Finding more accessible ways to train, create, perform and work is a major concern of researchers and practitioners (Ajula & Redding, 2013, 2014) of integrated and disability dance. In the spring of 2017 eight dancer/researchers from CRIPSiE, an integrated, disability and crip dance company located in Edmonton, came together to investigate their practices of timing through a participatory performance creation process. Participatory performance creation values researcher reflexivity (Heron & Reason, 1997). In this paper I reflect on the way that collaboratively building an improvisation score, a series of tasks and prompts that the dancer/researchers responded to (Gere, 2003), created inaccessibility for one of the dancers/researchers, Robert. At the time I assumed that improvisation itself was inaccessible. Upon reflecting I realized that the improvisation was accessible and that Robert was improvising in ways valued by both the integrated improvisation literature and the other dancers/researchers.
Interdependent Magic, curated by Jessica Watkin, is the first anthology of plays by disabled Canadian playwrights from Playwrights Canada Press. It includes pieces by Alex Bulmer, the Boys in Chairs Collective, Syrus Marcus Ware, and Chris Dodd, as well as an interview with Niall McNeil. In this review, Kelsie Acton considers the ways in which the strength of this volume lies not just in the quality and diversity of playwriting featured but also in the care the editor has taken in framing the work. Watkin offers two introductions, one aimed at audiences familiar with disability justice and disability arts and the other aimed at audiences new to disability culture. Interdependent Magic acknowledges the diversity of disabled playwrights in Canada and the diversity of audiences who will read their work.
Cette conversation entre Caroline Howarth, Mieko Ouchi et Kelsie Acton porte sur l’expérience de la création et de la mise en scène de Songs My Mother Never Sung Me, un opéra en langue des signes américaine (ASL) avec orchestre de chambre écrit et composé par Dave Clarke et produit par la compagnie Concrete Theatre d’Edmonton, en Alberta. Mettre en scène un opéra destiné à un public malentendant et à des personnes entendantes exige que l’on tisse des liens étroits avec la communauté malentendante d’Edmonton. À cette fin, l’équipe a recruté un conseiller malentendant et a forgé un partenariat avec SOUND OFF, le festival canadien de théâtre pour malentendants. Elle a aussi accordé une priorité à l’ASL et au public malentendant et a choisi une actrice malentendante pour jouer le rôle de la mère.
The aesthetics of accessibility, where considerations of access shape both the creation and presentation of a production, are a driving force in Canadian Deaf and disability theatre. In this article, we reflect on sound, music, access, and audism in Songs My Mother Never Sung Me, a bilingual American Sign Language (ASL) and sung English chamber opera written and composed by Dave Clarke and produced by Concrete Theatre at SOUND OFF: A Deaf Theatre Festival in 2019. This fictionalized memoir is based on Clarke’s experience as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adult) and explores the complex relationship of a hearing boy and his Deaf mom. In this piece, music and sound are not only aural elements, but are also tactile vibration, visual projection, and rhythmic ASL. This convergence of the senses expands conceptions of sound and music to comment on the inequality of Deaf and hearing access in the world beyond theatre production as audience position and ASL comprehension gave audiences differing access to the tactile vibration and ASL.
The arts-based research paradigm prioritizes creativity, relationships and the potential of transformative change (Conrad & Beck, 2016). Arts-based research may be useful in disability communities where people may prefer to communicate artistically or through movement, rather than through spoken word (Eales & Peers, 2016). Participatory action research (PAR) involves researchers working with communities to create research critical of dominant power relations and responsive to the needs of communities (McIntyre, 2008). Both arts-based research and PAR value an axiological approach that is responsive to the community’s needs over a dogmatic procedure, meaning that researchers must be reflexive and responsive to the often unexpected realities of the field. Over four months in 2017, eight dancers/researchers from CRIPSiE (Collaborative Radically Integrated Performers Society in Edmonton), an integrated dance company, came together to investigate how integrated dancers practice elements of timing in rehearsal, through an arts-based, participatory process. In this paper I examine the gap between my assumptions of how research should be conducted and the reality of the field, specifically: the tension between university research ethics and the ethics of the CRIPSiE community, the differences between the value of the rehearsal process and the performance as sites of data collection, and the assumptions I had made about the necessity of a singular research question.
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