Positive/Negative Writings on Integrated Dance Accessible Arts acknowledges the support of the Ian Potter Foundation for the generous provision of funding to enable the Second and Digital edition of Positive/Negative writings on integrated dance 2013. Second edition: Produced by Accessible Arts Coordinated by Vassallo Designed by Alphabet Studio Photography by Hayley Rose ISBN 095783442X Accessible Arts would like to thank the volunteers who contributed to the coordination of this publication, Olivia Hutchison- Smith and Rebecca Canty. First edition: Concept Neridah Wyatt-Spratt & Helen Connors Coordinated by Carey Lai Edited by Lynn Buchanan Designed by cercus Printed by Star Printery Accessible Arts produced the first edition with assistance from the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts. In-kind support was also received from Ausdance NSW and Andrew Cornish. © Accessible Arts 2000, 2013 Accessible Arts is the peak body for arts and disability in New South Wales, promoting full inclusion, access and opportunities in the arts for people with disability through advocacy, education, leadership and information. Accessible Arts is supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW and Ageing, Disability and Home Care. +61 2 9251 6499 aarts.net.au Contents Foreword by Philip Channells 04 Introduction Andrew Morrish 08 Perceptions of Movement Neridah Wyatt-Spratt 10 The Dance of Disability Janice Florence 16 What’s Your Attitude? Working Towards an 22 Inclusive Dance Culture Jeff Meiners Integrated Dance Workshop Stories Kat Worth 28 Restless Dance Company Sally Chance 34 Restless Dance Company checklist 44 Daring to Dance Ellin Krinsley 46 Flying Creatures from Man to Machine 56 Catherine Chappell Dancing In, Over and Out Of Wheelchairs 66 Helen Clarke Lapin Biographies 76
Foreward During the past two decades in Australia, social inclusion in the arts has provided opportunities for participants living with a disability to engage meaningfully in programs that range across the art forms. In Andrew Morrish’s introduction he challenges the reader to ask, “What is dance?”, “What is disability?” and “What is integration?” and since this first edition there have been many developments across the sector. Significant opportunities have arisen for people with a disability to have their voices heard through the work of a number of agencies and individuals. There has been ongoing support from the Australia Council and state-funding programs as well as the dedication of peak body organisations such as Arts Access Australia (AAA). In addition, the work of all of the contributors to this publication and many others not identified in Positive/Negative, have played a role. This activity has increased the visibility of people with a disability who are engaging in artistic endeavours, and has contributed to the cultural shift in our national identity. For the main part it has promoted inclusivity and changed people’s perceptions of others living differently. Organisations across the country that are working to increase access and participation for people living with a disability are: • Accessible Arts (NSW) • Art Ability (ACT) • Arts Access Victoria • Arts Action (Tasmania) • Access2Arts (SA) • DADAA (WA) • Arts Access Darwin (NT) • Arts Access Central Australia (Alice Springs) • Access Arts (Queensland). For dance, in particular, there has been a steady growth in activity across the country. Adelaide-based Restless Dance Theatre (where I was Artistic Director 2009-2012) continues to develop its national profile while working in an integrated environment where young and emerging and professional artists work collaboratively to create exceptional quality dance. More recently, a spike in dance activity at Accessible Arts in NSW has provided opportunities for people with and without a disability to access professional development in dance through attending workshops, masterclasses and public forums. These projects include the Arts Activated Conference’s Beyond Technique – searching for authenticity workshops (2010), the Dance Symposium (2011) and the Catalyst Dance Masterclass Series (2012, 2013). As a result of this increase in activity we are now seeing many young people with a disability emerging from their teens and early adulthood contributing to this cultural shift in dance. Exciting new relationships are being formed and continue to be nurtured especially through the ongoing work of Accessible Arts initiatives managed by Arts Developemnt Officer
Introduction Andrew Morrish ‘Reinventing the wheel’ is part of natural development in any field. For nearly twenty years I have been watching practitioners in the field of dance and disability finding and polishing their ‘own wheel’. The positive side of this is a strong sense of ownership in their work. This is both laudable and desirable, but for a field to develop it needs to endorse both its oral tradition and to take the risk of making clear statements of its own development. Books such as Positive/ Negative become important markers for a field. We begin to realise there are things that have been said already, and that we can focus on what needs to be said next. They give us maps for pathways into the field and help us to recognise we are not alone when facing difficult situations. Positive/Negative is intensely practical with the generosity of its contributors evident in every chapter. They are giving us insights into both what they do and why they do it. You will find activities to explore, scenarios to ponder, and challenges to your values on ‘what is dance?’, ‘what is disability?’ and ‘what is integration?’. This book not only presents diversity in terms of population, it also clearly marks out diversity of the function of dance. There is reference to dance for performance, self development, vocational opportunities, recreation and social development. This points directly at a history of dance that is much older than its contemporary manifestation as a ‘performance art’ and, importantly, it points at why dance needs to claim back its own history in these broader functions. This is a radical view and it is heartening to find a field in which the radicalism is profoundly based in compassion, competence and creativity. I would like to congratulate and thank all the contributors for Positive and Negative and to for its initiative.
