can switch it on. And just when lockdown hit, we were really getting somewhere with understanding how we could use our drama games, still with opening up the eyes and the mind, and targeting that proprioception. And then COVID hit. And obviously we couldn't perform. We were scheduled to perform all through this year in different theatres across the world and we couldn't do any of it. And I just was determined not to let the families down, that's what it felt like, of our community of families who we work with for. For many of them we're their only social activity. We're the only thing they feel safe that they can bring the children to.

Kelly Hunter:

So we just adapted everything so that we could make it work and ended up with the performances that you saw. A lot of it seemed absolutely impossible at first because our work had been about people holding each other, physical contact, sometimes really just rocking the small children and making heartbeats with them almost by osmosis of the calm heartbeat going into the fast one. But as you saw, we adapted what we do. We sort of did a start again really. We took what we knew we didn't want to lose, the rhythm of the heartbeats. Well, you can still do that. We still speak to the person with autism through the screen. The idea of the eye contact games actually became more profound because you can come really, really close with the screen. And I think the biggest boldest move that I made was saying we can't do this for 15 people at a time anymore. We'll do it for one.

Paul Edmondson:

Astonishing. I was watching it on Zoom and I kept wishing I was the one. I kept thinking Giles, this is marvelous. And I wished I was in his place on the receiving end of these six actors presenting moments of Midsummer Night's Dream. And one of the things that especially struck me, Kelly was there was no need to tell the story. It didn't really matter. These were connected episodes that Giles and the actors trusted and you didn't need to explain anything. So we had Puck scaring Bottom. We had the love juice being put on Titania's eyes. We had the lovers declaring their love for each other. We had heartbeats, "Are you sure you are awake", at one point? And Giles said, "No." He wasn't sure. And this was beautiful. And then you mentioned rocking and we had the rocking of the ground with the fairies at the end with Titania. None of this was a story. It was a series of connected episodes in a magical space.

Kelly Hunter:

I think that's what Shakespeare's plays are. I really do. Of course, there's narrative. Of course, he's this great dramatist, of course. But like I said, I hear and see and feel all this other unconscious experience where you land in these deep moments of waking up with him. And I think a lot of the time, in an audience, you don't quite follow the story of whose done what to who and which messenger is coming on and all of those things. But if you're in the midst of an extraordinary production of Shakespeare, you never mind. You just get swept up in this feeling. The question is, what's important? What can be the purpose of Shakespeare in the 21st century? The stories were not his first thing. He stole all his stories. He wasn't the original story maker, but he was the original creator of this poetry of the seeing brain and the loving eye. So that's what I have taken. And it's led me to give experiences to so many hundreds of people with autism that they wouldn't otherwise have. And they never say, oh, what was the story? They never say, where was I meant to... They never ask. But John Barton says, "You can say this island's mine and you just take it for what it is."

Paul Edmondson:

And you've been especially supported, especially it worked with St. John's College, Brighton haven't you? 80 to 90 performances with them.

Kelly Hunter:

Yes. So we first met them a couple of years ago when we were performing at the Chichester Festival theatre, performing our Midsummer Night's Dream and their drama teacher, Joe, brought a couple of groups. She'd heard about it; she'd put them on the bus. They came to have the real space experience. We kept in touch with them. We then did a residency there and then they were the first to call us up when she heard what we were doing and said could you come and do this online experience? So we were doing five performances a day because it's only one person. So we want to reach as many as possible. So it's about an hour long. Yeah, these incredible actors of mine would do it five times.

Paul Edmondson:

Amazing. Such energy and beautiful energy watching them.

Kelly Hunter:

Yeah, that's right. You can't not do it. You've got to give that energy. I mean, and that's not just me saying, come on guys. There's not a cracking of the whip that's ever needed because actually that extraordinary life force of someone with autism, you feel so much unexplored emotion, unexpressed thought. You feel such intelligence. You feel wit, but the autism, it's a barrier, it's like a wall. So you're finding ways to climb over, get under, knock it down a little bit. How am I going to get through the wall? Leonard Cohen says, "You find a crack in the light gets in." And that's what we're doing. And actually I think that feeds the actors. It feeds them.

