#CDNTimes

My theatre practice represents my contribution to both disability activism and to theatre and performance. I join the long line of Canadian disabled artists such as David Freeman, Persimmon Blackbridge, and Lyle Victor Albert, whose work frame impairment and disability in terms of identity and culture. Much of my work focuses on masculinity, disability, and sexual relationships. Through the use of dramatic narrative, comedy and movement aesthetics, I strive to present impairment and disability as valid parts of identity, as critical sources of artistic exploration, and to expose social barriers.

I’m someone who has enough conventional signifiers in place that I get all the privileges that a straight, white, married, procreative, able-bodied professional woman can get in this racist, hetero-patriarchal world, Although I know how to accuse the world of hetero-patriarchy, I still benefit from that oppression every day. I feel like I just don’t deserve to call myself stuff. Stuff like queer. Stuff like survivor. I am so straight-seeming that sometimes people forget that I’ve told them I do gay things, like fuck women.

You’d also be hard pressed to find any other artist who, on the second day of a workshop of his new play at the Banff Centre is being lied to by some of his best friends and collaborators, who are telling him that they are going back to their rooms by themselves to “chill out”. They are doing this – lying to their colleague, and pretending not to exclude him – for what feel like absolutely legitimate reasons.

Artist Jan Derbyshire introduced me to the concept of inclusive design. Jan and I have been working together for almost four years, and have...

Frank: There’s your authentic body, and the imaginary body they put on you. In the able bodied realm of performing, that imaginary body gets put on them a lot. What happens if you’re disabled, or paralyzed, and the imaginary body they want to put on you just isn’t going to happen?

A diverse ecology is a more resilient one. Conversely, when humans have impacted an ecology, reducing diversity to represent only a handful of varieties of species, the ecology becomes increasingly vulnerable to disease, natural disaster, and ecological imbalances that can lead to extinction or over-population. Evolution undoubtedly benefits from the sharing of diverse skills, at the biological level.

The elders in our community who have worked for decades to address inequity for artists of colour will testify to slight improvements, but there is still work to be done and other communities to include. Part of that work is gathering the collective wisdom of our elders - and the wider community – so that new initiatives can build upon that knowledge, rather than consistently rehash it.

A diversity of key creative personnel on a production brings a breadth of cultural knowledge. We are trained just like our White peers, and can not only render complex interpretations of works by playwrights of European descent, but many of us also have one foot planted in our own culture (or the culture of our parents), which can mean that the lens through which we perceive the world is larger.

I’m asking that protocols be collectively defined and become a means to challenge the structures of privilege and normativity. After all, ‘diversity’, as its been enacted, is often just enriching what we already do with what we can access, while ‘inclusion’ maintains a power structure of the us-versus-them: “I will include you.” Seen this way, it’s imperative that diversity and inclusion become more than a numbers game where we do things like hire more different looking people.

My own White Girl-ness of maintaining my place and not raising doubts held me back from doing my fucking job. Because when I read the subscriber’s complaint letter, I had intense artistic shame, thinking, “I could have prevented this.” Rather than partnering with my AD in a moment of doubt, I wound up partnering with him on a crisis of perception (which is much worse).