The Stage, Disability Arts Online, and Sparklewheels on In Water I’m Weightless.

I started this blog a year ago, wanting to document process and hopefully reveal some of the skills and experiences I as a dramaturg/performance writer may go through when making work in a broad range of styles.

I also want to have this as a place for discussion and reflection – dialogue, if you like.

My most recent production, In Water I’m Weightless, with National Theatre Wales, closed at The Purcell Rooms, Southbank Centre, London, as art of the Cultural Olympiad and celebratory Unlimited Festival, between the Olympic and Paralympic Games. I am now working in Berlin, but receiving more reactions to the work – interviews, reports, and reviews. I will partly reproduce them here, with the link to the relevant website so you can read further, if you so wish.

What follows is a mixture of opinion and perspectives – from the so-called ‘mainstream’ speciality industry publications (The Stage), disability culture (DAO) and a personal blog, informed by a disability perspective (Sparklewheels). It might be an illuminating mix!

Kaite O’Reilly: Putting the focus on humanity

Friday 31 August 2012. Derek Smith for The Stage

Playwright Kaite O’Reilly is seeking to confront and confound people’s perceptions of disability with her latest production, writes Derek Smith:

 

Photo: Hayley Madden

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A decade ago, Kaite O’Reilly, the award-winning playwright, poet and disability arts campaigner, created a stir. Peeling, the darkly comic play she had just written for the Graeae Theatre Company, proved groundbreaking enough, but some of the language used to champion her views on disability in theatre, must have caused a fair few in theatre to undergo some soul searching.

Speaking to O’Reilly recently in-between rehearsals for her new show, In Water I’m Weightless, there’s clearly still a burning belief that what the international dramaturg, author, mentor, tutor and honorary fellow at Exeter University said all those years ago hit the bull’s eye.

“One of the lines from that play has become a slogan,” she reflects with palpable pride. “What I said 10 years ago was that ‘cripping up’ had become the new, 21st century answer to blacking up. You know, that Richard III thing when someone pretends to have a hump or lose a leg, and so on. Mental health, disability and impairment roles are in so many plays, but invariably still played by non-disabled actors pretending to have that disability,” she says.

In 2012, it’s still the case, but it is getting better, she says. There’s still a huge amount of work to be done in the area of disability acceptance and inclusion in the arts – a fact borne out by actress Lisa Hammon’s recent comments in The Stage (August 23, News, page 2). “We just have to encourage people to get over their worries and their fears, says O’Reilly. “But, it’s very interesting now because people are getting excited about the challenge and the ideas.”

To read more of this interview, please go to:

http://www.thestage.co.uk/features/feature.php/37207/kaite-oreilly-putting-the-focus-on-humanity

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The official image of Unlimited Festival by the superb Sue Austin.

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.Paul F Cockburn for Disability Arts Online (DAO) Talks to Kaite O’Reilly and the Cast of In Water I’m Weightless about the production:

After an acclaimed run in Cardiff, National Theatre Wales and a cast of deaf and disabled performers brings the award-winning Kaite O’Reilly’s ‘In Water I’m Weightless’ to London as part of the Unlimited festival at the Southbank Centre.But how did such an imaginative, poignant and funny work come together? Paul F Cockburn, dropped in during the final week of rehearsals last July.

The morning DAO drops in on rehearsals, the cast have been working on In Water I’m Weightless for four solid weeks. With opening night now only a few days away, the momentum is palpable as the show’s ensemble cast — Mandy Colleran (who has to drop out after injury), Mat Fraser, Karina Jones, Nick Phillips, Sophie Stone and David Toole — physically flex and warm their bodies to the soundtrack of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The morning, according to NTW Media Officer Catrin Rogers, will be spent primarily doing ‘tech’. This is the first time the cast have been given their costumes, so the focus will be on going through the ‘tops and tails’ of scenes, focusing not on performance but the practical issues of stage positions and costume changes.

Director John E McGrath underlines how the cast should raise any issues they have from this process, not least visually impaired Karina Jones, who at one point has to dance in a big dress while wearing high heals. She’s up for it, but there are concerns: “You have a go at everything, because you’re fearless,” John tells her, though he later wonders if the question of her shoes will “haunt the whole production”.

The afternoon is dominated by the first proper run-through of the piece that brings together not just the cast but also the technical team with the music, soundscape and visual projections which are an integral part of the show. “Focus on meaning, on the work that’s been done on a scene,” John tells the cast.

“There are no happy endings. There are just run-throughs,” responds popular cast-member Nick Phillips, humorously paraphrasing what all too quickly becomes as an important theme of the work, repeated through the production.

