Disability Arts History Australia

Items

• "DADAA Inc and Arts Access Australia (2012) Art Works: Employment in the Arts for People with Disability.  http://www.dadaa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Art-Works-Full-Report-Web.pdf"
  Reads, in part "This document provides a short overview of the full Art Works report, which captures the results from national research into employment levels, barriers and strategies around employment in the arts for people with disability. The report was produced in response to one of the key focus areas of the National Arts and Disability Strategy, released in 2009."
• "DADAA Art Works Key Findings: Employment in the Arts for People with Disability – Current Status, Barriers and Opportunities (2012)"
  Reads, in part, "This document provides a short overview of the full Art Works report, which captures the results from national research into employment levels, barriers and strategies around employment in the arts for people with disability. The report was produced in response to one of the key focus areas of the National Arts and Disability Strategy, released in 2009."
• "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."
• "Bree Hadley (2017) Disability theatre in Australia: a survey and a sector ecology. Research in Drama Education, 22(3), pp. 305-324.”
• "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."
• "Katie Ellis (2016) Disability Media Work: Opportunities and Obstacles. London: Palgrave."
  Reads, in part "Elevates disability media discussions beyond representation and access by considering employment and discriminatory attitudes in the media industry"
• "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."
• "Anthea Skinner, Jess Kapuscinski-Evans (2021) Facilitate This! Reflections from Disabled Women in Popular Music. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2021; 33 (2): 3–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2021.33.2.3"
  Reads, in part "This article is a reflection by the authors on the impact that their identities as disabled women have had on their ongoing music careers. Skinner and Kapuscinski-Evans make up two-thirds of the Australian crip-folk trio, the Bearbrass Asylum Orchestra (the term “crip” is a cultural reappropriation of “cripple”). The Bearbrass Asylum Orchestra is a band that performs as part of the Disability Music Scene in Melbourne, Australia, using folk music to portray their experiences as people with disabilities. In this article Skinner and Kapuscinski-Evans discuss the formation of and philosophy behind the band, as well as the impact that growing up as disabled women had on their musical education, careers, and influences."
• "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.
• ”Bree Hadley, Donna McDonnald (Eds.) (2019) The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture, and Media. Routledge International Handbooks. Routledge, London; New York.”
  “In the last 30 years, a distinctive intersection between disability studies – including disability rights advocacy, disability rights activism, and disability law – and disability arts, culture, and media studies has developed. The two fields have worked in tandem to offer critique of representations of disability in dominant cultural systems, institutions, discourses, and architecture, and develop provocative new representations of what it means to be disabled. Divided into 5 sections:- Disability, Identity, and Representation; Inclusion, Wellbeing, and Whole-of-life Experience; Access, Artistry, and Audiences; Practices, Politics and the Public Sphere; Activism, Adaptation, and Alternative Futures - this handbook brings disability arts, disability culture, and disability media studies – traditionally treated separately in publications in the field to date – together for the first time.”
• ”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."
• "Janice Rieger and Megan Strickfaden(2019) “Dis/ordered assemblages of disability in museums.” In The Routledge Handbook of Disability Art, Culture, and Media, edited by Bree Hadley and Donna McDonald, 48–61. London & New York: Routledge."
  "Museums are spaces of power and care. They are institutions that present assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari 2002), which are reconstructions and representations of history and societal values, and thus are partial realities that curate human existence. These assemblages cannot ever represent the totality of human existence because it is never possible to do so, and yet these assemblages are embedded with power because choices are made about what ought or ought not be represented within museums (Ott 2013; Bennet 2017). The nature of partial realities is that, at their centre, these are still representations that tell stories of what one would imagine to be the most significant events related to a place (nation, city), with a particular focus on a societal event or issue (war, art, sports, nature, human rights, etc.) and peoples (e.g. immigrants, migrants, First Nations or Indigenous peoples, etc.). Persons attending museums rely on the expertise of historians, curators, archivists, conservators, and exhibition designers to present materials within the museum that focus upon and represent societal values. Most museum visitors are not aware of the power that museums hold, although more and more museum visitors push against narratives which they do not feel to be adequate representations of the places, events, issues, and peoples of society (Hooper-Greenhill 1992, 2000; Anderson 2004; Janes 2009, 2010). Where there is power, there is also care. Historians, curators, archivists, conservators, and exhibition designers take great care in how they assemble materials within museums."