sessions for young people with Downs Syndrome, with severe communication difficulties, in a language unit and in a project that linked a ‘mainstream’ group of primary students with disabilities. Through ’s innovative education and community program, I worked with a workshop program in Birmingham, which offered teaching students the opportunity to work with their peers in wheelchairs. First, after much lobbying and consultation, the university dance studio was made accessible. Then funding for transport to the venue needed to be secured- a major challenge in project planning. Some ‘students were anxious about working with people in wheelchairs, requiring considerable discussion about gaining and relinquishing control and power. All the students evaluated this short program as a challenge to their thinking about the dancing body. More recently in Australia, I worked with the 1997 Anybodies Dancing project, led by dance artists Helen Clarke Lapin and Janis Claxton exploring how integrated groups can work. The project culminated in an informally presented collation of some of the work undertaken during the workshops, which was hailed by viewers as ‘challenging’, ‘beautiful’, ‘moving’, ‘thought provoking’ and ‘full of artistic integrity’. A fundamental principle emphasised by both leading dance artists was the empowerment of all bodies through dance. Consideration was given to the working process, especially the need for sensitivity, care and trust required by all participants due to the wide-ranging needs and abilities of the group. Knowledge of individual physical abilities was a key issue, requiring participants to share information honestly so that risk-taking and safety – physical and emotional – could be balanced. The project challenged conventional perceptions of the dancing body, each responding to technical and choreographic tasks by contributing their own movement to the dance. Audience perceptions of traditional ‘theatre art’ dancing bodies were challenged and viewers were required to consider notions of beauty, aesthetics, validity, ownership, content and intent. Questions and tasks focused on asking ‘what can we do?’ rather than saying ‘we can’t do that’. This required a high degree of flexibility from all participants, including the leaders. The dancers felt that they had been challenged creatively and positively by working together to find solutions to movement tasks, often with unexpected and exciting outcomes. Throughout the project, the open atmosphere engendered by the two dance artists enabled concerns about accident and injury to be expressed honestly, as well as the sharing of information about participants’ particular
Our question was ‘How can we dance together in hospital?’. At the outset, associated multi-disciplinary hospital representatives were consulted to ensure that clear aims were established in the context of other hospital work. Consultation with doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, play therapists and clinical nurse consultants ensures that relevant and up-to date information is communicated to the school staff. They can then brief the dance team weekly on the medical condition and needs of the students. Staff workshops and longer meetings are also held regularly to deepen understanding of the aims and ensure that the project is properly reviewed with recommendations for future plans. A major focus of the project is to consider the potential of dance for teaching and learning in the hospital school context. Key considerations include curriculum development in dance and the contribution of dance in supporting students’ self esteem, confidence and self-image in relation to their hospitalisation. The project has clear educational rather than therapeutic aims. These provide; a positive dance learning experience for hospitalised school students; understanding the potential of dance as a learning medium and skill development for hospital school staff in teaching dance; awareness and understanding of the potential of dance for interested medical and therapeutic hospital staff, e.g. physiotherapists, psychologists, recreation and play therapists. People gain access to dance through opportunities for creative action and participation. Integrated Dance in action demonstrates the potential of the practice to act as a catalyst for change and growth in the individual and the group. Difference and the notion of ‘self’ and ‘other’ is intrinsic to this work, often provoking major attitude shifts, with each participant considering themselves in direct relation to other humans with whom they might not have otherwise worked. Integrated Dance offers considerable potential for including and valuing individual contributions. It provides a foundation for considering