Nick is the ‘original find’ of this production. Although professionally trained as a dancer, he had given up on performance after a car accident. It was involvement in an earlier NTW production that helped change his mind.

“I kind of just came to the conclusion that, actually, it was no different to what I used to do; it just happens that I have my wheelchair now,” he explains. “I’m still a bit wary of this not being my usual projected image on stage. My safety net is the others around me. I think I would have a different feeling about it if I was on my own — that first step onto the stage would be a lot scarier if I didn’t have these guys around me.”

To read more of this please go to: http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/?location_id=1873

Two further reviews of In Water I’m Weightless is also on the Disability Arts Online website.

Rehearsal photo of In Water I’m Weightless, by Kaite O’Reilly.

Finally, the fabulous Nina of Sparklewheels.blogspot writes about the panel I was part of ‘Making work for Deaf and hearing Audiences’, plus reviews In Water… on her blog.

‘In Water I’m Weightless’ starts off like a fashion show. Pounding music and bright lights is the backdrop as the five actors enter the stage in elaborate gowns, suits and striking headpieces. The characters take turns in shouting at the audience, shouting that we are all the same, we are all mortal. After this impressive beginning, ‘In Water I’m Weightless’ goes on to explore how the story of the five characters overlaps, and how it overlaps with everyone’s story.

 To read more of the above, plugs coverage of Unlimited Festival at Southbank Centre, please go to Nina’s blog:

http://sparklewheels.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/unlimited-day-2-in-water-im-weightless.html

‘Theatre has to get to get over itself and put crips in its scripts.’ Guardian Comment is Free.

The Guardian Comment is Free asked me to respond to Lisa Hammond’s Open Letter to Writers: Put Crips in your scripts (reproduced on this blog at: http://kaiteoreilly.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/lisa-hammonds-open-letter-to-writers-put-crips-in-your-scripts/)  

What follows is their edit of my article.

I think it is edifying to read the forty plus comments on the Guardian website in response to the article. You will find the article and the comments at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/30/theatre-disability-crips-in-scripts

Theatre has to get over itself and put crips in its scripts.

Kaite O’Reilly. 

Guardian Comment is Free.

I was delighted to read Lisa Hammond’s open letter to writers as part of this year’s TV Drama Writers’ Festival – Put crips in your scripts. It’s a sentiment I support, and have for some time. As a playwright, I’ve been trying to put complex, seductive, intelligent characters who just so happen to have an impairment into my scripts for decades. It is only in rare cases I am commissioned to write such a play; usually I have to smuggle it in like a Trojan horse, with disability politics and what I call “crip humour” in its belly.

Disability is often viewed as worthy, depressing, or a plethora of other negative associations I (and many others) have been trying to challenge and subvert in our work for years. I find this representation astonishing, for the vast majority of my disabled friends and colleagues are the wittiest, most outrageous and life-affirming human beings I have ever had the pleasure of spending time with.

I identify proudly as a disabled person, but am often struck how to those without this cultural identification the impaired body is “other”. Disabled people are “them” – over there – not a deaf uncle, a parent with Alzheimer’s or an acquaintance who has survived brain injury following a car accident. Although the vast majority of us will acquire impairment through the natural process of ageing, through accident, warfare or illness, disabled people are still feared, ostracised and set apart.

The western theatrical canon is filled with disabled characters. We are metaphors for tragedy, loss, the human condition – the victim or villain, the scapegoat, the inferior, scary “special” one, the freak, the problem requiring treatment, medicalisation and normalisation. Although disabled characters occur in thousands of plays, seldom have the writers been disabled themselves, or written from that perspective. It is also rare for actors with impairments to be cast in productions, even when the character is disabled. As I scornfully stated in my 2002 play Peeling, in which Hammond performed: “Cripping up is the 21st century’s answer to blacking up”.

As Hammond suggests in her essay, the theatre profession just needs to get over it – their fear, concerns about expense, about difference. There are fantastic deaf and disabled performers in the UK, just as there are talented and experienced choreographers, directors, visual artists, sit-down comedians, and writers. I hope that the Paralympics, and Unlimited at Southbank Centre,  part of the Cultural Olympiad, will change preconceptions just as the Olympics did regarding sportswomen and abilities.

For “putting crips in our scripts” means we have different protagonists with different stories, which don’t always have to revolve around yet another medical drama. The active, sexy, wilful protagonists of In Water I’m Weightless are an anomaly simply by being protagonists, and in control of their lives. The work is a montage of movement, visuals, excerpts from fictional monologues and not, as most of the reviewers assumed, the actors’ autobiographies (as director John McGrath said, “that’s called acting”).

