I’ve got a couple of lists on the go, there are 14 tabs open on my lap top, a suitcase open with good intentions and kids to feed within the next hour.

I’m in that pre-adventure terror haze. And I am about to have an adventure. I’ve been lucky enough to be selected by the British Council Canada and Directors Lab North (Toronto, Canada) to attend a 28 strong, 10-day theatre directors laboratory. 28 artistic directors from all over the world and I am one of 6 UK directors attending, all bringing different technical and philosophical approaches to theatre.

I’ve never been to Canada (though is has long been a dream) and I haven’t met any of the other directors before. As far as I know, none of the other directors are self-identifying disabled people – although I will obviously do my research to check out the fellow crip-stats and report back in my return blog. It’s a very exciting opportunity – we’ll be attending workshops, talks, presentations, an arts festival, theatre shows, art form and critique discussions, some us are leading sessions and there is a mysterious playwrights project so there is going to be lots of learning, exchanging and informing. It’s not often to be afforded the time and space for professional and creative development, so this feels like a real luxury.

And it’s quite daunting. Wondering where I’ll fit, are my/our stories and aesthetics interesting to this new audience, and will it be accessible and comfortable. I’m reassured to note that many of the other directors are all from diverse backgrounds – many of us are probably striving to ensure that amazing stories of often hidden people and cultures are given a place in our flagship theatres. And it’s clear that within so-called ‘diversity’ there is much innovation in the way that we reach and engage audiences, informing our practice. I’m looking forward to discussions in this area, and how and why we make theatre relevant in the 21st century in the midst of a technical and digital revolution. What is it about a live exchange that gives theatre its rich power and how does that translate in the modern world?

Practitioners attending are actively engaged in bringing about increased understanding, and social and cultural change, so I know there will be many notes and experiences to share. Everyone will bring a different voice, sharing practice and both introducing and learning new techniques and practices. And we will inevitably become an international network of practitioners – what a brilliant opportunity.

Oh and as for access, so far the British Council and the organisers of the Lab could not have done more to meet my access requirements…from the every-day things, to the extent of spotting that one of the outdoor festival events available to us is standing only and are solution seeking rather than saying ‘oh sorry, you can’t go to that one’. So far, so good. If I had time to pinch myself I would, but things need crossing off these lists and that empty suitcase is staring at me.  I’ll keep you posted.
 

The Keepers is a powerful new production created by learning disabled actors working in collaboration with professional theatre director Vici Wreford-Sinnott, who have been collaborating for the last five years, at ARC Stockton. It’s a piece about ‘not going back’ – about not going back to the old days, about not going back on promises, and about not going back to institutions for learning disabled people.
 
Full Circle have made their latest performance piece with a quickly changing world in mind and the fact that it’s easy to forget to respect people who are different, to leave them behind in the rush to move forward, and to forget to ask them about things that impact on their lives. Disabled people generally are concerned about the great societal uncertainties that impact on our everyday lives.
 
Full Circle members believe passionately that disabled people must be listened to about their experiences. They were inspired by a book which was created by a group of people who had left long term institutional hospitalisation. The book was created so that the stories of learning disabled people are neither lost nor forgotten.
 
Kenny, one of the actors told us, “Learning disabled people had no respect in the hospital. No-one listened to them and they had no choices.”
 
The days of institutionalisation are remembered with fear and dread for disabled people, and the lack of life choices and basic rights that go along with that. People were sent away from their families with no real diagnosis, and often, for no other valid reason than a person could not be understood.
 
The Keepers is set on a remote island and follows the stories of a group of people who have been sent to live there against their wishes. In spite of attempts to remove their dignity, the group forge a role for themselves, and become the keepers of hidden promises, of invisible truths, and of stories untold. The piece speaks to the responsibility we all have to reveal unfairness and inequality in our local communities. 
 
The Keepers collect the messages in bottles washed up on the shore of the island, and all the released balloons with messages of love are safely recorded so that no-one’s hopes and dreams is forgotten. One character tries to keep a promise it was almost impossible to keep, where every possible obstacle that could appear, did appear.
 
Alyson, who helped to create the piece said, “In the hospital, the people had no identities –all their personal items were removed. They had to wear a uniform, and followed a rigid daily routine – couldn’t eat when they wanted, and couldn’t even have a cuppa with friends. They were treated as if they had no brain and no feelings – work, work, work – and then go to bed early. We must never go back.”
 
Andrea, another actor, said, “We wanted to show that we are people with interesting things to say. We have a right to make choices about our lives, and we deserve to have the chance to share our ideas in a theatre with others. It’s our way of telling our own stories, and of trying to keep the promise that we will not forget what people have been through.”
 