• "Bree Hadley, Donna McDonnald (2019) Introduction: disability arts, culture, and media studies - mapping a maturing field. In Hadley, B & McDonald, D (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of disability arts, culture, and media. Routledge, United Kingdom, pp. 1-18.”
  Reads, in part "In this book, an internationally recognised collection of established and emerging scholars, artists, and activists from across the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and Australasia come together to trace the development of disability arts, culture, and media studies in recent decades, flag current interests, and forecast future concerns."
• "Bree Hadley, Janice Rieger (2021) Co-designing choice: objectivity, aesthetics and agency in audio-description. Museum Management and Curatorship, 36(2), pp. 189-203.”
  "The ‘Vis-ability’ exhibition, presented at the QUT Art Museum in 2019 was an exhibition curated with clear social inclusion goals from the outset. Through it, the museum sought to develop innovative, cost effective, and readily replicable techniques to allow blind and low vision visitors and artists to engage with the institution and its collections. The results affirm the benefits of offering blind and low vision visitors a spectrum of engagement choices, and also affirm that blind and low vision artists and visitors have capacity to make a critical contribution in co-designing that spectrum of choices. This exhibition and its use of multisensorial elements offers a useful prompt to museums to engage this community more fully in co-designing inclusion in the future."
• "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.
• "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."
• "Bree Hadley (2015) Participation, politics and provocations: People with disabilities as non-conciliatory audiences. Participations: journal of audience and reception studies, 12(1), pp. 154-174.”
  "Disability has always had a prominent place on the theatrical stage. Throughout the C19th, C20th and C21st to date, disabled characters have been used to signify corruption, innocence or suffering, and, of course, as salutary examples of how to overcome such suffering. In the past three decades, the work of disability scholars, activists and artists has also provided opportunities for people with disabilities to produce their own plays, performances or installations challenging these stereotypes. Interestingly, though both the body of literature on theatre makers with disabilities and the body of literature on theatre audiences has grown apace over the past decade, there is still surprisingly little written on people with disabilities as theatre audiences. In this article, I draw on observations made during five years of practical, empirical and theoretical research into disability theatre to discuss how people with disabilities work as a distinctive sub-group of spectators, with distinctive spectatorial processes, modalities and preferences, within contemporary theatre audiences. I begin with the factors that make attending theatre difficult for people with disabilities. I note that people with disabilities respond to the challenges they face in attempting to become active audiences of contemporary theatre in three common ways. I then unpack what these spectatorial modalities teach us about people with disabilities as audiences, other marginalised groups as audiences, as well as about audiences, audiencing and the part audiences play in theatre practice more generally."
• "Commonwealth of Australia, 2018. Research Overview: Arts and Disability in Australia. Barton: Department of Communication and the Arts, Cultural Ministers Council. Available from: https://www.arts.gov.au/sites/g/files/net1761/f/research_overview_of_arts_and_disability.pdf."
  Reads, in part "The Research Overview brings together published and unpublished data and research about arts and disability in Australia, and case studies highlighting arts and disability practice around the country. The Research Overview is part of the evidence base for a renewed National Arts and Disability Strategy. The evidence gathered here will be complemented by submissions and survey during a national consultation in 2018."
• "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."
• ”Racheal Missingham, Bree Hadley (2022) Oppression and allyship in Australia's Deaf Arts. Australasian Drama Studies, 80, pp. 304-332.”
  "In this article, we investigate the history of Deaf theatre in Australia, through the lens of oppression and allyship. Through a review of the to date limited academic, industry, and media literature, in conjunction with survey and interview research with Deaf theatre practitioners, this research sheds light on Deaf theatre makers’ perceptions of the ways in which ally support can operate to create both social benefits and barriers, and how this has impacted on the non-linear development and recent decline in Deaf theatre companies in Australia. It finds that, in developing a framework to scaffold stronger allyship relationships with d/Deaf and hard of hearing artists, it is critical to consider the accessibility and cultural requirements not just in relation to theatre methodologies, but in relation to arts management practices, which support continuing company production, too."
