Hunter Heartbeat
"The Hunter Heartbeat Method is a series of sensory drama games, which allow autistic people to share how it feels to be alive and celebrate their identity. I have created this award-winning methodology for and with autistic people across the world, playing with me over the last twenty five years."
What the Circle Is Creating
The method came first. The science arrived afterward and found it already there.
A Hunter Heartbeat session moves through this hierarchy in sequence, and the sequence is not accidental.
The rhythm of the opening hello — personalized, sung, repeated — establishes the shared clock. Both brains begin to share a temporal frame at the delta level. This is not a warm-up. This is the first tier of coupling, initiated before a word of story has been spoken.
As the session unfolds and the actors respond genuinely to each participant's actions, the coupling deepens into the predictive range. The child is not just hearing a rhythmic signal. They are inside a living exchange in which their response matters, in which the actor's next move depends on what they just did. Predicting that — modeling another person's future state — is exactly the neural operation that produces alpha and beta interbrain synchrony. The session trains this operation by requiring it, repeatedly, in conditions of safety and warmth.
And the warmth matters neurologically. The conditions that produce gamma-level affiliative coupling — mutual gaze, positive affect, genuine responsiveness — are conditions the method has cultivated by design. The actor enters the child's world. The child is greeted by name. The circle is physically configured to make eye contact natural rather than demanded. These are not merely therapeutic choices. They are the precise conditions under which the highest tier of interbrain coupling becomes available.
The Hunter Heartbeat Method is a series of sensory games that I have created for autistic people to play, they are games of humanity that need only the human voice and body and another person to play with. These games are derived from Shakespeare’s poetic exploration of how it feels to be alive.
— Teatrul Gong Sibiu Romania (2023)
Deconstructing the Dream
The Hunter Heartbeat continues to be the basis of long-term research projects with Neuroscience departments at UCL and Goldsmiths University of London. The evidence and data collected by these scientists allows us to develop the Hunter Heartbeat games with increasing and thorough knowledge of what may be happening in the brain as well as the participant’s obvious day to day signs of increased communication and language.
In 2019 we created Deconstructing the Dream. A unique performance that brought together scientists and actors to collect data, create theatre and explore the neuroscience of the imagination.
Click here for all the information.
The same year, Jamie Ward, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, published the following paper: “Sensing interpersonal synchrony between actors and autistic children in theatre using wrist-worn accelerometers” at ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '18) His opening paragraph reads:
“Over a period of 6 days, we collected wrist-worn accelerometer data on actors and children as they took part in a series of interactive theatre performances with Flute Theatre that are specially developed for children with autism. Interpersonal interactions were then analysed using both cross-correlation and cross-wavelet similarity measures. Through this analysis, patterns of interaction are clearly highlighted, and crucial events can be spotted quickly without the need to review hours of video footage. This combination of wearable sensing and wavelet-based similarity scoring provides a powerful new tool for quickly annotating recordings of social interaction”.
A documentary. Ten short films spanning 25 years.
Hunter Heartbeat Beginnings 2002-2012
Catalunya 2017-2021
Kourosh 2018-2023
"Bonjour Kelly, I am not sure that I can find the words to convey my gratitude to yourself and the whole company for yesterday extraordinary experience. Aimé spoke for himself, and I am reluctant to try to express what I believe he went through. As for myself, you all touched my soul to the deepest. I think that what we were invited to be part of yesterday is what the ancient Greeks intended Theatre to be for humanity. I still feel it in my all “being” this morning waking up from a profound long rest."
Filmed during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, I describe the “Conversation of the Body" and the “Choreography of Emotion” that underpins the Hunter Heartbeat games. The second half of the film is from our 2019community project with autistic children from Queensmsill School and their families at the Bush Theatre, London.
— Hunter Heartbeat Method
" There is no more effective way to teach social skills, promote inclusion, and awaken the soul than the Hunter Heartbeat method. The program changed my life, and ever since I started teaching it, it has changed the lives of the hundreds of individuals who have experienced the awakening it provides. "
—Shakespeare's Heartbeat (Second Edition)
Support our Theatre
Huge thanks to Arts Council England and Bristol Myers Squibb for their invaluable support during Spring 2026.
Funding for the arts is currently said to be at a ‘terminal decline’ but we will continue to create our life changing opportunities whatever the challenges. Please help us continue with a one off donation or a monthly subscription. Your donations go directly toward our performances with marginalised people and always will.