~~walks back in with tail between legs after lengthy hiatus from blogging~~
Well, to my credit, I spent all of last week volunteering/socializing with Hijinx for their Unity Festival, which left me about 8 hours a day to do all the sleeping and commuting and general hygiene kind of stuff, and zero solo time with a computer. So HERE I AM.
My initial impulse after the whirlwind week that was Wales is to go explosive with caps lock, so let me get that out of the way before I can be articulate about my experiences thus far and their relevance to my research: ZOMG WALES IS AMAZING CARDIFF IS AMAZING WELSH IS A CRAZY LANGUAGE WITH SO MANY VOWELS HIJINX IS AN INCREDIBLE ORGANIZATION EVERYONE I MET IS SO NICE I HAVE SO MANY FEEEEEELS. Okay, I’m ready for some punctuation.
The way I ended up in Wales was a magical series of connections (the fact that a couple of random emails brought me to one of the best weeks of my life is insane and makes me feel very lucky for the interwebs). I’d sent an email that got forwarded to someone who forwarded it to someone who forwarded it a bunch of people of whom only a few responded and one of those few was Ben Pettitt-Wade, Artistic Manager of Hijinx. Hijinx is a company based in Cardiff (a city on the south coast of Wales) that offers various theatre-based programming for adults with learning differences. The Hijinx Unity Festival features inclusive companies from all over (mostly from Europe and one from Africa) with artists who have a range of different physical and cognitive abilities. That means you get performances like the one-woman show I Breath–in which Amelia Cavallo sings original compositions about having “Pavement Rage” as a blind performer, whilst accompanying herself on the accordion and later swinging on a trapeze–and Beneath the Streets, a devised immersive collaboration between Hijinx and Punchdrunk (the company behind Sleep No More). Not only was I seeing my subject of research in action, but I was meeting the likes of artists I drool over in my studies at NU. Suffice it to say, I was hyperventilating from excitement for seven days straight.
Part of the festival took place in the Wales Millennium Center (which houses lots of different companies including the Welsh National Opera) down in Cardiff Bay. In the below picture of the WMC entrance, you’ll note what may look like a random assemblage of letters getting in the way of words you understand. Wales has an interesting linguistic history of the native language (Welsh) being threatened by the invasion of aggressive English-speakers (story of English’s life), so now everything–from road signs to websites to all of our advertising for the festival–is printed in both Welsh and English.
This is the Glanfa Foyer, decorated with the company’s name in giant painted styrofoam letters and hanging lampshades that have the faces of Hijinx Academy students on them:
The weekend part of the festival took place on the Hayes up in City Centre, about a mile from the bay. Here again are the styrofoam letters in front of our home base, the Tabernacl Welsh Baptist Church:
Hooray for free arts taking place in public spaces!
~~WE INTERRUPT YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING TO BRING YOU THIS IMPORTANT MESSAGE~~ Before I go on, I just need to make something clear: I am (and always have been) what may be considered “able-bodied,” in that my body functions more or less in the way that the media and sundry authoritative structures say a “normal” body functions. I also happen to not have any close relatives or friends who are differently abled. I am constantly learning about how to use language that respects the human dignity of all individuals, and this is always my goal; however, I will probably get things wrong. If you read something that isn’t up to date with the most respectful terminology, please email me! [EmilyBaldwin2016 (at) u.northwestern.edu] ~~WE NOW RETURN TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED RAMBLINGS PROGRAMMING~~
In seven days I saw twelve performances from start to finish and at least half of an additional three (that sort of thing is possible when you have a weekend of nonstop outdoor performances throughout the city centre). I saw hip-hop, modern, and jazz dance, Shakespeare, dangerous acrobatics, trapeze, immersive theatre, an audio tour of the city streets, and a piece involving nine ladies in ridiculous bridal gowns convincing random male pedestrians to don suits and pose for pictures. Perhaps the most bemusing were the two that I had a small role in (these roles somehow both involved getting audience members into various naked suits…more details to come). The artistic quality in all of these was mind-blowing. As a general artist, I found little moments of brilliant inspiration in each of these that I hope to steal and (respectfully) replicate some day. As a researcher, I found sundry approaches that these companies had to either referencing the different abilities of the performers or not.
One common trait I noticed in performers–particularly with different physical abilities–was self-deprecating humor (which was coincidentally written about after the festival in this Howlround article). At the end of her show, Amelia would yell off to the side, “access! access!” until I or another volunteer came to go with her to her dressing room as she said things like “Make way for the blind lady!” Remi, the third of the three-part French acrobatics group Cirque Inextremiste who uses a wheelchair, asked to keep one of our accessibility signposts (featuring the wheelchair icon) to carry around with him.
I plan to go into some more detail about specific productions in future posts, but for the time being, here are some of the Big Questions on my mind as I’m getting further into my research: are spaces constructed to fully highlight performers/participants with different abilities (ex. the audio tour play Eye Queue Hear featuring a cast with learning differences) or to mix together those with different abilities with neurotypical/able-bodied performers (which most of the Unity shows did)? In the latter case, are the activities that these mixed groups perform designed to serve some of the participants more than others? Overall, who hold authority positions/who is making decisions, and to what degrees?
Stay tuned for more of my affectionate ramblings about Hijinx and details about my coercing strangers into white morphsuits!