Why Catalunya? Shakespeare with autistic people.
He loves these games beyond comprehension, he’s brilliant at them, they possess his body and voice in ways that reveal levels of deep human pleasure. His family are all smiles to see him in bliss.
March 2017, Granollers, a town half an hour’s drive from the centre of Barcelona. From the top of the hill, I can see the jagged peaks of Montserrat, the beloved mountain of Catalunya made of asteroid style rock formations, holding an ancient monastery, accessible only by perilous cable car. I want to climb it. I will climb it but not until 2025 after eight years of returning to the hill. At the top of the hill is a special school, Centre D’Educacio Monserrat Montero. Here the autistic children and teenagers are greeted from their buses and taxis by the staff with open arms, receiving hugs and kisses as if it is Christmas every day. How utterly different from schools I have worked in, where at their most extreme, police search for guns and discipline is everything. The combination of the people’s kindness, the scent and colour of the Spring mimosa with Monserrat on the horizon ensure me I must be dreaming, and I if I should wake, I will cry to dream again.
I’m rehearsing my production of The Tempest, playing with twelve autistic teenagers who will take part in the interactive performance. I’d made the show in 2014, using games that I’d developed with autistic people since 2002, performing it in English in the UK and the US. Through quirks of fate, the telling of which demand a Substack of their own, now in 2017 I’m invited to create the show in Catalan in collaboration with Teatre Lliure and their company of young actors. Their “Joven Kompanyia Lliure”.
The eight actors play my games with the twelve teenagers and together they make my work fly, they give it wings, they shake it until it ripens in their sun and returns to me with its music, that had been lying dormant, audible and clear. They syncopate the rhythms, they sing their own tunes, they find the funny bone where I had only seen the serious. They never ever ask me “Is it OK to touch the participants?’ Their bodies are available, becoming the architecture of the play and the climbing frames for the participants. I’m home, I’m alive, I’m inspired. Anna is twelve years old, she is autistic, and she plays these games as if she has always known them. Her mother films her in her bedroom setting out her toys in a circle and making heartbeats with them, changing their faces and saying Hellos, before her bedtime. Anna asks us to make her a hugging game which I do for my next show and bring it back to her the following year.
We perform the show at the prestigious Teatre Lliure in Montjuic on a Sunday morning with our group of twelve autistic teenagers taking centre stage with the actors. Up till now, I’d insisted that performances (held only in the UK and US at this point) comprised only two audience members per participant, keeping the outer circle of audience small to avoid an overwhelm. The Sunday morning in Barcelona 2017 smashes that idea as, in true Catalan style, families come together to celebrate each other. “Our autistic family member is performing at Teatre Lliure? We’re not missing this”. I’m standing outside the theatre an hour before we start and I see whole groups of families walking toward me. They are dressed up for the occasion; mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, babies, grandparents, siblings and neighbours, at least ten people for each of the participants and then the same amount for each of the actors, not to mention the staff at the theatre.
So, we are packed, we could be sold out ten times over, and I learn that it doesn’t matter what the number is, what matters is why that number are there. The listening of everyone in the audience is intense because they need to be there, they want to be there, and they never want to leave. At the end of the performance all the families want to speak to me. But they can’t speak because they are crying so hard, so they hug me. They form a queue to hug me. They hug me because their loved family member has been seen, known, celebrated and adored for the beauty they know them to possess. We have witnessed each person for the unique and incredible attributes they have; we’ve created bonds of trust and rapture that cannot be broken.
April 2018. I return to create A Midsummer Night’s Dream - same actors, same autistic participants, same school. We go back up the hill to the school to rehearse, the autistic teenagers run to greet the actors like old friends. After twelve months of not seeing them, the teenagers take the actors by the hand to the same spot in the same room as one year previous. Now, Anna has her hugging game and new participants join. Montserrat in the distance, I must wait to climb her, to experience the sights, the time is not right yet. At the end of the project we perform at the same theatre, with the same euphoric experience of performance.
One boy, Joan, loves the rehearsals but on the day of the performance he cannot get out of the car from fear and anxiety. However hard we try, we cannot coax him out, he is frozen. His parents understand, they blame no-one, and they drive away. He misses the show. (But nowadays in 2025, at Flute Theatre if someone can’t get out of a car or a bus or is stuck in the loo, we bring the show to the street or the bathroom and we make performances for them through the open doors and car windows).
Summer 2018. Now come the storms. New directors at the Teatre Lliure bear nothing but broken promises and there will be no more well-funded prestigious theatre to support the work, so I continue working in Catalunya in other ways. I run a project in the tiny village of Montcada i Reixac. I meet Ese, a profoundly autistic son of a Nigerian family living in the village who I see dragging his father up the street every morning to get to the workshops. He loves the games intensely and his family are taken by surprise at his engagement. He is non-verbal and has never responded to anything in this way before. His family tell us they live in confusion, isolation and fear; the actors decide to visit Ese every Sunday once the project has ended to continue playing with him and they do so for at least six months.
