A Bridge to Meaning: Creating Performance with Neurodiverse Young People

This chapter investigates the enabling and uplifting potential of making and performing a contemporary devised work with a group of young people that includes neurodiverent learners. Through radical interrogation, the group devised an adaptation of Shakespeare’s seminal work The Taming of the Shrew using a scaffolded design that enabled the incremental development of agency and participation in participants. The chapter unfolds how this strength based approach afforded young people the means to develop and refine communication and performance skills using embodied, object-based and physical performance practices. Focusing on three neurodiverse young people, the chapter shares insights into their devising and performing experience, most notably the way they moved from the fringes of the artistic processes in the early stages of the research to be in key roles on opening night.