that worked in this class was that I stayed and stuck it out. The consistent training and ongoing development of Company CHAOS members has produced Integrated Dance workshops with a mature professional standard and high level skills base. The level at which the core company’s Integrated Dance artists are able to work has achieved quality performance material and renowned success. A project of such quality was ‘In the Name of Love’ in 1999. The project explored sexuality, intimacy and relationship. In addition to workshops and rehearsals were family planning workshops, movie watching, lots of talking, social outings and a major performance season. Company CHAOS has up to thirteen core performers but for this project only eight were selected to perform. This was because those eight were highly experienced in their work as employed professional dancers and were mature enough to manage the content of the piece through performance. An important aspect of the project was that it truly emphasised the skill of the dancers involved. Each dancer had a completely individual sexual education and life experience. There was no normal. There was no common denominator. Each dancer had stories to share and secrets to keep. The workshop process covered deep and personal issues and was challenging and educational. The final piece was performed with integrity, professionalism and outstanding calibre. It is artists such as these whose accumulated skill opens up workshops to limitless exploration of improvisation, composition and collaborative choreography. It is important to acknowledge the culture of disabilities, which Integrated Dance work stems from, and the intrinsic skills that are specific to Integrated Dance practice. I ask you to consider the need for dance to be all inclusive, but at the same time to recognise and make advantageous the individual skills and styles by remarking and drawing on the differences rather than comparing or evaluating them. The classes I have led have included all types of disabilities and often have an indefinable mixture within the one class. Disabilities, as with human beings, are most individual and my aim as an Integrated Dance practitioner is to include any body who walks, wheels or crawls into my class. Hope to see you in a workshop some time. More Information View class and workshop footage of .
Restless Dance Company Sally Chance The atmosphere was electric. In August 1991, for one night only, ninety people with a disability and a small band of their carers and recreation supporters filled the Norwood Concert Hall in Adelaide. The dances represented the raw material of future work: complex solos, some totally unplanned; small groups stepping boldly into the space; large group pieces which needed to accommodate some performers deciding at the last minute whether they wanted to perform or not; the Aboriginal social group/ from one of Adelaide’s large residential institutions for people with an intellectual disability/ stomping their stuff to music by Yothu Yindi- all presented under huge ceiling-to-floor banners designed by some of the participants in separate visual arts workshops. This performance marked the culmination of a Carclew Youth Arts Centre community dance project called MOC Connections – a precursor to . Since those beginnings Restless has grown to encompass: • A youth performance ensemble, involving up to twenty people aged with and without an intellectual disability • A professional ensemble, involving five experienced dancers with an intellectual disability • Community cultural development projects, involving people of all ages in dance programs exploring the culture and identity of people with a disability. When I founded the company in 1991, I was motivated simply by a sense of social justice, of redressing the historical imbalance of dance not being available for people with a disability. I wanted to demonstrate that people with a disability could make dance too. Right from the start the company has worked with people with and without an intellectual disability to create dance theatre and run community dance workshops in which the dancers with a disability are the driving force. Encouraging the dancers with an intellectual disability to gain a genuine sense of their skill level is a continuing issue for the company. In the first year of his involvement with the youth ensemble one of the dancers would refer to the ‘teachers’, meaning everyone without a disability. He had internalised a sense of having a lower status than people who were actually his peers and whose role in the company he shared. Even the experienced professional ensemble members tend to defer to the ideas of people without a disability. Collaborators without a disability are deliberately positioned as guests of the group, in order to encourage the professional ensemble members to take their own skills seriously. The tendency among people with an intellectual disability to play down their own expertise needs to be gently redressed at every level. It is common in community dance contexts for support workers to change during the program, due to changing staff rosters and other