We need characters who are not victims, whose diagnosis or difference is not the central drama of their lives, but multi-faceted individuals with careers and relationships, dreams and challenges. I want characters who are full of themselves, their hands and mouths filled with a swanky eloquence. Whether in signed or spoken languages, words can dazzle and dip, shape form, shape meaning and shape a perspective that counters the previously held.

We need to have crips in our scripts not just to reflect the society we live in, but, as one of my characters says, to “threaten the narrow definition of human variety … [to] broaden the scope of human possibilities”. And we need crip actors to perform these parts, not yet another non-disabled actor doing an impersonation, with an eye on an award.

(c) copyright Kaite O’Reilly 30th August 2012.

‘Funny, yet tender; gutsy and still poignant’ – In Water I’m Weightless review

Cast of In Water I’m Weightless (Mandy Colleran excepted). Photo: Toby Farrows.

Tom Wentworth on In Water I’m Weightless.

Disability Arts Online. August 1st 2012.

http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/?location_id=1839

Punching right between the eyes from the first second, In Water I’m Weightless is truly an energy-packed, relentless spectacle. Written by Kaite ‘O Reilly (The Persians, LeanerFasterStronger) and directed by National Theatre Wales’ Artistic Director John E. McGrath, the show manages to be funny, yet tender; gutsy and still poignant, whilst maintaining its integrity for an audience as a highly truthful exploration of life with a disability.

One of the greatest strengths of the production is its ensemble cast. Performers Mat Fraser, Karina Jones, Nick Phillips, Sophie Stone and David Toole (unfortunately, due to an accident, Mandy Colleran was unable to perform but hopes to re-join the company soon) perform a complex lattice work of monologues, chorus pieces and dance and movement sequences to a range of music, (including a wonderfully comic and sexy routine to ‘Hey, Big Spender’ by Choreographer Nigel Charnock).

dig deep into the fundamental nature of disability and impairment, exploring the body as well as constantly seeking to question our perceptions. (“How do you describe seeing?” asks Karina Jones provocatively at one point.)  The cast each have their own set pieces with Nick Phillips providing us with a central image: “In water I’m weightless,” he tells us. However, the sequences are never isolated; but flow seamlessly.

Kaite O’ Reilly’s complex mix of word play, rhythms and imagery within the text provides the heart beat throughout the production, which has been developed as one of the Unlimited Commissions for the Cultural Olympiad.

Using the metaphors of war to give an insight into the way the body reacts to its own internal warfare through illness or disability is just one very powerful device through which the audience are drawn in, to experience a fresh, and often surprising, perspective on the unspoken, unseen minutiae of human existence.

There are lighter moments too. Sophie Stone’s part signed, part spoken piece entitled ‘Things I Have Lipread’ is both warm and engaging (the production integrates British Sign Language – often in unexpected ways – throughout.) Even during the darkest and bleakest moments, the humour of the show shines through.

The show is always visually stunning. Designer Paul Clay has created a spectacular set (suspended balls onto which are projected text, images and live video as the actors put a camera into their mouths to observe the tongue.) Clay has also employed a large cyclorama which displays a wide range of images from diagrams showing how a Cochlea implant works to fantastically breathtaking video of actors suspended.) The costumes too are bold and designed to make a statement – and they do.

‘In Water I’m Weightless’ is ultimately a feast of textures. Seeking to question, explore and surprise, the production manages to do all of this throughout; holding the attention and being – to use the production’s own ‘water-imagery’ – completely immersive. Most impressive of all, however is the production’s strength to empower its cast, crew – and ultimately its audience. A must see.
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In Water I’m Weightless runs at the Wales Millennium Centre until the 4th August, after which it will play as part of the Unlimited Festival London’s Southbank Centre on 31st August – 1st September.

The show must go on – and spectacularly so…. In Water I’m Weightless.

David Toole – In Water I’m Weightless. Photo: Kaite O’Reilly

It’s a cliche, the show must go on – and we know cliches exist because they are true…. In the break before the dress rehearsal for National Theatre Wales’s production of my script In Water I’m Weightless last Wednesday 25th July, one of our performers, the phenomenal Mandy Colleran, had an accident and had to be taken to Accident and Emergency. We cancelled the first preview the following night, and, under Mandy’s encouragements, began to consider our options for the performance continuing until she was able to join us again.