The new piece of work premieres at ARC Stockton as part of a project called Cultural Shift, which aims to put disabled people centre-stage in a disabled-led way, ensuring that the ideas are all those of disabled people.
 
Vici Wreford-Sinnott is the Creative Lead on the project, and is used to creating pioneering work with disabled people. “I have had the pleasure and privilege of working with Full Circle for the last five years. They are a remarkable group of people, of theatre makers who have developed a unique signature style – physical, visual work with a brilliant sound track and themes of comedy even in the most powerful of work. It’s really surprising and entertaining.”
 
She continued, “The group usually play to packed houses, and we hope to fill ARC again this time for a particularly significant performance at this time in the company’s development, in a social climate which presents significant challenges for disabled people”.
 
The Keepers will be performed on 9 November at both 1.30pm and 7.00pm. Tickets are on a Pay What You Decide basis but should be booked in advance please. Box office is 01642 525199 / www.arconline.co.uk
 
About Cultural Shift
Cultural Shift is an extraordinary three year programme of artistic activity, led by disabled people at ARC Stockton, ensuring that the extraordinary voices of disabled people are heard and that the incredibly diverse art created by disabled people is valued as equal in our cultural landscape. We are challenging perceptions, creating new opportunities and introducing new people to the work of disabled artists.

Little Cog
Little Cog is a dynamic disabled-led theatre company presenting ground-breaking new work in the North East of England. It was founded by Artistic Director, Vici Wreford-Sinnott, in 2011.
The company has been involved in a number of pioneering disability arts projects and is currently working in partnership with ARC Stockton, a multi-artorm venue, delivering a three year programme of activity called Cultural Shift, which aims to challenge perceptions of disabled people in the arts and to create increased opportunities for both professional and community based disability art.

About Full Circle
Full Circle is a theatre company of learning disabled actors based at ARC. It was set up in 2008 by two of the groups’ members with the support of Stockton Borough Council Adult Services. The group is committed to promoting and valuing learning disabled people, their creativity and their voices. The group creates new and original work, with scripting and devising being carried out by group members.  The group work as an ensemble, where everyone has equal input, and are supported by two members of staff. They have created work in collaboration with Vici Wreford-Sinnott from Little Cog for the last five years.
 

Rehearsal photos

Throughout my career in Disability Arts and the promotion of equality for disabled people in art and culture, I, along with many Disabled colleagues around the country, have always tried to increase understanding of Disability as a social idea. We don’t view any notions of ‘difference’: disabled people; Black and Asian people; women; older people; LGBTQI people, as we do, by accident. I’d love artists and companies, both disabled and non-disabled, to be aware that negative ideas around disability are continually perpetuated through the arts and permeate culture each and every day – theatre, literature, film, spoken word, fine art, comedy, television, print media, news, children’s stories. To encourage artists and companies to consider misrepresentations when creating new work or re-presenting old works, it’s important to put a few things into context.
 
 In a 21st Century world with our increased understanding of society, of segregation, and of social constructs, it really isn’t good enough to be lazy in our understanding of the systemic social and cultural discrimination of Disabled people.  Within the Arts, we have to examine our practice, our processes, our work, its content, any representations it makes, and be accountable if we, either deliberately or inadvertently, perpetuate negativity around Disabled peoples’ status and value as equal citizens. There are a number of clearly articulated stereotypes and tropes which do this, and some clearly articulated artistic decisions taken by those with artistic and cultural power which actively hinder progress.
 
I’ve been lucky enough to attend a few Disabled-led Disability Arts events lately, which are brilliant for all sorts of reasons, but particularly when you need to just take a peer ‘check-in’ with your thinking. Having been involved in Disability Arts for 25 years things have changed a lot, and it’s really important that we continue to lead the way when it comes to policy and practice around Disability Equality in art and culture, both for our own work and to inform the work of those working with Disabled people, or where Disability is a subject within their work.
 
The Disability Arts sector has changed greatly since its inception as part of the Disability Rights Movement in the 1960s and 70s where theatre, music, poetry, cabaret, visual art, street performance  were used as a means of protest against discrimination and to campaign for equal rights for Disabled people. Society and culture have also changed a lot since those days, but the fight for equality seems ever more urgent in our current political climate.
 
One of the great difficulties for any social group seeking equality is to challenge the historical and social status given to ‘marginalised groups’ and perpetuated through time, art and culture. We can trace the development of low ‘social status’ for Disabled people right back to Ancient Greece, where to be less than perfect was to be ‘less good’ and to have ‘less value’ as a citizen, and similarly through each historical era since, there has been specific negative attention given to those with impairments.
 
