Disability Arts History Australia

Items

• "Morwenna Collett, Gill Nicol (2024) Building Strong Foundations: Research on arts and disability needs and opportunities, Creative Australia, 2024."
  "This report is a summary of an arts and disability needs and audit conducted in 2023 for Creative Australia. Through desktop research and consultation with d/Deaf and disabled artists and creative workers, peak bodies and broader arts and cultural organisations, this research provides insights into needs and opportunities in the arts and disability ecology in Australia."
• "Interview with Kate Larsen"
  Kate Larsen (she/her) is a writer, consultant, leader and advocate with Australian and international experience in the arts and disability sector. Interview Summary Kate Larsen (she/her) is a recognised arts and disability advocate who emphasises the importance and inherent politics of self-expression and access in the arts. A non-disabled ally, Kate was influenced to pursue a career in the sector by the profound impact of learning about the social model of disability, which sparked a commitment to creating opportunities for and by disabled individuals. Larsen's work has involved fostering leadership among disabled artists and arts workers, advocating for disability-led organisations, and driving systemic change within Australia’s arts and cultural sector. She hopes to see continued progress towards equity and representation in the arts, with the NDIS playing a crucial role, and an increased presence of disabled artists, arts workers and leaders in mainstream organisations.
• "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
• "Interview with Morwenna Collett"
  Morwenna is a leader, consultant and facilitator in the arts, government, not-for-profit and university sectors and is passionate about helping arts and cultural organisations to include everyone in their work. Interview Summary Morwenna Collett is a consultant in diversity, access and inclusion and during the interview discusses her vast experience in the disability arts sector including time in the Australia Council where she played a key role in creating the first targeted funding program for artists with disabilities. Morwenna notes that while disability arts is gaining some awareness with mainstream audiences, there are still issues regarding how people think about the quality of art created by artists with disabilities. Morwenna highlights the NDIS as a significant milestone for disability arts in Australia, though she believes that there is much more potential for arts organizations to engage with it. Morwenna also emphasizes that the decision for artists to identify with their disability is a personal choice and it is becoming increasingly safe to disclose this identity, demonstrating progress toward inclusion in the arts.
• "Bree Hadley, Eddie Paterson, Madeleine Little, Kath Duncan (2024) How Disability Performance Travels in Australia: The Reality Under the Rhetoric. In Czymoch, Christiane, Maguire Rossier, Kate, & Schmidt, Yvonne (Eds.) How Does Disability Performance Travel?: Access, Art, and Internationalization. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, pp. 62-76.”
  "The last three decades has witnessed the development of a distinct narrative about how disability performance has become a much celebrated component of the Australian theatre landscape. A central aspect of this narrative is the critical importance of festivals, events, and other industry initiatives that allow disabled performers to travel - both conceptually and corporeally - to meet and be mentored by other artists, and to present their work to new and more mainstream audiences, in new spaces and places, around the country, and around the world. In this chapter, we draw on historical data, collected as part of an AusStage ARC LIEF project designed to database information about disability drama, theatre, performance, and dance over the past 100 years, as well as the Last Avant Garde ARC Linkage project on disability performance in Australia, to unpack areas where the reality seems to challenge some of the dominant rhetoric."
• "Australia Council - Disability Fact Pack 1998"
  The website reads “Outlines a variety of issues for arts organisations regarding people with disabilities including access, attitude, employment and discrimination” - Noelene Gration
• Back to Back Theatre
• “Screen Australia commissions the reports ‘Seeing Ourselves’ (2016) and ‘Seeing Ourselves 2’ (2023)”
  In 2016, Screen Australia commissioned a report "Seeing ourselves: Reflections on diversity in Australian TV drama". The report highlighted the lack of characters on TV with a disability. When characters with a disability were part of the story they were played by actors without a disability and were portrayed as either unemployed or retired. Screen Australia commissioned a follow-up report in 2023 called "Seeing Ourselves 2 - Diversity, equity and inclusion in Australian TV drama". This report shows that, while diversity is a global conversation and there is an increase of disability representation, it remained significantly lower than the actual disabled population.