• "Bree Hadley, Donna McDonald, Sarah Austin, Kath Duncan, Gerard Goggin, Lachlan MacDowall, Veronica Pardo, Eddie Paterson, with collaborators Dave Calvert, Jori De Coster, Shawn Goh, Alice Fox, Ann M. Fox, Andy Kempe, Petra Kuppers, Justin Lee, Alex Lubet, Sarah Meisch Lionetto, Ann Millett-Gallant, Laura Misener, Bronwyn Preece, Megan Strickfaden, Joanne Tay, Matthew Reason, Nancy Quinn, and Sarah Whatley (2019) Conclusion: practicing interdependency, sharing vulnerability, celebrating complexity - the future of disability arts, culture, and media research. In Hadley, B & McDonald, D (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of disability arts, culture, and media. Routledge, United Kingdom, pp. 362-372."
  "In this chapter, the authors conclude The Routledge Handbook of Disability Art, Culture, and Media studies by reflecting on the past, present, and potential future of disability art practice debated throughout the book. Based on research currently underway in the work of many of the Australian contributors, and including reflections from the global contributors, this concluding chapter reflects on what the disability arts, culture, and media practice and research of the future might look like, do, and achieve in the public sphere."
• "David Throsby, Katya Petetskaya (2024) Artists as Workers: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, Creative Australia, 2024."
  "Artists as Workers: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, by David Throsby and Katya Petetskaya, is the seventh in a landmark study, carried out independently over the last four decades by Professor Throsby and colleagues at Macquarie University, with support from Creative Australia (previously the Australia Council for the Arts). Conducted at roughly six–year intervals, the series tracks the working conditions of artists, providing information about their artistic practice, income, career development and pathways, and their broader working lives. The latest survey was in the field late 2022 and early 2023 and examines activity in the 2021-22 financial year. This edition therefore captures the conditions for artists in the wake of COVID-19 and coincides with the Australian Government’s January 2023 announcement of its five-year national cultural policy Revive: A place for every story, a story for every place."
• "Catherine Grant (2013). Participating in arts- and cultural-sector governance in Australia: Experiences and views of people with disability. Arts & Health, 6(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/17533015.2013.826259"
  Reads, in part "This study sought the perceptions and experiences of people with disability relating to their potential or current involvement in the governance of arts and cultural organisations in Australia. Methods: A total of 32 people participated in an online survey, and results were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Results: The findings revealed that those participants who had been involved in governance benefited from it in terms of self-esteem, participation in society and well-being." Contains tables with survey data.
• "Sarah Austin, Kath Duncan, Gerard Goggin, Lachlan MacDowall, Veronica Pardo, Eddie Paterson, Jax Jacki Brown, Morwenna Collett, Fiona Cook, Bree Hadley, Jess Kapuscinski-Evans, Donna McDonald, Julie McNamara, Gayle Mellis, Kate Sulan (2019). The last avant garde? In B. Hadley, D. McDonald ed. The Routledge Handbook of Disability Art, Culture, and Media. London & New York: Routledge, 251-262."
  "“The Australian Research Council project Disability and the Performing Arts in Australia: Beyond the Social Model – known to collaborators as the last avant garde – is mapping disability performing arts in Australia. We open up this chapter, and our ongoing research project, with the words of the late Tobin Siebers. In researching disability and performance here in Australia, we also acknowledge that since Siebers’ 2010 text, we have seen new experiments and emerging companies pushing the bounds of how bodies feel – in a sector which embraces differences in bodies, but also in thinking, in neurodiversities, in being, in articulating, in appearing, in sensing, in intersectionalities, and in the experiences for audiences. As such, this chapter aims to explore ‘disability aesthetics’ not as a set of specific techniques, themes, or politics, but in order to position disability at the centre of ‘future conceptions of what art is’ and what it can be.”
• "Jung Yoon (2021) Cultural strategy for people with disability in Australia. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 28(2), 187–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2021.1916003"
  Reads, in part "This paper analyses the first cultural strategy introduced in Australia for people with disability and its evaluation reports. For an in-depth understanding of the cultural strategy, it reviews the literature on disability in historical and socio-political contexts, and on human rights for people with disability. It also discusses three key recommendations identified from the evaluations of the cultural strategy: first, to develop an information hub for the arts and disability sector; second, to facilitate collaboration between Australian governments, including arts agencies and national disability support agencies; and third, to revisit and renew the existing cultural strategy"