Disability Arts History Australia

Items

• “The documentary series ‘You Can't Ask That’ premieres in 2016”
  The ABC started a documentary series in 2016 called ‘You Can't Ask That,’ which asks "outrageous, uncomfortable and shocking questions to uncover the truth behind some of the most marginalised and misunderstood Australians." The series has featured episodes focused on people with short stature, Downs syndrome, schizophrenia, and autism, Deaf people, blind people, and wheelchair users.
• Bruce Gladwin
• Lisa Havilah
• "DADAA - The Lost Generation Project"
  DADAA - The Lost Generation Project 2007 - reads, in part "The project was conceived from a partnership between DADAA and the WA Disability Services Commission, which began in 2002. After working on 15 small projects, the partners decided to develop a large-scale project in 2007 to continue developing arts and cultural interventions with and for people with intellectual disability living in supported accommodation across the Perth metropolitan area. The project's rich CACD strategy has seen numerous successful workshops, exhibitions and related projects come to fruition in partnership with local governments and other community arts organisations.?
• Arts Access Society Inc. (Victoria)
• Arts Access Victoria
• “Commonwealth Disability Strategy launched in December 1994”
  The Commonwealth Disability Strategy was launched in December 1994. The strategy was meant to ensure compliance by Commonwealth Departments with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) (passed in 1992). The Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House reports that “Results have been uneven, especially in employment, but the Act has made some breakthroughs on education and disability access in new buildings.”
• “The South Australian Film Corporation announces their disability screen strategy”
  The South Australian Film Corporation launched their disability screen strategy. First, their Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2022-2032, which they say “breaks new ground nationally,” defines quantifiable 10-year targets. In addition, the SAFC has developed a Disability Equality Plan, Targeted Diversity Attachments, the FULL TILT Short Documentary Initiative, and Film Lab: New Voices, a feature film development program presented by SAFC with Adelaide Film Festival and Mercury CX.
• “2023 Screen industry report ‘Disability and Screen Work in Australia’ finds disabled people fulfil a range of roles in the screen industry, despite facing prejudice and exclusion, and should be treated as experts of their access requirements”
  ‘Disability and Screen Work in Australia: Report for Industry’ (2023) was compiled by researchers Radha O’Meara, Laura Dunstan, Anna Debinski and Catherine Ryan. The study was supported by Melbourne Disability Institute and A2K Media. The authors summarise that disabled people fulfil a range of roles in the screen industry, despite facing prejudice and exclusion, and should be treated as experts of their access requirements. They find that “Disabled people experience a more precarious, lower paid, and less powerful position in the screen industry than their non-disabled counterparts.” O’Meara and her colleagues call for widespread change in the industry to expand access.
• ”Hadley, Bree, Paterson, Eddie, & Little, Madeleine (2022) Quick Trust and Slow Time: Relational Innovations in Disability Performing Arts Practice. International Journal of Disability and Social Justice, 2(1), pp. 74-94.”
  "Despite a range of policies, plans, protocols and funding programmes to support disabled artists and collaborations between mainstream producers and disabled artists, the statistics – at least in our context in Australia – suggest most disability art still occurs outside and alongside an industry that struggles to include these artists. In this article, we draw upon findings from a series of workshops with disabled artists around Australia, conducted as part of the ARC funded Disability in the Performing Arts in Australia: Beyond The Social Model project – known colloquially to its collaborators and participants as ‘The Last Avant Garde’ project (https://lastavantgarde.com.au) – to propose a new approach. We find that while provision of logistical access (ramps, hearing loops, interpreters) and ideological access (stories, characters, discourse and language) is critical, so is methodological access, which embodies disability culture in training, rehearsal and production processes. Disabled artists use crip culture, along with relational space and time to negotiate what happens in disability arts and culture production practices and work through desire, fear, vulnerability and reciprocity to rapidly establish trusting collaborations."
• "Bree Hadley, Gerard Goggin, Petra Kuppers, Colette Conroy, Meagan Shand, Donna McDonald, Martin Paten, Norm Horton, Sarah Moynigan, Veronica Pardo, Caroline Bowditch, Morwenna Collett, Kerry Comerford, David Doyle, Pat Swell, Clark Crystal, Peter Stuart (2019) The NDIS and disability arts in Australia: Opportunities and challenges. Australasian Drama Studies, 74, pp. 9-38."
  "In Australia, disabled people’s participation in the arts has historically been afforded by means of direct-to-organisation grants that arts, community services or disability services arms of government award to arts organisations, charities or disability service organisations, who then deliver programmes. The introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is creating wide-reaching changes for disability arts practice in Australia. We undertake a first step in addressing the need for research into how the NDIS will alter the landscape of disability arts practice in Australia. We highlight a set of questions that all performing and creative arts industry stakeholders will need to respond to, in order to ensure that the excellent work done in disability arts in Australia to date can continue in the new climate that the NDIS brings."
• "Bree Hadley (2014) Disability, Public Space Performance, and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers. London: Palgrave Macmillan."