Support people are partners and allies in this important work. Mutual respect between support staff and the workshop leader is as essential for a successful project as building positive relationships with the participants. As a means of demonstrating the expertise of people with an intellectual disability, we use a team of co-leaders who work alongside the workshop leader in the company’s community cultural development programs. The early days were a huge challenge, because it took a long time to find out who could handle the role and even longer for those people to develop their skills. My valiant colleagues and I wondered for a long time whether we were setting up a token role for the whether the sheer challenge of involving them in the ebb and flow of the workshop served only to undermine them, and whether we had the energy to sustain the double role for us of running a group as well as finding ways in which the could meaningfully take some responsibility. Over time it has all been worth it! The co-leaders have come to operate as powerful role models for other people with an intellectual disability, demonstrating their expertise and supporting participants to recognise their own developing skills. In the early days of the company I described the methodology that evolved in the work of Restless as ‘reverse integration’. My use of the word integration took a term familiar to the disability sector- the principle that every person with a disability has the right to integrate into society, enjoying equal access to work, education, relationships, religion and politics – and then turned it on its head. Nowadays, disability sector policy has shifted to embrace a model of personal empowerment and the need for people with a disability to make their own choices. I like to think that Restless has always operated this way, but the initial concept of reverse integration was useful. Reverse integration referred to the idea that the dancers without a disability entered into an activity that they did not automatically own. In other words, they were the people having to do the integrating and find their place within a ‘normality’ defined by the others. They became the ‘other’. Material for a performance evolves from the dancers’ personal responses to improvisation tasks devised by the director. These ideas are then shaped, modified and positioned by the director in collaboration with the dancers. The dancers agree on the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ of the imagery in relation to the ideas they want to express. However, in performance there is always room for the subtle shifts of pacing or spacing by which the dancers with a disability make the material their own. If the
disability into a situation more usually experienced by the dancers with a disability. More interestingly though, the idea challenged the assumption that a young person with a disability would necessarily want to be more ‘normal’ by benchmarking their way of dealing with the dance workshop against the responses of the people without a disability, or to play down the qualities and style that they have because of their disabilities. Reverse integration as our working methodology did not disregard the drive in every person to fit in and be accepted, nor did it ignore the emotional and practical challenges faced by young people with an intellectual disability in other spheres of their lives. Its main focus was to establish a creative space, in which having an intellectual disability was advantageous and in which young people with an intellectual disability, with their intuition, idiosyncratic creativity and highly individual dance languages, could excel. Our thinking started to shift in an exciting way when one of the dancers with a disability began to talk about cultures of disability. This was articulated in terms of unique ways of speaking and thinking. These wonderful concepts freed up the thinking behind the work to become far more complex than the earlier notion of reverse integration. It is dynamic and positive, rather than defining itself in terms of what it is not. The disability culture model recognises that professional artists or community arts participants with a disability need to have their art viewed as art in its own right and not just as disabled art. In fact the company’s work had to achieve a certain amount of critical acclaim from audiences, arts colleagues and funding bodies in order to have the appropriate credibility to pursue the thought process of cultures of disability. Another major shift was the realisation that the emphasis on the performers with a disability risked alienating the performers without a disability, whose involvement in the company has always been a key aspect of the company’s success. Ironically, the dancers without a disability faced the kind of marginalisation that the company seeks to redress on behalf of people with a disability. I now feel that successful Integrated Dance work depends on providing separate talk space for the dancers with and without a disability to articulate their own perspective, particularly if the distinction between the roles of dancers with and without a disability is not marked with payment or other indicators. The dancers without a disability are now invited to meet regularly in a separate group to air everything from practical ways of supporting the dancers with a disability to in-depth discussions about the company’s aesthetic and ways of maintaining our ethos. An exciting development scheduled for the youth