Paul Edmondson:

And the review session at the end when you are able to look at the stills from the performance with the audience members. So Giles on this occasion, and you were able to show him. Giles, this is your surprised face. This is your angry face, your hysterical laughing face, your disgusted face, your cheeky face. And this is a sort of review and at the beginning of the digestion of what's happened,

Kelly Hunter:

Yes. There's two things there. So autistic people find it very difficult to recognize facial expression. That is one of the traits of autism. And can find it difficult to make facial expressions themselves. There was a woman I met in Sweden who told me she didn't know where her face was. She was a very high functioning woman with quite a high powered job. She was autistic. And she said, "Look, I know it's here, but if I try to express what I feel here I can't do it." So there's disassociation of mind and body. And she said this to us because she came to one of our shows and she said, "Well, for the first time I'm being given time and space to practice this thing that everyone thinks I'm so foolish because I don't know how it should be."

Kelly Hunter:

And then this thing of being able to see yourself afterwards is like waking up from a dream. So I think our shows give the chance for observation and participation at the same time like our dreams. We are observing ourselves and we're inside them, doing stuff in the dream as well. In the real space, obviously we don't show photographs in the real space, but in the real space we always have tea and biscuits. Sounds such a small thing, but it's really important. Very much a part of what we do. It's not an idiom. We finished the show and then actors, participants, parents, whoever else has been there, we'd go and have this communal time in this sort of halfway house and then out into the street. Otherwise, it feels too brutal to have that incredible experience and then suddenly be on the tube.

Paul Edmondson:

Well, we're going to move into the team biscuits' moment just now and the waking up from the dream as it were. If you could wake up in one of the Shakespeare houses in Stratford-upon-Avon which you're going to be living for a while, which one would you choose I think to wake up in and live in for a bit?

Kelly Hunter:

Can I? I've done something a little eccentric. I thought deep and hard about this. So I have a very, very favorite spot out of those five houses, but it's in the sculpture garden, Paul, of Anne Hathaway's Cottage.

Paul Edmondson:

I know. By Greg Wyatt, his pupils.

Kelly Hunter:

Yes. The one I love is actually the one with Brutus.

Paul Edmondson:

I know.

Kelly Hunter:

I'm really taken with that statue every time I see it. It feels like he captured a living brain, that head of that statue is quite remarkable. So I was going to ask if I could pitch a tent in the sculpture garden and live there for a while.

Paul Edmondson:

Well, I hope you do. I hope you take us up on that.

Kelly Hunter:

Excellent. I could see that beautiful statue and that's where I'd like to be.

Paul Edmondson:

And if you were able to deposit something within the collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, whether that's papers or books or audio visual materials or objects, what would you deposit, Kelly?

Kelly Hunter:

Yeah. We have a lot of footage from Flute Theatre of productions and workshops, and there's one extraordinary thing that happened about six months ago. There's this eight-year-old boy called Lumen, who is non-verbal, who is part of our community project and has been coming to our sessions for maybe two years. We sang, hello, to him every night once lockdown started. They were in a terrible state in the family. They really needed help and some social activity. And about two months in, his mum was filming him. She always films him. She was doing some hellos with him, just singing to him herself. And he went, hello, like a cry from the deep. So it was the first time he'd ever said hello and she caught it on camera. So I have that little bit of film. And for me, the power of the iambic, the power of this work just is encapsulated there. So I'd like that 10 seconds of Lumen's first, hello, to be in your archives.

Paul Edmondson:

Thank you very much. We should treasure it. Now, how can people best support Flute Theatre? We can find out more at flutetheatre.co.uk. We can follow you on Twitter @FluteTheatre. Is there anything you'd like us to do?

Kelly Hunter:

Yeah. There's two things you can do. You can subscribe to the newsletter. I write a lot actually, sort of every six to eight weeks. I try and write about what we're doing. So on the website subscribing to the newsletter is very easy at the top. And if you want to donate some money, we have no core funding so we still always rely on donations and grants. There's a little button you can click for the just giving at Flute theatre. But following us and subscribing to the newsletter doesn't cost anything. And I would be so appreciative if you've enjoyed listening to me, if you can follow us, if you feel like donating, that's an extra idiom.

Paul Edmondson:

Well, I'm always happy to talk about Flute Theatre to my friends, and I'm sure our listeners will be as well. So Kelly, Hunter, thank you very much indeed.

Kelly Hunter:

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Anjna Chouhan:
Now, if you could deposit something, what would it be? In our previous series, our guests suggested diaries, alternative voices and artworks celebrating Shakespeare and pride. But now it's your turn. What would you like to see in our imaginary hoard to celebrate Shakespeare in the 21st century? Please let us know by going to shakespeare.org.uk/future. And while you're there, please consider completing our short survey, so that we can make more of the content that you like.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Shakespeare Alive with Paul. Join me next week as I talk to Matt Pinches, the co-founder of the Guildford Shakespeare Company, as we talk about the company's 15-year journey and adapting to the digital age whilst maintaining its charitable ethos.