Inspiring Creative Expression
Formed in 2006, InnerSense was a registered charity which for many years provided multi-sensory creative arts workshops for people with a wide range of learning disabilities across the spectrum, including moderate, severe, profound and multiple disability. Many clients had additional sensory and physical impairments and/or challenging behaviour making interacting and communicating very difficult.
Our artist team had over 20 years experience working in arts and disability. In our workshops, people who rarely spoke were inspired to sing, those who rarely moved, to dance and those who were trapped in their own worlds, to explore another imaginative world where communication became a possibility.
This website provides a unique resource of multisensory theatre ideas and practical methods for engaging people of all ages and abilities.
You can also find detailed ways of working with different props and resources, and how to run themed activities and workshops on our Resources page.
The artistic process we developed facilitates opportunities for engagement and interaction using multisensory resources.
Every term, a theme was chosen and the artist teams contributed ideas for workshops. These were honed by the 'Build Team' who created the environments in which participants were able to explore their own creativity.
Each week the studio was transformed into a different theatrical environment filled with imaginative props and musical instruments designed to inspire the creative talents of our participants. The workshop programme evolved directly in response to our clients’ needs. It was developmental.Improvising together through the mediums of music, dance and drama we created amazing transitory pieces of immersive theatre every session.
A unique feature of InnerSense is the way in which the environment and workshop catered for the widely differing needs of all our clients - people with PMLD were encouraged to explore the textures, tastes, sounds of the environment, people with autism may have had special ‘safe’ areas from where they could happily participate, people with MLD may have explored the narrative, sequential elements of the theme.
Experience shows that a lighting change, the sound of an instrument, the texture of a beautiful cloth, a puppet, can elicit incredible responses and creativity.
When planning the workshops all of these components were carefully considered and implemented.