Everyone has limits - for me the Unlimited festivals and funding streams haven’t been about pretending that disabled artists have somehow broken free of all the things that limit us (as artists, as disabled people, as humans) – it has really been about questioning what our limits are and why they are there. What we’ve learnt is that if you invest significant funds then you can spur on the development of work by disabled artists and you can host festivals where many - but not all - barriers for artists and audiences are minimised.
I’d argue our limits as people is what makes art interesting and engaging - watching a character on stage trying to achieve something but being prevented from doing so by some internal or external factor is at the heart of a lot of drama. With disability art it can be easy to equate limits with struggle and so with impairments - which can be dangerous territory as it suggests that all disabled people are overcoming some sort of battle (ps we’re not inspirational heros!) - but when used well and when built around great, engaging art, our limits are often the thing that makes our stories interesting, engaging and universal.
The way that work by disabled artists has evolved over the last decade or so has been, to me, nothing short of revolutionary. A lot of important progress was made in the 80s and 90s which laid the necessary ground-work for this current generation of artists to get to the level where we’re presenting our art on international stages and at prestigious venues such as the Southbank and Tramway. We can’t forget this history and we need to avoid repeating mistakes or reinventing metaphorical wheels as much as possible, but we also need to remove any sense of restraint that this history might bring.
For instance, there’s a lot of excitement about making work accessible to audiences at the moment - by embedding audio description, sign language and captioning/surtitling in to the production and by offering relaxed/autism-friendly/dementia-friendly performances. These are really important things to explore and I love seeing new approaches to ‘creative access’ that pushes at boundaries and that fundamentally makes the art better. But we also need to remember that companies like Graeae and Birds of Paradise have been exploring access for audiences for over 20 years - we need to build upon and radically push such work without ignoring what’s gone before.
Having said that, the real excitement comes for me when new work by disabled artists completely surprises me by not feeling the need to reference what has gone before. Jess Thom’s ‘Backstage in Biscuitland’ is part-theatre, part-stand-up but is completely captivating as a show and has taken ‘disability art’ in to entirely new arenas. Graeae’s ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ took a piece of musical theatre that had integrated access and made it appeal to a general audience. I saw it at the Southbank as part of Unlimited 2012 and sat among 700 audiences members who would never have gone to a show ‘about disability’ but we rocking along to Spasticus Autisticus. It was magic! And I’d like to hope that productions I’ve been involved in like ‘Wendy Hoose’ and ‘If These Spasms Could Speak’ have had their impact too.
The progress we’ve seen has been about producing great work with the narratives and experiences of disabled people at the centre of it. It can be really tempting to now look at how disabled artists can have an impact on the rest of the arts sector and the rest of society - how we can take our skills and knowledge and use them to increase the inclusion of disabled people generally. This is great and incredibly important but I feel we need to keep going back to the art. All of the conferences, training events, strategic programmes and development schemes from now until the end of time won’t be able to replace that moment when an audience member engages= with a piece of art and ‘gets it’. The strategic impact of work by disabled artists and the role that companies and individuals play in influencing a wider social justice agenda is huge, but this can’t deviate from the art itself. When a young disabled person sees a disabled artist (or a non-disabled artist) on stage and thinks “that could be me” - that’s when the magic happens.
Robert Softley Gale is Artistic Director of Birds of Paradise Theatre Company. He also is co-director of Flip Artists. He spoke as part of the What is Unlimited Conversations to the theme of Evolution on Saturday 18 September 2016.
Image from What is Unlimited conversation at Tramway's Unlimited Festival. Documentation by Beyongolia and Chris Scott