Arts Activated Transcript: Track 8 - 21st September 2016

Professional Practice: Diversity and Career Sustainability

SPEAKER:
Hello everybody. Does anyone want to move down the front of a little bit closer? No, you can all hear?
OK, so we're going to kick off today. This session is called professional practice, diversity and career sustainability. We’ve got three fabulous artists here to talk to you this afternoon. They are established from Australia and New Zealand, and we are going to be talking about bridging the gap between disability arts and the mainstream, the career successes of each of these three artists and some of the challenges they faced along the way, international touring, what's working and what changes and their passion about creating in that context.
I'm Mandy Chang. I'm head of arts at the ABC, on ABC TV and iView arts channel. Next we have Suzanne Cowan, a choreographer with a PhD. I’ll let Suzanne talk about her experiences and her career, but just to quickly introduce Kate Hood, who is the artistic director of Raspberry Ripple productions, who again has an amazingly eclectic career and is also the deputy chair of (unknown term) Equity Diversity Committee.
And finally, Emma J Hawkins was the artistic director... a proud member of the Equity Diversity Committee, has been performing since the age of 10. But I'm just going to hand over to each of these three ladies to talk a little bit about their practice, their career and their journey, and then throw it over to some questions for you.
Would you like to kick off for us, Suzanne?
SUZANNE COWAN:
So, I'm Suzanne Cowan, I'm based in New Zealand and am just a little bit about a pathway today. I actually started as a dancer as a child and then at the age of 22, I acquired a spinal injury. So I didn't really see dance as being part of my career at that point. Ten years later I came across a dance company in New Zealand… I saw them perform in 1998 and I thought, that looks really fun, I’ve got to try that. So the next year I was in my first show with Touch Compass and I enjoyed that.
A few months later I got a job with Candoco Dance Company in London that has dancers with disabilities. I joined them and I had no idea what I was getting into. It was pretty much learning on the job. I hadn't trained at an institution as a professional dancer. I just had to make it up as I went along. For a while I felt like a complete fraud. It was an amazing experience. In 3.5 years we toured around 20 countries.
You sort of have to become like an arts diplomat, you're meeting and greeting lots of people in those countries and other artists, lots of people with disabilities and opening up possibilities in the arts, full of different people. So that was a very exciting time.
I went back to New Zealand after that and I became instantly developing my own work and also, I wanted to reflect on all the experiences that I had. I was really interested in what kind of aesthetic a dancer with a disability creates. What does that mean? What does it mean to be a dancer with a disability? What is different about them? …

I did a Masters of Creative Arts and considered the differences between the classical body and the grotesque. And I explored the aesthetics of the freak show.
With my dance partner we created two different characters... Coincidently, we're performing this duet a year later in London. It’s had quite a life, that piece.
What interested me most about the settings that disabled answers create, what makes us unique and really exploring and exaggerating that uniqueness. And because I sort of got the research bug, a few years later I went back to university to study dance at the University of Auckland.
Practice and research means that the practice is what generates the theory for the written thesis. There was something satisfying about doing an in-depth project, having the opportunity to reflect on what is important to me and how to develop work as a philosophical enquiry, as opposed to just making something that just gets bums on seats.
And also, the idea that the theories generate the practice and influence the practice is quite inspiring. Like any creative process, you can't predict how it is going to turn out. My creative practice PhD… many illusions, and some people refer to the process as a three-year pregnancy. So I started mine as a part-time student because I thought I might go crazy spending summertime over books and a computer. I wanted to test it out to see if it was something I wanted to do.
What I discovered in the process was that I fell in love with philosophy, and I’d just come back from a summer school in the Netherlands with a very exciting philosopher called Rosi Braidotti. She talked about post-humanism, which amongst other things is about valuing difference and acknowledging the diversity of life, not just humans, have value on this planet.
It's about critiquing what has been regarded as normative in creating unnecessary barriers in society and a kind of body fascism. There is a big overlap with disability studies when we are talking about difference, as if there is a human template, but within any species there is difference, and to be different is not to be less than. We are just different.
This seems simple and straightforward, but actually is a radical shift in mainstream thinking, what I sometimes referred to as the master language.
I think is a bigger picture here for disability arts… predict lifestyles extensive with experience as a valuable counterculture. My own research explores the idea that we are extended bodies, that we are not fixed, contained, separate bodies, but we extend into other bodies, objects and even places.
We are embedded in the world, not separate from it. For example, when I'm in the dance studio I am a swelling, fast moving, churning body that tears up the space. And when I'm faced with a steep, grassy hill, I become multiple arms and legs and other bodies help propel me up the slope. From this perspective, identity exists on a continuum which shifts and fluctuates according to the terrain and circumstances.