There were various possibilities: To get someone, probably the production’s emerging director, Sara Beer, to read in the lines, acknowledging our Mandy-shaped hole in the production, or to rework the complete performance, re-assigning Mandy’s lines to other members of the cast, re-casting, re-blocking and re-choreographing the performance. Cancelling more than the first preview was not, we all agreed, an option, so we chose to do the latter, reworking the whole performance in 24 hours. And so we set off on this Herculean task – and never have I been more aware of the humour, strengths, flexibility, and professionalism of a company…

In Water I’m Weightless is a collage of monologues which are performed collectively, chorally, bilingually, and as solos. It is an ensemble piece, so the cast are practised in working together as one entity – but as it is an ensemble, Mandy’s absence was sorely felt. Swiftly Sara Beer, John McGrath, and I re-allocated the lines, making edits, shifts, and cutting one scene. Overnight the actors – Mat Fraser, David Toole, Karina Jones, Nick Phillips and Sophie Stone – learnt new scenes and staging – appearing virtually word-perfect the next morning for rehearsals.

John worked us chronologically through the script, the technical crew and cast adjusting, amending, reinventing, but always staying true to the original concept and interpretations of the text. We broke for lunch – the actors dotted individually around the front of the Wales Millennium Centre, enjoying the rare summer sun, sandwiches and scripts in hand, running lines, learning the new texts, whilst in the dark of the studio, designer  Paul Clay and the technical crew re-edited videos and replotted the lighting design.

We finished rehearsing the new order in time for a run at 5pm – the whole company going above and beyond expectations in their focus and mastery of the new version – with just enough time for dinner before preparing for the opening, at 8pm. The show went up to a packed audience and with a mixture of pure adrenaline, professionalism, and extraordinary skill the cast and crew carried it off with aplomb. We have a new version which will work well until Mandy rejoins us – and now have a glorious week of performances ahead of us…

Slow mo’ filming, audio description, and the Radio Wales Arts Show

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Mat Fraser recording his part of the audio description CD/download for In Water I’m Weightless.

It is, I think, a most peculiar way to make a living. No two days are the same and my working life at the moment is of such a surreal quality, normally loquacious taxi drivers are silent as I outline the activity….

‘Today at work I’m observing slow motion filming of water being poured onto various parts of various actors’ bodies…’

Still, that’s probably nothing compared to what Jacob probably said when he got home for tea that night (‘Well, I hung off the top of a ladder and had to pour a stream of water from a glass jug onto a specific mark on the bare shoulder of Karina Jones, whilst a group of men watched and filmed it’).

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Jacob, Karina and the crew slow mo filming

We are in the final week of rehearsals for In Water I’m Weightless with National Theatre Wales – a week filled with media activity as well as intense rehearsals and run-throughs.

It is our designer, Paul Clay, who has brought the slow motion filming and mediatised elements into the production. An accomplished designer and artist, he also live video mixes in the underground club scene of New York, where he lives.

The design and visual world of the play is a response to the poetic conceits at work in the text – the weightlessness from floating in water, and the sense of freedom and liberation this creates (see my earlier blog about filming stunt dives).

This is in direct contrast to the weight of prejudices, fear, and preconceptions usually loaded onto the disabled body. It was our director (and artistic director of NTW), John McGrath, who pulled out this quotation ‘In Water I’m Weightless’ from the large body of monologues I have written over the past few years, and from which the text of this montaged production is taken.

This is my second show with Paul, and John. The first, Perfect, at Contact Theatre in Manchester, also had a strongly visual component and won Paul the M.E.N award for best design of 2004, whilst I won best play. It is wonderful to be back in a rehearsal room with both, aware of the growth in experience, skill, and stature since we last collaborated.

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Designer Paul Clay recording a description of his set, costumes, and visual/video artwork on In Water I’m Weightless for visually impaired and blind audience members.

As In Water I’m Weightless is an Unlimited commission, part of the Cultural Olympiad promoting the work of Deaf and disabled artists, we are keen to make the work as accessible as possible – which brings us to the second mediatised experience of the week.

Karina Jones, one of the cast, suggested we prepare a pre-show recording for visually impaired and blind audience members, so they would have a sense of some of the visual and physical aspects of the work. One performance at the Wales Millennium Centre will have live audio description (a headset is provided for audience members, if required, and during the performance a description of action and visual elements is relayed), but we were all excited with Karina’s suggestion. I provided bullet-points for the performers to use as stimulus – a description of their bodies, costumes, and the dance/movement sequences – and Paul spoke about the visuals and his design concept. Mike Beer recorded them, and this should be available prior to the show at Wales Millennium Centre as a CD, and also hopefully as a download from NTW’s website.

The final media experience of the week occurred on Thursday, when cast member Nick Phillips and I were guests on the BBC Radio Wales Arts Show, with Nicola Heywood Thomas. The interview will be available for the next few days as ‘listen again’ on:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01kvdls   

David Toole’s stunt dives – In Water I’m Weightless

Today rehearsals are unnusual, in that we have a slow motion film shoot for the production In Water I’m Weightless. Designer and artist Paul Clay has transformed the dance studio in Wales Millennium Centre where we are rehearsing into a film set.

