Kent has been fascinated by disability, the arts, and the senses his entire life. His education includes a BA in acting from the University of Iowa, a Professional Diploma in dance studies from the Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, an MA in special education from Converse College, and a Professional Diploma in clowning from Ringling Bros. Clown College. For his post-graduate work in interdisciplinary studies, he researched how Deaf and autistic people can reap the benefits associated with the concept “music” through senses in addition to sound. Additionally, Kent has performed in a Deaf theatre company, described plays to blind audience members, and developed a system for presenting performances to blind audiences.
Kent S. Godfrey at TEDxSanJuanIsland
Teaching Methods
While teaching creative movement to disabled students, Kent realized that he was teaching tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony (the components of music). His first step is to guide students in object exploration so that they kinesthetically and tactilely encounter the tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony inherent in the physical properties of the objects. For example, light, soft fabrics bring about light, soft movements, which corresponded to light, soft sounds. An object with four parts (such as the legs on a chair) might cause participants to touch it in patterns of four, thus experiencing a four-count rhythm visually, tactually, and kinesthetically. This leads to an activity called, “painting music” in which participants create murals/patterns on large vertical pieces of plexiglass. The theory is that the participants’ kinesthesis, their movements (as seen by the audience), and the two-dimensional images left on the plexiglass canvas are each different manifestations of the same tones, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies. Additionally, visual patterns such as these can be painted on the floor so that participants can move to the visual patterns with their own kinesthetic tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony.
Another approach of Kent’s is to convey tone, rhythm, melody, and harmony to autistic participants simultaneously through multiple senses. The tones, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies are transmitted visually via moving patterns on a video screen, auditorily via music, and tactilely by touching the participants with various objects. If the participant is overstimulated or under-stimulated by a specific sense, then the tones, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies can be perceived through different senses.
