Member-only story
Sensory-friendly doesn’t have to always mean family-friendly
Why do we still have yet to hear WAP at a sensory-friendly concert?
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Once upon a time…
When I was in 7th grade, years before I began to work on understanding my own sensory differences, my performing arts secondary school chose me and three other classmates to perform at a nearby school that exclusively served self-contained special education students. In general, my school only believed in the study of classical music and we ended up performing excerpts from string quartet arrangements of different orchestral works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Arcangelo Corelli at a school assembly of sorts.
On the way over in the principal’s van, we were told that we would be performing for “severely mentally handicapped kids” and that we would “see and hear things we were not used to at a regular concert”. We performed for about 20–30 minutes in a small, dimly-lit room, clothed in all black business casual attire near a swimming pool while staff swiftly came in and out intermittently to assist students with various care needs, such as G-tube maintenance and adjusting IV infusions and then were rushed back into the van and taken back to school to finish…