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David Toole on the film set In Water I’m Weightless.

The performers all choose short movement sequences to film in slow motion, but the day begins with Paul capturing the cast weightless, in mid-air.

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Dave preparing for his stunt dive.

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The title of the production comes from one of my monologues and was chosen not just for its lyricism but sense of liberation – being free of constraints, liberated from the weight of prejudice and preconceptions associated with the disabled body.

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The session was exhilarating, especially the verve and power in David Toole’s stunt dives, hurling himself from his wheelchair, flying momentarily through the air.

photos by Kaite O’Reilly

‘In Water I’m Weightless’ – background and day one of rehearsals.

Nick Phillips dressing up, first day of rehearsals In Water I’m Weightless. All photos Kaite O’Reilly.

The first day of rehearsals for In Water I’m Weightless, with National Theatre Wales….

Performers Mat Fraser, David Toole, Karina Jones, Nick Phillips, Mandy Colleran and Sophie Stone are encouraged by director John McGrath and designer Paul Clay to play dress up….

David Toole.

In Water I’m Weightless is collaged from a large body of work I’ve been developing over several years – The ‘d’ Monologues (‘d’ denoting Deaf and disabled) – initially from a Creative Wales Major Award from Arts Council Wales, and then further developed with the Unlimited Commissions I have been awarded as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

Designer Paul Clay makes some adjustments to one of Sophie Stone’s rehearsal costumes.

In Water I’m Weightless came about from my ambition to put Deaf and disabled experience, what I call crip culture, and disability cool centre-stage on a national platform, performed by some of the best Deaf and disabled performers in the UK. I’m immensely fortunate that long-term collaborator John McGrath, the artistic director of National Theatre Wales, understood what I sought to achieve with this project, and was excited about it, deciding to bring it to fruition.

Warm-up, first day of rehearsals

Today was the first time the company came together since our r&d week in November 2011. It was an opportunity for us to begin recapping and revisiting earlier work, and for designer Paul Clay to explore some basic costume ideas.

I will be documenting the process over the next four weeks on this blog, and writing about a different process in collaborating and making performance than my two previous productions this year.

Hope you want to follow the journey…

Cripping up – Copping on. Rosaleen McDonagh in Irish Theatre Magazine

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Rosaleen McDonagh

I was honoured to be included in the following article from Irish Theatre Magazine by the phenomenal playwright Rosaleen McDonagh. This is reproduced from the on-line version of the magazine and is available at: http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Features/Current/Cripping-Up—Copping-on.aspx

IRISH THEATRE MAGAZINE

Cripping up – Copping on.

by Rosaleen McDonagh 10 March 2012

Rosaleen McDonagh discusses her new play Mainstream and the challenges of casting and performance: Should a disabled writer hold their work back in the belief that there may be some emerging disabled performers who someday will bring their work to the stage?

‘In Peeling I wanted to create women who were witty, sexy, complex human beings who made difficult decisions about their fertility and potential offspring; women whose lives didn’t necessarily differ so much from non-disabled, hearing women’s lives.’  Kaite O’Reilly, playwright.

Peeling was written by a woman who identifies as disabled. Directed by Jenny Sealey, a deaf woman, and performed by three female actors, two disabled and one deaf. Being exposed to Kaite’s work, the politics of identity and representation became much more vivid and important. Such exposure brings with it an emotional resonance that says this is theatre at its best. Not just for someone like me who can identify with all the parts of the three actors but, as O’Reilly says, it was the universality of the women’s lives that made it work. When using ‘cripping up’, it’s part of a cultural and political mode of language that encompasses self determination. Again O’Reilly said, ‘Cripping up is the twenty first century’s way of blacking up’.

The term ‘cripping up’ in Ireland is not used because it’s understood as being insulting to ‘trained’ actors. The way in which white men once painted themselves black to get a gig is now understood as being racist, exploitative, voyeuristic and dangerous. For me ‘cripping up’ carries similar dangers. In the disability artistic community, the joke says, if an able-bodied actor wants an award and a director wants lots of accolades, be it in theatre or film, cripping up is the easiest, most unethical way of doing it. Others say ethics in any art form blocks creativity. Either way, whether it’s local, national or indeed even international, the infrastructure for artists with disabilities in any discipline is always an afterthought, an appendix, sometimes we’re told appendix take up too much time and room—they’re not needed. The explanation of the plot is evident in the performance regardless of who or what body that performance comes from, they tell us.