  "Why would disabled people want to re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the everyday encounters in public spaces and places that cast them as ugly, strange, stare-worthy? In Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley examines the performance practices of disabled artists in the US, UK, Europe and Australasia who do exactly this. Operating in a live or performance art paradigm, artists like James Cunningham (Australia), Noemi Lakmaier (UK/Austria), Alison Jones (UK), Aaron Williamson (UK), Katherine Araniello (UK), Bill Shannon (US), Back to Back Theatre (Australia), Rita Marcalo (UK), Liz Crow (UK) and Mat Fraser (UK) all use installation and public space performance practices to re-stage their disabled identities in risky, guerilla-style works that remind passersby of their own complicity in the daily social drama of disability. In doing so, they draw spectators' attention to their own role in constructing Western concepts of disability. This book investigates the way each of us can become unconscious performers in a daily social drama that positions disability people as figures of tragedy, stigma or pity, and the aesthetics, politics and ethics of performance practices that intervene very directly in this drama. It constructs a framework for understanding the way spectators are positioned in these practices, and how they contribute to public sphere debates about disability today."
• "Rachel Carling-Jenkins, Mark Serry (2014) Disability and social movements: learning from Australian experiences. Burlington : Ashgate Publishing Company"
  Reads, in part "This book provides the reader with a ground-breaking understanding of disability and social movements. By describing how disability is philosophically, historically, and theoretically positioned, Carling-Jenkins is able to then examine disability relationally through an evaluation of the contributions of groups engaged in similar human rights struggles. The book locates disability rights as a new social movement and provides an explanation for why disability has been divided rather than united in Australia.."
• "Queensland Government (2024) Arts and Disability Plan. 25 September 2024. https://www.arts.qld.gov.au/projects-and-initiatives/arts-and-disability-plan-web"
  Reads, in part "The Queensland Government acknowledges the rights of people with disability to participate equally in the state’s cultural life and to have the opportunity to develop and use their creative, artistic and intellectual potential, as recognised in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability."
• "Commonwealth of Australia (2017) “National Arts Disability Strategy Evaluation Report 2013–2015.” Canberra: Meeting of Cultural Ministers."
  Reads, in part "The second Evaluation Report was endorsed by cultural ministers in September 2017. It concludes that progress continues to be made against the Strategy. It also identifies that there have been significant changes to the arts and disability sector since the release of the Strategy in 2009 such as the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme."
• "Commonwealth of Australia (2019) Key Results of the 2018 Public Consultation: National Arts and Disability Strategy. Canberra: An initiative of the Meeting of Cultural Ministers"
  Reads, in part "Between 24 September and 3 December 2018, people shared their stories and ideas about arts and disability in Australia. The Meeting of Cultural Ministers asked to hear these ideas and stories. The Meeting of Cultural Ministers is made up of the Cultural Ministers from the Australian Government and state and territory governments. The statistics in the report all come from the online survey. These ideas and stories will help Ministers to make a new National Arts and Disability Strategy.
• "Christopher Newall (1996). The Disability Rights Movement in Australia: A note from the trenches. Disability & Society, 11(3), 429–432. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599627705"
  Reads, in part “A recent visitor to Australia from the UK commented to me on their return ‘I looked in vain for the disability rights movement. Can you tell me where they are?’ In essence, the Australia disability rights movement is currently fragmented, predominantly organised around disease labels and seems to have lost ground, compared with the self-help initiatives fostered around the time of the International Year of the Disabled Persons in 1981.”
• “Australia Council - People with a disability - attendance at cultural events 2008"
  Australia Council - People with a disability - attendance at cultural events 2008 - reads, in part "A 2003 survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that over 40 per cent of people with a disability went to the cinema. According to the 2003 Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers, one in five people in Australia reported that they had a disability which restricted their everyday activities and which had lasted, or was expected to last, for at least six months."
• "Australia Council - Annual Report 1997-98"
  Australia Council Annual Report 1997-98 - discusses letter from chair of council, functions, profile, organisation chart, corporate overview, year in review, arts funding, main activities of Council and its Boards, and includes professional development activities, financial statements and lists of grants made including grants for programs, projects, information and advocacy with producing a set of Disability Fact Packs exploring the importance of accessibility for arts and cultural organisations and a guide to marketing arts to disabled audience
• "Bree Hadley (2019) Advocacy, allies, and 'allies of convenience' in performance and performative protest. In Grehan, H (Ed.) The Routledge companion to theatre and politics (Routledge Theatre and Performance Companions). Routledge, United Kingdom, pp. 85-88.”
  "Though allies have always played a role in the production of political performance, analysis of the work of disabled artists, women artists, queer artists, and artists of colour has yet to be combined with analysis of the work of allies addressing the same issues. In this chapter, I consider the practice of allies in a specific context, social media performance, as a newly emerging platform for political activism. After tracing the way allies are typically involved in political performance about, with, and by marginalised people and communities, I point to complexities arising when activists, campaigners, entertainers, and pranksters use new online platforms in performance that purport to support the same cause.
• Urban Theatre Projects
• Force Majeure
• Danielle Micich
• Rose Dennis
• “Inaugural High Beam festival in 1998”
  High Beam was a biennial community-based disability arts festival. It was a joint initiative of SPARC Disability Foundation and Arts In Action (through the direction of Tony Doyle). (Arts in Action later became Arts Access SA.) The 10-day event was the first of its kind in the Southern hemisphere, attracting around 20,000 people at each festival. The festival showcased theatre, dance, comedy, and music. Some celebrity artists included Adam Hills and David Helfgott. The inaugural festival (1998) invited Swedish Disability Theatre Company Mooms Teatern to perform; the company also conducted workshops with a disability-led Australian theatre company, No Strings Attached. This first festival was also the site of Tutti's first public performance as a choir.