Articles

Where there's a wheel

Art for art's sake, not art as therapy.

That's the message disabled artists want to get out. And to be judged like everybody else.

Jo Litson reports

You might think that having no legs would put paid to any hope of becoming a dancers. Well, it ain't necessarily so, as British dancer David Toole showed us so eloquently when he performed with DV8 in The Cost of Living at the recent Olympic Arts Festival.

Hurtling across the stage on powerful arms. Weaving between legs, flying up and down other dances bodies, he displayed grace, athleticism, and a dynamic, cheeky stage presence that made him utterly compelling to watch.

To see Toole, who was born without legs, performing with a mainstream dance company, smashed a whole lot of preconceptions about what people with disability can and can't do ,and received plenty of media coverage. For although 19 per cent of Australia's population has disability, that is not reflected on our stages and screens.

Toole, 36, professes not to have given of lot of thought to the political aspect of his involvement with a company such as DV8: in an ideal world it wouldn't be a big deal he says with a shrug. I'd just be another dancer in another company, end of story. But it's not an ideal world and yeah, I do stand out like a sore thumb, even amougst this group (the company of The Cost of Living), which is an unusual group by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm always going to stand out, so I just have to take it with a pinch of salt.

Although Toole can't hide his disability, Jane Muras could if she chose. Instead when she meets people, on the first things she says to them is: Hi, I'm Jane, I'm a woman with an acquired brain injury.

I do that because I'm challenging the system says Muras, who believes that all too often our society treats people with disabilities as if they don't exist.

A lot of people who have invisible differences don't want to say they have a disability because of shame. I have felt that in my childhood and that shame needs to be exposed.

One of the ways Muras hopes to do that is through a one woman show Is that It!???? which she will perform at the Paralympics Arts Festival (which runs to October 29).

It features artists with and without disabilities from 20 countries and includes a program of free outdoor entertainment at Olympic Park , a city performance program and a program of visual, tactile and sound arts.

Is that It!??? tells the story of Muras' life. At the age of nine, she was run over on the way to school. Her injuries were so severe that her mother was told she would never come out of the coma. When she awoke three months later, she couldn't speak or walk.

Now 29, Muras limps and has a tremor in her left hand, but only when she is feeling vulnerable. Her speech patterns are ever so slightly unusual and she finds it hard to write, so she uses a computer. All little things I've learned to compensate for she says. And how. Last year she graduated from the University of South Australia with a degree in social work, she lives on her own, has travelled around the world to connect with theatre companies and organisations working in the disability sector, and plans to open an arts centre for people with disabilities with Pat Rix, the writer of Is that it!???.

Muras attributes her rehabilitation to the love of her family, the power of theatre, yoga and meditation, and a strong spiritual dimension to her life.

It's a belief in the joy of life and in the ability to reach a higher potential, she says.

Muras admits that rehearsals for Is that it!????? have been challenging ,It's very hard to meet everyone's expectations ,but she is pressing on.

Once you've had an accident and nearly lost everything, what else is there to lose? I'm going to reach for the stars. It's like acknowledging that fear is there but doing it anyway. I just think that people have heaps of potential but they limit themselves or they limit others and I want to provide another way. A lot of people with disabilities are underestimated, I feel. They have heaps of untapped creative energy, which I think is a crime.

Neridah Wyatt-Spratt is a project officer with Accessible Arts in Sydney, one of a national network of organisations which aims to provide opportunities for people with disabilities. I don't think people expect people with disabilities to be as good. That's a stereotypical attitude a lot of people have, she says. It's hard to get any work seen and even harder to get it on a level playing field with other work out there. Performers with disabilities don't get critiqued by the standards that other people would, people feel they can't say they're crap ,and that's ridiculous. We want to be judged on the same level as everyone else. We want that feedback.

Wyatt-Spratt welcomes the Paralympics Arts Festival as a forum where performers with disabilities can perform and be judged alongside performers without disabilities, where the art will hopefully be the point rather than the disability. She will perform with Isthmus, a group of five performers, each with a disability, who have developed an aerial show on ropes called Loose Ends that will take place off one of the lighting towers at Stadium Australia.

Like her mother and sister, Wyatt-Spratt was born with a sight disability. She always dreamed of being a dancer but when she lost the sight in her right eye at the age of nine, she put that dream on hold and became and archaeologist instead. While living in Europe, she began to do movement work again and became politicised about having a disability. Having faced a reasonable amount of discrimination in the work place, she had been trying to hide her disability by wearing lenses, Although it was pretty obvious when I had my nose to the computer that something was wrong.

When I came back from Europe, I was incredibility empowered and really wasn't going to put up with it any longer, she says, so I decided I was going to wear glasses all the time.

Back in Australia, she joined Accessible Arts as a volunteer one day a week, eventually becoming a project officer there. Researching access issues for one of two masters degrees, she met Helen Clarke-Lapin, who teachers contact improvisation and has never looked back. Together they started an integrated dance class at Accessible Arts. There are a lot of talented people out there but the training opportunities for people with disabilities are really limited, says Wyatt-Spratt.