Mainstream, my new piece explores a love affair disintegrating while people are grappling with identity, age, sexuality, institutionalisation memory, friendship and fear.  All the characters from Mainstream have significant impairments. Their impairments are part of how the piece is presented. Their journey as characters is very much tied up with their disability identity. When writing the play Mainstream, my politics were compromised due to the standard theatre praxis here in Ireland. What’s ideal is unfortunately limited by what’s possible at the present moment.

Opportunities for training and development in theatre for disabled performers and actors are not de rigueur.  This creates a difficulty in getting disabled Irish actors that can play these parts. More affirmative action policies please. The Arts Council and the Arts Disability Forum do have a specific bursary for disabled artists which is €5,000. Arts & Disability Ireland do provide supports to organisations to make their venue and services more accessible to people with disabilities. Access in the form of audio description and touch is also part of ADI’s remit. There are venues, such as the Project Arts Centre who deliver and provide good practice at all levels of their organisation. The Dublin Theatre Festival 2011, when supporting site-specific work, ensured that access to most of the venues was possible, in particular Mark O’Halloran’s Trade in a Dublin bedsit. The Festival ensured that this work was open to all audiences regardless of the venue type. For me, the ultimate sanction and marker of good access would be that companies are not funded by the Arts Council if their work is not accessible to all the public. That public includes people with disabilities. We’re an audience too.

An example of a positive affirmative action was Turning Point in 2010, an opportunity for artists with disabilities to develop a short play. This project, which was supported by ADI and VSA, meant that I and the three other writers travelled to Washington with Fishamble. Our work was performed in a rehearsed reading. At the reading of my play Rings the sign interpreter for the main actor didn’t turn up.  Vulnerability, fear and embarrassment were shared by me and the actor.  Jim Culleton, director of Fishamble Theatre Company, managed the situation in an empowering and professional manner. Our work as disabled artists is underrepresented and therefore affirmative action initiatives should have a two-pronged approach. This approach would be a specific targeted approach for disabled artists by way of funding and other resources. While at the same time, mainstream theatre, whether it be companies or venues, need to be resourced and supported to be inclusive of disabled artists, practitioners and disabled audiences. This work can’t be done if theatre companies and venues aren’t supported and resourced to do this.

For me the question of cripping up is an exercise purely for the non-disabled ego: the illusion that you can control, modify and contain, if not your own body, then somebody else’s. The dilemma is: what do you do in a country that prides itself on a legacy of being part of the universal canon of theatre but pays no real dividends to disabled artists or performers? ‘Dividends’ in this context is used as a metaphor for cultural inclusion. In short, the authentic disabled aesthetic is erased out of Irish theatre and performances. Brian Friel’s plays Molly Sweeney and Translations were both restaged in Dublin in 2011. The character of Molly Sweeney and Sarah, the non-verbal woman in Translations, had potential to be innovative performances;  instead they objectify and infantilise our bodies, to be received by an unquestioning audience.

They say an actor should be able to perform any part, borrow an aesthetic. There are some parts that actors can’t play. Characters are built, shaped, pulled and stretched to envelop an outside reality and bring it inside themselves. Yet, Irish theatre audiences, or at least the majority of them, seem to enjoy the cosiness of knowing these are not real people—they’re acting out. How we know and where we think people with disabilities belong in our society. Our narrative as disabled people must be funnelled through a non-disabled form. From the director to the actor and then it’s bounced back to the audience, people get so caught up in the physicality of our bodies. The emotive manipulation is what’s damaging. That’s the bit that hurts. They can only do the outside but they can’t bring the emotional, historical resonance to a performance.

These representations are reductive and damaging. Another example of this type of false representation is that of Carmel Winters’ B for Baby. There’s been much chatter about breaking the ‘taboo’ because this piece attempts to explore sexuality in the context of people with learning or intellectual disability. For me, this piece had nothing new to offer other than the usual stereotypes. The most disappointing element of the piece was whatever groundbreaking crescendo that we were all hoping to reach, the end of the piece reverted and resisted going to the edge where the premise of the play was attempting to go by not allowing the two characters to kiss. They share a bag of sweets instead of a kiss. If that’s not infantalisation, well then what is? However, I bought a ticket which means I colluded with something that I’d hoped would be radical; instead, it was pretty mundane. Although these pieces were written by a non-disabled man and woman the very fact that they create disabled characters could be a really positive opportunity to reinvigorate the disabled aesthetic in Irish theatre. The reinvigoration would only come with the call for actors who are disabled for these particular parts. The presumption that non-disabled actors can play our parts so much better is outdated.  We Irish can be very unsophisticated and not confident when it comes to taking risks in theatre making. The politics of representation is often outweighed by the so called importance of the narrative – but the narrative comes from a place of representation even if it is almost invisible.