• "Interview with Paul Constable Calcott"
  Uncle Paul Constable Calcott is a proud Wiradjuri man and artist living with a disability on Gubbi Gubbi country….. Uncle Paul uses his art to share stories of his journey as an aboriginal gay man living with a disability in urban Australia. Interview Summary Uncle Paul Calcott is a proud Wiradjuri elder and disability advocate who contracted polio as a child. During the interview, Uncle Paul discusses becoming an artist later in life through the encouragement of his husband and influenced by the storytelling of his culture. He embraces his identity as an Aboriginal, gay man living with disability. He talks about his artwork aiming to celebrate the achievements and contributions of people with disabilities, using traditional symbols to tell new stories, particularly about disability within Indigenous communities. Although there has been increased visibility and acknowledgment of disability arts in Australia, Paul notes that there's still a long way to go in terms of policy, funding, and public recognition. Uncle Paul says art can reflect political and social issues, and he proudly identifies as an artist with a disability and believes in the significance of diverse stories being told through the arts.
• "The first Arts Activated conference takes place"
  Accessible Arts NSW started biennial Arts Activated conferences in 2007 "to inform, connect and activate people and organisations involved with Australia’s arts and disability sector" https://aarts.net.au/arts-activate/
• Neridah Wyatt-Spratt
• "Accessible Arts - ACE Arts Creativity Expression - Dave King - Article: DADAA - Disability in the Arts/Disadvantage in the Arts- Iss5, Pg3"
  Accessible Arts - ACE Arts Creativity Expression - Dave King - Article: DADAA - Disability in the Arts/Disadvantage in the Arts- Iss5, Pg3reads, in part "DISABILITY IN THE ARTS/DISADVANTAGED IN THE ARTS AUSTRALIA (DADAA) is a group of artists/art workers who represent the states and territories of Australia. Its members are representatives from those groups who work towards artistic empowerment and filling the creative needs of people with disabilities - that is to name a few, ACCESSIBLE ARTS and ARTS ACCESS. All the current members attended a meeting in July. They all work with people with disabilities and three have disabilities. The inaugural meeting was held in late 1990. This group was formed to facilitate and maintain a responsive external overview of the trends in the arts for those experiencing disadvantage or a disability."
• Gerard Goggin
• ”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."
• “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.
• "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."
• No Strings Attached
• “Choose Art, the Australian accessible arts directory, is launched”
  The Australian accessible arts directory Choose Art was launched in 2019. It is an initiative of Arts Access Victoria, designed for and by Deaf and disabled people. Choose Art is a Commonwealth project supported by the Cultural Ministers of each State and Territory through Arts ACT; Arts Tasmania; Create NSW; Creative Victoria; Culture and Arts WA; Arts South Australia; Arts Queensland; Department of Tourism and Culture, NT and the Federal Minister through the Department of Communications and the Arts. Arts Access Victoria has created Choose Art in partnership with Arts Access Australia, Access2Arts, Access Arts, Accessible Arts, Arts Access Darwin, Belconnen Arts Centre, DADAA and Incite Arts.
• National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)
• ”Bree Hadley, Janice Rieger, Sarah Barron, Sarah Boulton, Catherine Parker (2023) Codesigning Access: A New Approach to Cultures of Inclusion in Museums and Galleries. In Cachia, Amanda (Ed.) Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, pp. 183-195.”
  "In museums and galleries, access is often designed and implemented by staff and informed by regulations and guidelines. Codesign approaches have the potential to shift this understanding away from designing access “for” visitors and toward access as a creative process developed “with” visitors. This chapter focuses on the exhibition and practice-led research project Vis-ability: Artworks from the QUT Art Collection, which was presented at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Art Museum in Australia in 2019. Vis-ability represented the culmination of five years of international research into access in museums and galleries for visitors who are blind or have low vision."