Toole agrees It's beginning to open up very slowly in Britain he says. When he first began training as a dancer in England it was virtually uncharted territory. Never in his wildest dreams had he considered becoming a dancer.

Instead, until the age of 27, he worked in the post office in his home town of Leeds. Bored rigid, he cast around for something creative to do, maybe one night a week, and in 1991 went to an Integrated dance workshop held by Celeste Dandeker, who was in a wheelchair having broken her neck on stage while performing with the London Contemporary Dance.

As a result of the workshop, Dandeker invited Toole to join an integrated dance company she was in the process of forming called Candoco.

Initially it was contact improvisation. It was very experimental because it was new,' says Toole. None of us really knew what we were dong at the time, then we developed our own technique over the years and travelled the world.

In 1997 they came to Australia. A few months before they arrived, Australia ballet dancer Marc Brew was involved in a car accident that left him without the use of his legs. He recalls being told about the company, but not wanting to know at that point. I was still hoping to regain the use of my legs, then it really hit that my legs weren't moving. Having tried without success to eradicate his need to dance, he checked out Candoco. Then he got a message from a friend in New York saying that she had just done a class with a teacher called Kitty Lunn who was in a wheelchair, that what Lunn was doing was amazing and that Brew had to come and see for himself. He began corresponding with Lunn by email and last year went to New York wot work with her company Infinity Dance Theatre for three months. To be in a professional environment doing a class every day in a wheelchair came as a joyous revelation to him.

Until I saw it, I couldn't begin to really understand how it could be done or how beautiful and elegant it was, say Brew, who has just formed his own company Dance Ability. The company premieres a new work choreographed by Brew for himself and four able bodied dances, which uses the wheelchair access logo as its title at Chapel Off Chapel in Melbourne next Tuesday and Wednesday.

Brew, who also teaches dance in Bendigo and Melbourne to children who use wheelchairs and children with cerebral palsy and Down syndrome, admits that at times he feels like a lone crusader and experiences great highs and lows ,something everyone who has worked in the disability and the arts sector has experienced. Getting more people with disabilities involved in the arts both as practitioners and as audiences members, increasing training opportunities for those who want to be involved and raising the profile of those who are involved remain significant challenges.

Getting recognition that there is an issue there at all is difficult:, says Claire Havey, the national network coordinator of Disability in the Arts, Disadvantage in the Arts, Australia (AAA), a national peak body formed to lobby on behalf of Australians with disabilities and disadvantage. It's very hard to engage people's interest sometimes.

While doing her degree, Muras worked as a volunteer at the Disability Information Resources Centre in Adelaide, where she rang arts organisations to discuss issues of access with them in order to compile a Disability Arts Database. The apathy of many of the people she talked to was extremely distressing. I'd wake up crying my eyes out, she says. The way I saw the system was a spiral down. Disability was like a cyclone that destroyed everything. I suppose I just reached a point where (I thought) enough is enough. This warrior woman came to me in my dream and said no, no, I will be liberated by this ,and then it was okay. I hope that telling my story is a way of sharing something with others.

Access is a big issues for people with disabilities and something that the Paralympics have had to contend with. It is not just about wheel chairs. Only 2 per cent of people with disabilities use wheel chairs. Often all it takes is a little thought and a change of attitude. Havey recalls going to a performances by Theatre of the Deaf where the bar staff where not prepared for a mostly deaf audience and watching a woman behind the bar yelling louder and louder, when all she had to do was have a list of drinks so people could point to what they wanted.

Access will be one of the many issues discusses at Microgroove, a 10 day conference at the Paralympic Arts Festival organisation by Accessible Arts with support from the Australia Council. The Australia Council has also worked with AAAA to produce several publications including Access All Areas a guide to marketing the arts to people with disabilities and The Disability Fact Pack. A new publication, Making the Journey which looks at arts organisations that have moved to greater awareness of access issues, is in the pipeline.

Getting funding for disability and the arts projects is also a constant challenge. In 1996 Russell Dykstra devised a 30 minute performance piece called CACA Courage about life with disabilities, as part of a Queensland Performing Arts Trust disability arts program. Neal Price, director of Access Arts in Brisbane, was entranced by its subversive style and has been trying to raise funds to remount a developed production ever since. It was hoped that CACA Courage would go to the Paralympics Arts Festival but budgetary constraints put paid to that. However, the show is finally being given a new life at the Energex Brisbane Festival where it runs at the Brisbane Powerhouse until tomorrow.

CACA Courage uses the medieval French Bouffon clowning tradition. It takes an irreverent but highly passionate look at society's attitude to people with disabilities. It's about acceptance and perceptions, says Dykstra, about people not acknowledging your existence, treating you as if you are invisible, as if you are a child, as if you have not intelligence or sexuality. At the same time it's funny show, because it breaks down people's fear.

The Paralympics offer an opportunity to break down fear and challenge preconceptions about disability. Whether they trigger changes remains to be seen, but they in all likelihood trigger debate.

There has to be some form of critical debate about arts in disability and disability arts which is not yet happening here in Australia says Wyatt-Spratt. But I think that one thing that will come out of the Paralympics Arts Festival is that people will be surprised at how good the work is.

Jo Litson The Weekend Australian October 14-15, 2000

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