Should a disabled writer hold their work back in the belief that there may be some emerging disabled performers who someday will bring their work to the stage? Or has a writer to compromise and collude with ‘cripping up’ as a way of establishing their work? My Traveller ethnicity, like my disability, cerebral palsy, is an integral part of who I am. It’s how I understand my place in the world. My history, it means I have a shared knowledge and experience with other Travellers and disabled people. This said, the Traveller community or the disability community, are not a homogenous group. We share a common narrative but at the same time, our individual experiences lend themselves to diverse views on art and other matters. ‘Cripping up’, for some disabled people, is fine. For others, like me, ‘cripping up’ or ‘putting it on’ for Travellers, there’s an innate sour taste of a collective, pejorative projection that is not a representation of who and what we are. As a writer, I can illustrate shame but I refuse to carry it, regardless of how and where it’s projected onto me.

Having been exposed to disability arts in the context of mainstream theatre, the spark was lit. Kaite O’Reilly has been a role model and a mentor in many ways for me. I deliberately use the capital D when describing myself as a Disabled artist. This cultural phenomenon gives me reference points to work from, rules, not just for writing but rules for life. Our lives, our experiences and the veins of knowledge that we have as performers, writers and visual artists, need to be nurtured. My ambition for my work goes beyond any special category. While my work is grounded in a particular experience, the writing carries with it a calling for other disabled writers and performers to be part of the Irish theatre community. Being known as the only crip in the community is isolating. This also means often my voice isn’t loud enough to keep making demands on all areas of access for other disabled artists.

Rosaleen McDonagh is a Traveller woman with a significant disability, a playwright and human rights activist. Her short play Beat Him Like a Badger is part of Fishamble’s Tiny Plays for Ireland at Project Arts Centre 15th-21st March, 2012.

With thanks for the reproduction of this article. http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Features/Current/Cripping-Up—Copping-on.aspx

Spoken Word Event – Chris Kinsey, Jim Ferris and Kaite O’Reilly. 19th March 2012. Oriel Davies, Newtown, Wales.

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Chris Kinsey hosts an evening of poetry with readings by Jim Ferris and Kaite O’Reilly  – Monday 19^th March 2012

Jim Ferris’s poems have been described as “funny,” “sly,” “Whitmanesque,” and “kind of holy.” He is author of The Hospital Poems (2004), Facts of Life, (2005), and his latest, Slouching Towards Guantanamo (2011). One reviewer said “Notwithstanding the spiritual weight they carry, these poems are playful, musical, satirical and passionate” (Jendi Reiter). Ferris has won awards for creative nonfiction and performance as well as for his poetry. His work is featured in Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (2011). Ferris currently holds the Ability Center Endowed Chair in Disability Studies at the University of Toledo.

Kaite O’Reilly currently holds the Ted Hughes Award for new works in poetry for her version of Aeschylus’s PERSIANS, produced by National Theatre Wales in 2010. A multi-award winning writer and playwright, productions in 2012 include LeanerFasterStronger with Sheffield Crucible in May, and In Water I’m Weightless with National Theatre Wales – both Cultural Olympiad projects, part of the celebrations for the London Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Chris Kinsey is Writer-in-Residence at Oriel Davies. She has been BBC Wildlife Poet-of-the-Year and writes a regular nature diary for Cambr ia. She has contributed to numerous anthologies and magazines and has three collections published: Kung Fu Lullabies and Cure For a Crooked Smile with Ragged Raven Press and Swarf with Smokestack Books. She is inspired by wildlife: human, animal and bird. Chris has also had short dramas read at Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Venue Cymru.

 Oriel Davies Gallery  The Park, Newtown, Powys SY16 2NZ

01686 625041 desk@orieldavies.org www.orieldavies.org

Monday 19 March 7.30pm £5

The Gallery Cafe will be open for drinks and light refreshments

That was the year that was (continued). Has anything changed?

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Cast of IN WATER I’M WEIGHTLESS: David Toole, Sophie Stone, Karina Jones, Mandy Colleran, Mat Fraser, Nick Philips. National Theatre Wales development week, November 2011.

Cardiff, November 2011: I’m in a studio with a group of outstanding performers, some internationally renowned, others forging reputations as ‘people to watch’. Also present is John McGrath, artistic director of National Theatre Wales, choreographer/movement director Nigel Charnock, designer Paul Clay, and emerging director Sara Beer. We’re here to develop In Water I’m Weightless and I can’t quite believe it’s happening.

