Disability arts: the challenge of ensuring creative momentum
There’s a lot to celebrate in the work of disabled artists right now.
Ramps on the Moon, for example, brings together a collaborative network of seven Arts Council England national portfolio theatres to create three new pieces of high-quality touring theatre. Each venue will co-produce shows over consecutive years, giving all the organisations direct experience of working with disabled artists and learning how to develop disabled audiences. This, coupled with the Unlimited commissions for individual artists announced earlier this year, is a testament to the achievements of such work so far and industry support for it.
Training to support the growth of disabled talent is also growing. There’s the partnership between the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Solar Bear Theatre Company – the first BA course in performance in British Sign Language and English. Then there’s the Central School of Speech and Drama, which is running a diploma for learning disabled performers, and the workplace-based training for learning disabled theatre-makers provided by Mind The Gap theatre company in Bradford and Hijinx theatre company in Cardiff.
Oily Cart theatre company has quietly generated passionate interest and engagement among a new generation of theatre-makers who are providing work for those with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD).
The disability arts are also gaining ground in higher education, with the likes of Nicola Shaughnessy’s Imagining Autism at the University of Kent, and Northumbria University’s Matt Hargrave’s excellent and challenging new book, Theatres of Learning Disability. The widening online of reviewing and criticism beyond the broadsheets has also brought a better range of voices into the mix.
But this is only half the story. All this fantastic opportunity is the culmination of many years of hard work and investment that has led to the emergence of talented disabled artists. Will producers be able to continue to draw on a broad and deep pool of talent to meet these new opportunities?
The arts are becoming increasingly sidelined within the national school curriculum, with the exclusive focus of education secretary Nicky Morgan on Stem subjects: science, tech, engineering and maths. Add to that the pressure on schools to deliver progress on league tables and the EBacc, and the arts are merely the icing on the cake.
A key part of the ecology that can create opportunities for disabled performers is youth theatre. But with local authority disinvestment, this is increasingly becoming the preserve of those who can afford it. This matters: where will the disabled artists of the future first encounter the possibility that the arts might be something to which they can aspire?
Many leading disabled performers now now in their late thirties and forties learned much of their craft while working as part of theatre-in-education or young people’s productions. Daryl Beeton, who has just stepped down as artistic director of Kazzum, which makes theatre for young audiences, was inspired to enter the profession after seeing Jamie Beddard – part of the Extraordinary Bodies creative team – on a poster for Graeae theatre company’s production of Ubu. The company’s pioneering training programme, Missing Piece, is now in danger of being seen as engendering a golden generation.
At Action! Disability and Employment Training, the first conference on disability and training in theatre, held by Rada in 2004, the discourse was very much around meeting legal requirements. Much has moved forward since then and the cultural policy focus has shifted towards the creative case for diversity. This is where artists want to be having the conversation, but changes to Access to Work and the Independent Living Fund mean that the discourse of rights and the necessity of political activism can never be very far away.
Government changes in the name of austerity create a form of cultural segregation – not just between disabled and non-disabled artists, but between disabled artists who need Access to Work in order to work and those able to manage without it. This is, of course, part of the wider issue of how diversity cannot simply be a “creative case” if only an increasingly narrow cadre of people can afford to work in the arts.
The richness and diversity of disability arts – in pictures
Read more
I want disabled artists to be able to make work that matters to them and connects with an audience, however that audience is defined. I want to see personal stories, work that addresses the experiences of being disabled, and work that’s just anything a disabled artist wants to make. I want to see very divergent points of view – from those who want to celebrate being different and move away from any sense of disability, to those who absolutely identify as disabled.
I would like to suggest a view that draws on the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, where something can appear to be both itself and its opposite. Sometimes disability arts might need to be seen as a single entity – a movement rich in diversity. At other times it might need separating out, for example when delving into the aesthetics of the work of some learning disabled artists, where the discourse might need to develop differently than that which has already evolved around work made by some artists with physical and/or sensory disabilities.
If 2012 generated significant further opportunities for some, once the Paralympics happen in Brazil in 2016 there’s a danger that the caravan really does move on. Will the strong presence of disabled-led work at this year’s British Council Edinburgh Showcase become standard – as part of an understanding that UK disabled artists make work of international renown?
I’m skeptical about so-called ladders of opportunity as this presumes a simple vertical hierarchy of progression, but the absence of key rungs was what prompted Graeae to establish Missing Piece. The ecology for disabled artists is now more developed, scattered, varied and successful than ever. But it’s still vulnerable. Sustaining the gains of recent years will be tricky in the current economic climate. Domestic investment in culture is likely to dwindle during the life of this parliament. Wouldn’t it be a strange irony if our artists fared better abroad?
Jonathan Meth is project dramaturg on Crossing The Line, an EU Creative Europe-funded project with Mind the Gap, Moomsteatern and Compagnie de l’Oiseau Mouche. He’s an expert adviser to Ambitious About Autism and part of the Disability Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Join our community of arts, culture and creative professionals by signing up free to the Guardian Culture Pros Network.