I've explored the idea of the extended body for bodily suspensions, the idea of inhabiting in-between spaces that suspend meaning and invite new interpretations and experiences of time and space. I’ve got a couple of examples.
So this first photograph is me hanging horizontally from a bamboo pole attached with ropes to a tree overlooking the sea and looking upwards towards the sky. I'm dressed in the Supergirl outfit, with red tights, a blue shirt and a long red cape that hangs to the ground. So in this photo I'm launching my debut as ethical Supergirl, which is a body of work I developed to extend the component of the ethical body. What I mean by an ethical component is that I'm considering the ethics of exactly how we extend into the world.
And the Super-crip is how we are referenced as (inaudible) and how we reference our limitations. I’m going to speed things up.
This is actually my wheelchair suspended from a tree in Auckland. By suspending my wheelchair, I'm proposing that it suspends its meaning, so it's no longer grounded and it's not about functionality, and it invites your interpretation. So when I talk about an extended body I'm definitely not talking about erasing differences between us in what's called a kind of pan-humanism where we are all one, not at all. It seems to be acknowledged, understood and worked with. That is what creates complexity, diversity and richness of life.
I have long struggled with the idea of identifying myself as a disabled artist, and actually, I really dislike the word “disability”. It is so wrong on so many different levels. I do understand the political implications of identifying with a social model, the idea that I'm not disabled, it’s the environment. But the word disabled seems like such a psychological and political cul-de-sac. So I propose the idea that we are not disabled, but we are extended bodies, we extend into the world, not separate from it, but intrinsically embedded within it, and our devices and other people. We extend into the world socially, relationally and politically.
As artists we send into our audiences and shape their perceptions. As extended bodies we have a concept of fluidity, where we connect and disconnect. What is exciting about being an artist is that we have the freedom to explore different paradigms and conceptualisations of ourselves, and move beyond binary distinctions of being able to and disabled. It's not about being assimilated into the world, it's more about redefining the world in which we live. Living in a culture where disability is seen as reductive and generally not valued, rethinking identity seems an absolute given.
And performance is incredibly effective way to explore it, because it hits people at different levels, emotionally, aesthetically and politically. Through my performance installations, I try to create spaces that take the audience out of their comfort zone and offer new interpretations and new meanings. I see art as a vehicle for social change and also as an end in itself. It is an opportunity to generate juicy preconceptions of ourselves and alternative routes to what otherwise seems to be a never-ending treadmill of trying to validate ourselves in the so-called nondisabled world.
(Applause)
MANDY CHANG:
Thank you. Thanks Suzanne, that was fascinating. Kate. Welcome and I look forward to hearing what you've got to say.
KATE HOOD:
As Mandy said, I'm deputy chair of the Diversity Committee at Actors Equity. I'm an actor and writer and director. I want to give you a bit of background on myself because it leads into what I want to talk about, which is the importance of disability in... I spent the first 20+ years of my working life as an able-bodied actor, working for major theatre companies like… Hit Productions. I also worked in music with Gordon Frost, and in television. I did the show Prisoner in 1842.

(Laughter)
[Olivia.Captioner is Live]
I am still known well in the mainstream district. Despite that and my obvious intelligence remaining intact, I was not considered for television a decade after becoming a wheelchair user.
But things have changed recently. I was cast in 'Neighbours' and I am back on board, and guess what, being paid penalty rates!
(Applause)
Really the most important thing about this for me is that a disabled actor has been cast as playing a disabled character in a series we may or may not like that is known globally and has fans.
Young people look at this and say yes, that is something I can aspire to. That's really important to me. Just this year I formed a theatre company known as Atypical Theatre Company and we did our first production called 'Annunciation' with the support of arts Victoria.
In the workshop stage when we were searching for what we would do in the show we tackled new material, some Shakespeare, some Joanna Murray Smith, from her work in 'lovechild' where her character discovers her mother was disabled. This was not in the play. We just put it in. We explored three things, loving, disability, success.
I'm happy to say we got good reviews, and the performance was mentioned in the reviews, and having able-bodied people put it together was mentioned. This is really important to me. I am passionate about ending the silo of abled performance, and putting disabled bodies on stage. After all we live in this world, and yet they are not put on the stage. I think it's time they were.
Through my work as a mainstream actor, I have really worked to make change in my mainstream industry. As an able-bodied performer and writer in the mainstream I would really like to add to the work that has been done through performance.
