Movement with Touch and Sound

 Movement with Touch and Sound is unique to the Sesame Approach and was created by its Founder Marian Lindkvist.  Indeed in many respects it is at the heart of the Approach.  It is a non-verbal way of working which focuses on the instinctual use of movement, touch and sound as a fundamental form of communication between client and therapist.  It is perhaps this rootedness in the instinctual which makes this limb of the Sesame Approach so difficult to understand without experiencing it.

 In 2006, Mary Smail, the Sesame Institute Director, described Movement with Touch as follows, it, “introduces the movements which healthy children experience as part of natural growth.  It is a therapeutic, non-invasive way of working with people whose disability has deprived them of early movement experience.  In this way the opportunities for building trust, exploring relationship, building self-esteem and solving problems that might be available for the able bodied child have been lost.  Movement with Touch offers the person a chance to experience and make up for what has been missed in development.”  However, as Rosie Emanuel notes in ‘Speaking of Movement with Touch (SJ Spring 2007), there is ‘more to it than an approach principally for people with disabilities.  It is at the heart of the Sesame practitioner’s therapeutic relationship whether or not it is being used in its ‘purest’ form.'

Unlike Veronica Sherborne’s work which is based on a series of specific principles, Movement with Touch and Sound is a more subtle system based on ‘watching, listening, empathetic touch, and being able to read some of the feelings that are expressed by the way people move’ (Pearson 1996: 55-56).  It is a person centred approach in which the therapist has to sense and feel their way as well as think.  It requires patience, openness, the ability to wait and allow whatever may emerge from the encounter.  As Emma Westcott said in [ ]  ‘ it requires the therapist to think ‘non-specifically’ to read information in ‘a horizontal place of lateral thinking and in the vertical place of depth and soul’.

It is not dance based, nor is it performance oriented. There are no stock responses or solutions to particular syndromes or tendencies or diagnoses. A practitioner does not do things to someone in their care, but resides with, along side and meets the client where they are.  The work is determined by the needs of the client.  It allows the space and pace of an encounter to develop organically.  The premise is one of always meeting the client where they are and joining them without any expectation of them being in any different ‘place’ to the one they inhabit.  This means that the client has reflected back to them the experience of themselves being as they are ‘just right’.  When the therapist and client are together in this way, they inhabit the landscape together and any alternative landscape is imagined or looked at together, alongside.  The only place to begin the journey is where you are.  This way of working means that not only does the client feel supported in a safe starting point, but it allows a legitimate unknown as there is no predetermined destination.  Together the unknown can be encountered with curiosity, compassion and patience.  This approach allows the client not to feel an expectation that they move from where they are, and it prevents the therapist expecting the client to act in a way that makes them feel like hey are doing their job.

With some clients the experience of being met and seen and accepted “as they are” is the place of therapy, is the repeated exchange; with others, the starting point and the destination may hold a long and elaborate, often cyclical, journey between those two points.  In any case the steps along the road are small and subtle, and the journey is safest when each step is taken and leaps ahead are minimised. One might say to get from A to B or P or Z one must step through the alphabet letters en route. In Movement with Touch terms our alphabet letters are provided for us by Rudolph Laban.

Rudolph Laban suggests that

“As movement is a feature in which all qualities of the mind are strongly represented one may say that to study harmony of movement is perhaps one of the best ways to deal with the nature of harmony itself.  Harmony exists between things which have a certain relation or kinship to one another. Things which have no kinship are opposites and can only become harmonised by intermediary steps leading from one step to another”

Reference: Emma Westcott: Hong Kong Speech
See Our Founder for more on Marian Lindkvist
Click here foror a Movement with Touch and Sound Case Study
For more on Laban see Movement