• “The Victorian Government commissions ‘Picture This: Increasing the Cultural Participation of People with a Disability in Victoria’”
  In 2008, ‘Picture This: Increasing the Cultural Participation of People with a Disability in Victoria’ was published. The report was commissioned by the Victorian Government, specifically the Victorian Office for Disability in partnership with Arts Victoria and Disability Services Division and written by Kim Dunphy and Petra Kuppers. It focussed on methods to increase participation by people with disability in the arts as artists and audience members.
• "Arts Access Australia appoints Emma Bennison (2012) and Megan Shand (2017) as CEO"
  Prior CEO Kate Larsen statesin 'Disability Leadership: If You're Gonna Talk the Talk .... ABC: Ramp Up, 30 March 2012' - "Now, I love my job. I'm good at it. I think that I've been useful here. But on the same day I accepted the position last February I also did something else. I gave notice of my resignation, and undertook to hand over the organisation by the end of 2012. The reason? Because I believe that Arts Access Australia should be led by a person with disability."
• "Bree Hadley (2017) Disability, Sustainability, Austerity: The Bolshy Divas Arts-Based Protests Against Policy Paradoxes. Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts Journal 18 Spring. http://www.sustainablepractice.org."
  "In this short article, I want consider some of the ways theatrical artists, activists and advocates in Australia are tackling the paradoxical relationship between sustainability and austerity discourses, and, as a result, some changes this may be starting to produce in disabled people’s aesthetic prerogatives. For the last 30 years, artists, activists and scholars in Australia and beyond have avoided casting disability in terms of trauma, crisis, catastrophe and disaster. Accounts of the way disability theatre challenges stereotypes , as well as analysis of disability signifiers in screen, stage, and social performance , have expressed concern about deploying disability as a metaphor for disaster, or defining disabled people as monstrous, tragic, stoic, or inspirational, the way the medical model of disability traditionally defines us. Instead, modern disabled artists and the scholars who analyse them have advocated for work that deploys live art, performance art, and performative intervention in public space to challenge stereotypes, oppressive institutional systems, and other factors the social model of disability sees as the cause of disability oppression .In the last few years, though, there has been an increase in work that does associate disability with trauma, tragedy and disaster, in what seems to be a response to austerity, accountability and economic sustainability agendas that call for cuts to disability services spending to make our societies more sustainable going forward."
• "Maree Roche, Ben Whitburn (2019) Mate, You’re Crippin’ Us Out: Biopolitics of the Arts Curriculum in Australia and the Swinging Identities of Dis/abilities. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies.13(3). https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2019.25"
  Reads, in part "The article explores arts curriculum in Australia as developed in the contexts of schooling, community organizations, and higher education for people with disabilities and mental health concerns. Motivated to explore whether or not students provided access to modified arts curriculum are engaging in education or receiving therapy, the aim is to address a dichotomy that is seemingly present in educational institutions, but extends well beyond the school gate and informs organizational responses to arts in the lives of people with disabilities. Resourced with the theoretical contributions of dis/ability studies for its concern for the biopolitics of disability, the authors weave personal experiences through the discussion of participation in arts throughout their lives. The article concludes with a theoretical discussion of how arts provision in the Australian context might develop the social and political value of art in the lives of people with dis/abilities and for all, on the basis that its educative value is emphasized over its therapeutic one."
• "Bree Hadley (2020) Allyship in disability arts: Roles, relationships, and practices. Research in Drama Education, 25(2), pp. 178-194.”
  "In this article, I propose that investigation of allies, ally skills, and allyship in disability arts is overdue. I articulate some of ways in which non-arts approaches to allyship need to be adapted to meet the needs of disabled artists, given the aesthetic as well as professional and social dimensions of allyship distinctive to disability arts. In doing so, I highlight the need for new theory, terminology, and frameworks to define the different approaches to allyship, developed by different artsworkers, operating in different roles, across the different domains of disability arts and/or arts and disability practice."