I believe disability that performance will really need to things and attracting these bodies is really important for cross-fertilisation in the industry. I'm really passionate about providing access for people in the industry. I believe that it will depend on the impact. Rather than trying to break into the mainstream industry for years, we may do better to bring able-bodied performers to us.
I believe we can tell stories that audiences are interested in hearing right now. We can build capacity in the mainstream by telling stories to open audience minds and give them the experiences. I'm going to Skip a few pages here.
Disability led. What does that mean? Here is the definition I use. The definition of disability led applies to organisations in which the CEO or lead create and 50% or more of staff have identified as having a disability.
That means that much of the aims and impacts of the organisation comes from people with a disability. This problem in Australia. Almost all of our disability programs in the arts and other environments is run by able-bodied people.
For me that is unacceptable. In other parts of the world I think that doesn't happen and we need to catch up. I think the assumption that a person with a disability is not capable, will let the team down, will let you down, is a massive coprolites to include, in short, that is going to be a letdown to include.
Actually, they can talk was about being remarkable and acceptable whilst making sure we are never in charge of our own potential.
Let's be clear, funding streams that are available to us leave us competing for a very thin slice of the cake. That leaves us working and living in poverty. I want to see disabled arts administrators and financiers overseeing the distribution of money to disabled artists. Why not? It has to be said there's always a reluctance by those that have the power in any situation to hand that over willingly.
Especially when that power is being handed over to someone perceived as being less than. There is a saying in the disability community, nothing about set by us.
What does that mean in the industry? We need access to training, workplaces, opportunities. We need access most of all within the arts. I say that because I believe passionately that the arts can lead in creating social change.
To me, the function of the arts is to subvert clichéd ways of being, to challenge accepted ways of seeing the world. It's very possible for a disabled person to be trained up to take on a position of leadership and also very possible for our leadership positions to be shared with the person with disability.
And that would be the beginning of the creation of a pathway that would lead to an initiative to be disabilities and that would then create professional capacity and provide another role model for disabled artists.
It needs to be said in our industry that people with disability don't get the same opportunities as everyone else. What opportunities are not therefore advancement, there are not tools for the mainstream to draw on.
So these people need to be sought out and embraced as a vital part of society and creators. I think if we say that human rights are a crucial part we cannot any longer turn away from the idea that celebrating diversity needs to be a core part of what we are doing now and the increasing disability led initiatives will inform the creation of original and creative work.
That work can dissolve the divide between mainstream and disability arts which is something I am passionate about working towards.
We also need to turn away from the fact that disability is always the last thing or the least. This is something I encounter always in my will. Disability is always the last thing mentioned not first. It goes like this. Women in arts, indigenous arts, LGBTIQ.
The indigenous population of Australia sits at 2%. Indigenous representation in performing arts it's at 5%, a truly great achievement and one we should all be proud of.
It has become abhorrent in Australia and around the world for actors to play them which is why we see increasing numbers of them on the screen.
The disabled population sits at 18%, disabled representation on screen is 4%. There's no disabled characters on screen. Overseas and here, the vast majority are played by able-bodied actors, many who have won Oscars for it.
It's time for us to say that if it's not OK to black up, it's not OK to crip up. It's time for every single person to be seen. The great thing about the arts, to me, a function. We think back to the audience as artists about what they go through.
What is fed back about disability is that we have no aspirations, no capabilities, and certainly cannot be the person we can be. Today, in organisations, we don't see people with disability as teachers, academics, arts administrators, or disabled people as art leaders.
It's like we're not there in the mainstream and if we are seen at all, it's Siloed away.
The influence can be used to run business, increasing the creative machine. It's about walking the talk of inclusivity, acknowledging progress is possible without change. And those who can't change their mind cannot change anything.
(Applause)
MANDY CHANG:
Thank you, Kate. Last but not least, we have Emma J Hawkins.
EMMA HAWKINS:
Hi, everyone. Don't worry, my speeches short like me. I am an artist and art director of Atypical Theatre Company.
My quote is that I have a bag of tricks bigger than myself. It is essential to know that you have a sense of humour in this industry.
For me, although I have had success in the industry, it's not be lasting. I used the analogy of a snakes and ladders game. If you have made it to the top, you think you are a winner, but then you find a snake and you're sliding right down to the bottom as a struggling artist again.
It feels like every time you have a mini life crisis. You ask the questions, are you actually any good at this and the effort I put in, the bank balance I have?
It was of course very lucky to get these roles, but it was very hard to get these roles. I was working very hard at auditions.
I have been a professional artist for just over 17 years now. It's been a lot of bloody hard work, it's been exhausting a lot of the time, and I have had to bend and grow as an actor.
[Johnabbate.Captioner is Live]