Spero is a Training and Activity Centre for blind persons and the visually impaired. It is run in collaboration between Aġenzija Sapport and Outlook Coop. ‘We are all story tellers’ is the name of an artistic project which was held at Spero during the first few months of this year, and was aimed at helping the people at Spero tell their stories in order to enable their social, emotional and  cognitive functioning. This project was supported by Il-Premju tal-President għall-Kreattività, managed jointly by the Office of the President of Malta and Arts Council Malta.

Participants have engaged with the experience of bringing together their perception of words through poetry and through narration, together with the sensory motor experience of dance and movement.

Focusing on the senses that are hyper-developed in a visually impaired person has allowed them to engage with aspects of their sensory experience that they can develop.

Three artists, Pamela Abela, Leanne Ellul and Estelle Zahra, worked cohesively to structure the workshops which were created in relation to four main senses, with two sessions focusing on smell, two focusing on touch, two focusing on sound and two focusing on their relation. Throughout the sessions we felt it was best to have some overlap between one session and another which worked beautifully because participants were reminded of what they did during the last sessions and could easily build on the next one.

Adults without a background in dance typically find the notion of movement in front of others somewhat inhibiting. This was further challenged by their sensory difficulties (some of the participants were both visually and hearing impaired). Participants therefore benefitted from a good amount of time to ease into the idea of moving their bodies in order to express ourselves; time that would otherwise have not been available to us had sessions been shared.

Participants were prompted to do different exercises, both literary and physical ones, to engage their senses. They participated through speech and movement, among other ways. For instance, they also managed to co-create a collective poem which prompted many memories that they readily expressed in their group. Ultimately the sessions weren’t the artists’. The latter were the facilitators to the protagonists who were the participants at Spero.

Those who participated came to appreciate their innate capacity to move freely in response to a smell, taste, touch or sound. They also came to appreciate the cathartic effect of movement on the body and to experience an endorphin release during our movement sessions.

Participants also took a lot of what the artists said and explained and started to use such techniques in their everyday life, such as the brain gym and listening to music as meditation.  Such a project goes to show that poetry is found in the slightest of movements, in each little word, and sometimes also in what is left unsaid. Participants appreciated all this and will carry these moments with them for what’s to come.