Disability Arts Online

Colin Hambrook, editor of dao, attended both the Art of Difference Disability and Deaf Arts Festival at the Gasworks, Melbourne from 10-21 March 2009 and the Momentum09 one-day conference in Auckland on 27 February 2009.

This report sets out to précis debates which took place at the Art of Difference Festival Symposium. It also places in context interviews with a range of individuals and organisations concerned with Disability Arts and the practice of disabled artists. It looks at the cultural differences between approaches in Australia in comparison to Disability Arts development in the UK.

On his travels, Colin also visited Back to Back Theatre and the Karingallery in Geelong, Restless Dance Theatre and the No Strings Attached Theatre. He also gave a presentation at the Disability Arts Forum South Australia.

Background: Both dao and Art of Difference are concerned with moving forward the agenda for self-determination by disabled and deaf artists. The Social Model of Disability has been one of the key tools to furthering Disability Arts within the UK. This has been less influential in Australia. Here the agenda for inclusion has had more of an influence on the development of work by disabled and deaf artists.

This is reflected in the fact that the generally accepted term to describe disabled artists in Australia is ‘artists with disabilities’. This has evolved out of a will to downplay the disability agenda and to present the work produced as coming from artists, with an emphasis on the artistic credibility of the work. This is in contrast to the UK where Disability Arts has been fired by a political will to use artistic expression as a way of empowering disabled people.

Disability Arts in Australia came into being from the other side of the coin. The movement is predominantly focused on how to make the Arts accessible for disabled people as practitioners and as audiences. Within that dialectic, the notion has evolved that to be accessible, the Art has to be of a professional calibre to reach a wider audience.

In the UK, Disability Arts has sprung from a political lobby pushing to counter discrimination. In Australia, the aspiration - beyond a community arts ethos - has been to create work which can stand critically alongside ‘mainstream’ Art.

Most of the arts development workers, producers, directors, curators, etc. are however non-disabled. The amount of insight into how the work is informed by the disability experience is therefore extremely variable.

Outcomes: My impression from Art of Difference was that for many of the artists with disabilities at the festival ‘normalisation’ - as expressed in arguments written by UK disability academic Dr Paul Darke - is the accepted way forward within the Australian arena for Disability Arts development. As such, it could be argued that it isn’t Disability Arts at all if we understand Disability Arts as an art form with the intention of directly challenging discrimination of disabled people.

For Art of Difference and for many Disability Arts companies and agencies within the UK, including dao, key questions we wish to address include how do we raise awareness and foster an understanding of the work of disabled and deaf artists which in turn supports the development of artistic practice? More and more it has become accepted that artists need to be working within mainstream settings and looking at widening the net of audience development.

The intention behind Art of Difference was to look at how we broaden the debate and how we provide a way into looking from alternative perspectives at the issues which underlie Arts practice.

It was useful being a part of these discussions since they reached outside the political perspectives around Social Model understandings which have been a foundation stone for the Disability Arts movement in the UK.

Due to lack of funding, Momentum09, held in Auckland, New Zealand, was pared down from a four-day festival to a one-day event. It remained a useful occasion though for making connections with a range of disabled artists and with Momentum specifically.

Momentum has similar key aims and objectives to dao. An important result to emerge from the event was a directive to pursue Creative Momentum as an international online discussion and debating journal aimed at increasing awareness and appreciation of creative diversity.