Restless Dance Company’s Checklist for Support Workers • Participate as yourself as far as possible. We hope that you enjoy the workshop too! Your clients ideally need to experience the workshop alongside you. Your open, relaxed involvement validates the dance activity for your client. We are generally not happy to have people watching the workshop because this says it’s OK not to participate. (Regular group members are, of course, welcome to sit quietly for a while.) We are open to arranging certain occasions during the project for people to watch. This may be at the end of the whole project, or for the last ten minutes of each week, or at the halfway stage. • Designate prior to the workshop who will specifically support whom. If someone needs support during the workshop it needs to be provided within the group or by leaving the group for a short while with the person in that designated role for the session. This is to ensure the continuity of the workshop. • Your participants are the experts. People with an intellectual disability are often experts in an activity such as a creative dance class because of their ability to improvise and follow their own ideas. Supporters need to acknowledge this and tune in to the movement vocabulary the group is developing, particularly if they have missed a couple of weeks of workshops because of the staff roster or other circumstances. • Develop a sixth sense for when to provide support and when to leave space. This is to do with the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ of the workshop being decided on by the participants. People are only going ‘wrong’ if they are hurting or interrupting other people. The actual movement does not have rules to do with set rhythms, steps, right/left or use of the room. Creative dance does not aim for everyone doing the same move at the same time. It’s more to do with creating the same mood as a group or sharing the same moves but performing them in your own time. • Enjoy the workshops! Feel free to ask the workshop leader any questions or to feed back any worries or thoughts you may have. We aim to balance our experience in creative dance with your knowledge and understanding of your clients with their interests and ideas. A dance project is a dialogue, in which we value the input of everyone
Ellin Krinsley Ellin Krinsley is a community artist sharing story telling and nonstylised movement with diverse groups in Sydney. She has completed a Masters of Inter-Cultural Performance at the University of Wollongong. Jeff Meiners is currently a researcher and lecturer at the University of South Australia’s school of Education. Jeff has taught extensively, directed movement for children’s theatre, and works with government arts and education organizations and international dance projects. Earlier in Jeff’s career he was the leader of a dance education team in London. Jeff has worked as manager of Outreach Projects, leading projects with young children, youth dance and dancers with disability, and with dance company outreach programs including , the , and with . Jeff was Australia Council Dance Board’s Community Representative and in 2009 an Australian Dance Award winner for Outstanding Services to Dance Education. Jeff’s current doctoral research focuses on factors impacting upon the construction and realization of an inclusive primary school dance curriculum. Andrew Morrish has vast experience in performance, teaching and researching in the areas of improvisation, performance and therapy. Andrew is a Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield. He has toured internationally as an improvisational dancer with groups such as Neil Thomas’ Urban Dream Capsule, and his movement theatre duet Trotman and Morrish. Andrew has developed various international collaborative relationships, which allow him to continue to research and perform improvisational performance. Kat Worth has a Bachelor of Arts Dance from the University of Adelaide, has worked as an independent choreographer in Adelaide, Sydney and northern NSW, and as a lecturer at the Northern Rivers Conservatorium Arts Centre. After dancing and teaching with , Kat has worked with Integrated Dance in community centres, dance companies, respite programs, festivals and schools. Kat is the founder and previously worked as the Artistic Director of ‘Company CHAOS’ Integrated Dance Movement Theatre Inc. Kat has also worked as Artistic Director of Restless Dance Company, where she developed a movement and music program for young children with developmental delay. Kat is currently the Director of , providing experience in improvisation, expressive movement and dance for adults, children and babies. Neridah Wyatt-Spratt Neridah Wyatt-Spratt is involved in integrated improvisation and has performed with Isthmus, five women who are exploring movement in aerial and physical theatre. Neridah has worked at as a project officer, where she designed, developed and taught inclusive arts programs.