Spring 2019. Back up the hill to the school in Granollers. This time, I project raw emotion onto Montserrat as if a mountain on a distant horizon recognises my spirit. I run a performance course teaching actors how to play the games, performing with the autistic teenagers, many from the original group and many new to me. At the end of the course, we perform in a converted church on a Saturday morning in the town of Granollers, a packed audience as always. Barely space to breathe. And now Joan joins enthusiastically for the show, managing to wordlessly communicate to me that he loves it and has overcome his fears. His parents are beyond happy. One young man Ricki, new to me, stands out. He loves these games beyond comprehension, he’s brilliant at them, they possess his body and voice in ways that reveal to me levels of deep human pleasure. His family are all smiles to see him in bliss. He writes me a poem, adorned with his drawings to say thank you.
And now its Covid. I adapt all my shows to be accessible online so as not to lose touch with the communities of autistic people I work with in the UK and soon these spread to performing online with autistic people across the world in whatever language they first understand. So of course, we come back to Granollers and perform online with the school. And of course they have their own way of understanding numbers. Whilst our online adapted performances (of which we did 950 during the pandemic) are for one autistic person at a time to accommodate the isolation of lockdowns, here in Barcelona they have come back to school but are still experiencing social isolation so suggest that we set up the online shows for a whole class at a time. We connect and there on the zoom is my beloved Monserrat Montero classrooms, the familiar faces of the teenagers and the distinctive vowel sounds belonging only to the Catalan people. They wave at us and play the games through the zoom lens, bemused at playing the memorable games filtered through the lens of screens and technology.
One face bothers me. He’s at the back; he’s sitting down, unable to really join in, his legs in splints, his face and voice like the ghost of himself and I can’t figure who it is. Later the teachers tell me its Ricki, who months previously had thrown himself from a second-floor balcony during the lockdowns. He had miraculously survived, though with much damage to his spine and bones. When asked, he was never able to say why he did it. I contact his family and the following year I visit them at their home. This summer, 2025 I saw him, we talked and we walked. With luck one day we’ll play together again.
Since Spring 2022, I’ve managed to return at least once a year to play the games at the school with a small group of Catalan actors who have now become like family, travelling with me to Mexico and across Eastern Europe to perform our shows in festivals. The original group of autistic teenagers from 2017 are now either in their final years at the school or have moved on to the neighbouring foundation for older people with special needs with whom we are now starting to work.
June 2025, we run a one-week performance course at the school, playing with autistic children from 5 years old up to adults from the foundation of over 35. Our final performance is in an outdoor space at Arsènic, Espai de Creació. Anna, now in her twenties takes part, knowing the games better than most of the actors. Adria, who had skipped around the stage without a care in the world playing the ‘game of first sight ‘between Miranda and Ferdinand back in 2017, arrives in a wheelchair, his life permanently thwarted through a rare complication experienced during a routine eye operation. I push his chair around the stage and play the games with him as if he were my own family, ensuring his father that we will be back later in the year.
My last day of the Summer 2025 trip, we arrange to climb Montserrat. We now have a Flute Catalunya company, and we are at the start of making my dream of basing my work in Barcelona, where the games can live and develop, more of a reality. Although Montserrat is not far away and although I have been to Barcelona at least twice a year for eight years this will be my first climb. I feel ridiculously close to this rarity of nature who has become my spiritual icon. I know from friends that the views are extraordinary and that the climb allows a vision of Catalunya, as though walking on the moon, that makes you feel you can see forever. The weather has been beautiful all week, and we set off.
I climb with two of my closest Catalan friends with whom I’ve shared years of close work and commitment. We set off. Almost immediately clouds descend. They descend so fast that at times, it’s impossible to see more than an arm’s length around you. Sometimes we can see nothing, at best we can see each other. The higher we climb, the more impossible it is to see anything whatsoever. We must look carefully at each footstep knowing we are on narrow tracks with perilous drops. We continue into white sheets of mist, walking amongst dense droplets so that our skin, hair and clothes are soaked, yet it isn’t raining, it’s a consequence of walking in the clouds.
Nothing I could have seen from the mountain would match what I have already seen and experienced with the Catalan people, which I hold in the dark backward and abyss of time; my mind’s eye. For eight years the clouds of Catalunya have opened and shown me riches, in this dream-like world in which I’ve always been awake. Finally, we are at the summit, there is nothing but white, punctuated by laughter and the bond of friendship. I am the luckiest person at the top of this mountain, not for the views of the Iberian Peninsula, today they are obscured, but for the people I am sharing todays white obliterated world with, thanks to whom I have been able to see forever, since the first day I arrived.
Flute Theatre will be performing in Barcelona and Girona in November. For details contact Kelly@flutetheatre.co.uk