The project is a long time coming and is only possible because of my Unlimited Commissions from the Cultural Olympiad, funded by the National Lottery through the Olympic Lottery Distributor, delivered in partnership between London 2012, Arts Council England, the Scottish Arts Council, Arts Council of Wales, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the British Council.
 These awards enabled me to launch The ‘d’ Monologues, scripts written specifically for Deaf and disabled actors, informed and inspired by interviews and interactions with people from all over the UK.

I’ve talked to disabled and Deaf friends, strangers, and colleagues about sex and complex interpersonal relationships, childhood ambitions and adult careers, divorce and promiscuity, favourite recipes and aphrodisiacs, societal labels and self-identification. We’ve spoken about sub- or counter-cultures and the mainstream, prejudices and preconceptions, theatres where performance happen and theatres where surgery is performed. We’ve talked of discrimination, both positive and negative, of love and loathing, fertility and being sterile, of what it is to be human and how to be truly alive. And this stimuli has prompted several projects and attracted National Theatre Wales’s creativity and openness to engage.

In Water I’m Weightless will be NTW’s twentieth production, produced at the Wales Millennium Centre in July 2012, setting an important precedent about which practitioners and what content are produced on a national platform. It’s rare for the material which makes up In Water I’m Weightless to reach the ‘mainstream’ – and it is even more rare for such a high profile transcultural experiment to happen.

I write this with confidence as I’m a fellow of an International Research Centre connected to the Freie Universität Berlin’s Theatre Department, which investigates the interweaving of performance cultures and of cultures in performance in the broadest sense. My research through practice focuses on what I call ‘Alternative Dramaturgies Informed by a Deaf and disability Perspective’, with particular reference to disability arts and culture and its relationship(s) to dominant, or mainstream culture(s).

As a practitioner, I have one foot in the ‘mainstream’ and one in disability arts – and previously it was a case of never the two shall meet… It has taken several decades to reach this position where I can openly fold disability content into a ‘mainstream’ project without having to find clever ways of hiding it and my intentions, or endlessly having to justify this way of being, or why I might want to write about human difference whilst challenging established parameters of ‘normality’.

There’s often an assumption that this kind of work has no place in the ‘mainstream’ – or it will be hectoring, or politically correct. Personally, I’m far more interested in the provocatively politically incorrect – and am sure that the combination of NTW’s creative team and the witty, subversive performers will ensure In Water… is anything but ‘worthy’.

The first part of this post began reviewing the year and questioning whether anything has changed in the relationship between disability arts and culture and majority culture. Given my forthcoming production with NTW, and  other developments in 2011 in Scotland, I’m encouraged and given hope for the future.

Both Robert Softley and Claire Cunningham have been developing projects in 2011 with National Theatre Scotland.

Robert’s Girl X was an exploration of ethical issues surrounding the rights of an eleven year girl with cerebral palsy, who had the mental age of a five month old infant. Her mother sought a hysterectomy for Girl X, believing the onset of puberty would only bring additional, and unnecessary distress to her. The doctors also felt such controversial surgery might improve her quality of life. The play, produced in Spring of 2011 and written by Robert Softley and Bart Capelle, asked questions such as:  ‘When do private matters become public concern? Is the majority always right? Do wheelchair users know better? Where will it all end?

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In contrast Claire Cunningham’s recent dance theatre work explored her twenty year relationship with her crutches – and the (im)possibility of creating her ideal man from these objects, – what she knows best. Ménage à Trois  was ‘a hauntingly beautiful study of love, obsession, loneliness and manipulation’ and, like In Water I’m Weightless, emerged from an Unlimited Commission.

I’m a big fan of both Claire and Robbie’s work, so am delighted at this development. It’s incredibly heartening that the National Theatres of Wales and Scotland are making unprecedented approaches towards disability artists and content in their commissioning and programming. But it’s also clear how central Unlimited and the Cultural Olympiad have been in helping make these changes happen.

Unlimited describes itself as ‘a project celebrating disability, arts, culture and sport on an unprecedented scale as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.’

I am writing on January 1st 2012. It will be fascinating to see on January 1st 2013 quite how successful that influence will have been – how far and deep its touch…. For the moment, I am hopeful.

Happy 2012, all. Hope it is creative and provocative and stimulating and joyful.

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For an interview between Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of National Theatre Scotland, and Robert Softley on Girl X, go to:

http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/default.asp?page=s717

For further details on my research project with International Research Centre Interweaving Performance Cultures in Berlin, go to:

http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/v/verflechtungen/People/Fellows/Fellows_2010_2011/Kaite_O_Reilly/index.html

Copyright Kaite O’Reilly 1/1/12.