Thanks to the Disability Rights Movement, to Disabled activists, artists and academics, we are able to robustly examine art and culture, and its role in perpetuating the low value and low status bestowed on Disabled people.
 
We have looked at societal perceptions of Disability and Disabled people, and collected those perceptions into different ‘models’ of disability. There is a ‘charity’ model which views us as rather pitiable dependents needing other people to take care of us and make decisions for us. The dominant contemporary model of viewing disabled people is known as the Medical Model of Disability. It sees disability as a deficit, as something ‘wrong’ with a person. An individual is at fault because they are perceived as having functional deficiencies, which progresses into either needing to be cured or becoming a burden to both family and state.
 
However in the 1960s the Disability Rights Movement developed a new approach of looking at Disability and examined what the disabling factors were for people with impairments. Disabled people were all too aware that we experienced barriers and obstacles to fully taking part in society. There were physical barriers such as steps and lack of accessible car parking for people with physical impairments, there were sensory barriers for visually and hearing impaired people, communication and information barriers for learning disabled people, psychological barriers for people with mental health conditions, and both attitudinal and institutional barriers preventing equal access to employment, education, communities, the arts, and social involvement more widely. Disabled people realised that we were not the problem but in fact the disabling factor for us was that society was full of barriers and attitudes which prevented our equality.
 
The Social Model of Disability (the term coined by Mike Oliver in 1983 to describe what disabled peoples groups were articulating) is now recognised as the most effective model we have to increase understanding and to removing inequality and discrimination, with its recognition of barriers external to individuals with impairments and to the equality measures that must be put in place by society to equally accommodate the requirements of all citizens.
 
Stereotypes
 
The social model allowed us to see clearly that ideas around disabled people had been socially constructed, which in turn revealed the stereotypical ways disabled people had been represented in theatre, film, media and literature. In 1991 Paul Hunt identified 10 stereotypes that various media use to portray disabled people:

1. The disabled person as pitiable or pathetic – Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
2. An object of violence – Blanche in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
3. Sinister or evil – Most Bond villains
   
4. The super cripple or superhuman – Paralympics advertising, overcoming and overcompensating
5. As curiosity or atmosphere – Tommy the Musical
6. Laughable or the butt of jokes – Forest Gump or Dumb and Dumber
7. His/her own worst enemy / chip on the shoulder – Captain Hook
8. As a burden – people kept hidden or outcast such as Quasimodo
9. As Non-sexual – Marlon Brando as a veteran in The Men
10. Being unable to participate in daily life – lack of visibility, presented as incapable

Myths about Disabled People
 
Due to both under-representation and mis-representation, myths about Disabled people have been created and underline and inform public opinion. These are just a few myths which we need to dispel.

• Disabled people are brave and courageous – no, we have successfully adapted to our lives
• To become disabled is a personal tragedy – life-changing situations can be supported positively. 70% of us will become disabled as we age.
• Disabled people are chronically ill or sick – we are not defined by illness
• Wheelchairs are restrictive – actually they are a tool of independence
• Disabled people don’t have sexual relationships – of course they do! We are all sexual beings.
• All disabled people need carers – disabled people are independent and sometimes employ assistants to support that independence
• Disabled people are a financial burden – actually there is a strong economy around disabled people through 7 million of us working and tax-paying, and  through the creation of jobs to support us – many of us are employers. The ‘purple pound’ has been calculated to be worth £249 million pounds to the economy.

 
Tropes
In this context the word ‘trope’ means that  a culturally or socially ‘agreed-upon narrative’ already exists around a certain idea – for example disabled peoples experiences, lives or identities  – and that it is possible that an audience will accept a reading of a story or situation according to the simplest and most widely-held beliefs. It is a kind of narrative stereotype. Many tropes exist around disabled people and appear in our lives on a daily basis. We exist in these tropes on the basis of the one-dimensional stereotypes above and to further the narratives of other more important, non-disabled ‘whole’ characters. Sadly, there are many more than those listed here. Disability tropes reinforce disablism and ignorance.

• The sweet innocent saint – a representation of saintly goodness in spite of difficulty and inequality
• The vengeful villain – dark revenge characters unable to accept their impairment and seek to harm others
• Magical cures – where a disabled person is cured of their impairments and only then becomes whole
• Better dead than disabled – where someone who becomes unwell or disabled would rather die than endure life with an impairment often relating to suicide or mercy killing
• Disability as an education tool – where disability is used as a tool to educate another character to a device to further another characters narrative
• Disabled people as inspiration porn –  a character rebuilding him or herself back from impairment – you can get better if only you tried harder
• Damaged disabled person suffering – presented as a broken person
• Affliction and suffering – defined by a steady decline in health in forensic detail
• Disabled person as a solution – a side-lined one dimensional character who at the end possesses the solution to another characters problem based on their ‘specialness’

Cripping Up
 
Put simply, ‘cripping up’ is the appropriation of disabled peoples’ narratives by non-disabled writers, directors, and presented using non-disabled actors to play the parts of disabled people. It means that the stories chosen to be told are chosen by non-disabled people, often containing disablist stereotypes, myths and tropes because they are unaware of the cultural implications of their ‘artistic’ choices. Much has been said of the relief audiences feel when non-disabled actors receive their Oscars for representing a voyeuristic and distorted view of disabled peoples’ experiences, and then walk away from the podium, transcending disability, completely healed and whole again.
 
Much of what I’m writing here has been discussed a lot within the Disability Rights Movement and the Disability Arts Community for decades, we’ve discussed it with legislative bodies, Government departments and national policy makers for the arts but somehow the discourse is always side-lined, or hijacked by a new initiative, or sometimes by people who think they know better than we do about what is best for our cultural position - the old Charity Model. We are largely under-estimated still, ironically based on cultural tropes and myths. There are earnest initiatives in place attempting to support the advancement of Disabled people in the arts but without advancing the discourse around content, around voice and how the work is viewed,  we may just be temporarily treading water culturally.
 

It has been such a privilege to rekindle my body of work with the support of the team at ARC Stockton. Annabel Turpin has always been so open to providing space and platforms for theatre-makers developing work which is contemporary, is challenging in form or content, and work which explores the relationship between audience and theatre practice. I've had a truly curious, artistically fulfilling, adventure with other amazing artists, and as such, the space to engage in my ongoing conversation within my own practice about the aesthetics of change / equality in theatre.

Butterfly is a one woman contemporary performance piece which aims to recognise the historical trail of stigma attached to mental health problems, and more widely to disabled people and to anyone regarded as ‘other’. However, Beatrice, our main protagonist, had hoped that she wouldn’t be here, tonight, in this place. Under the microscope. The worst thing we could do really was put her centre-stage. She just wants a quiet life, but given the treatment of disabled people, including people with mental health problems, her hand is forced.
Beatrice is faced with the options of staying under the radar or becoming a ‘Reclaimer’ in an increasingly hostile state. With the help of Butterfly and Boudica, and an experimentation with form, Beatrice travels between both big and little history, and is forced to make some difficult decisions. Elizabeth, as ever, stays behind her blinds and half drawn curtains.

Butterfly explores how we, as a society and as a culture, continue to accept and perpetuate the weighty baggage of stereotypes, medicalisation and myths as facts. So great and powerful are the traditions of the cultural canon, that anyone outside it, anyone not represented by it, anyone who has not had their voices and stories heard by it, must continue to challenge it and fight to be included in the cultural landscape.

I am committed to disability equality in cultural contexts and I am currently exploring the connection between work made in a mental health context and its aesthetic relationship to the social model of disability, or models which locate the disabling factors in a person's life outside of the individual, and its position within the broader body of Disability Arts. I am fascinated with the representation of disability in the classical cannon and challenging our accepted narratives around disabled people and their value/place. My work explores the colonisation of identity and its reclamation.

In aesthetic terms, it is not enough for me to make 'access' an artform, thought I do value this - the work we make clearly has to be accessible as an act of equality. I fully understand why it is important to make work accessible. How possible is it to make the work universally accessible though? Or perhaps what I really mean by that is, in terms of the access we're attempting to make part of the artistic process, how many people do we leave out, exclude, leave unreferenced in terms of equality, how many impairments are not considered in current 'access as aesthetic'. And what message does it send to disabled people (and non-disabled people) whose access isn't considered for the aesthetic? Within Disability Arts, we've been having these conversations for decades, and will for time to come. I'm interested in  the stories we choose to tell, the aesthetics we employ in their telling, the artistic decision making which comes from the palette of a disabled person's individual experience but with equal weighting for me, the truths we expose through our reference to history, status, society, social policy, cultural signs and signifiers. Until our histories are told, we cannot fully reveal our present.

You can see a trailer here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpPYsne-wzU

A review of the show from the Northern Echo

Lovely blog piece on Express North

Some comments on Vici’s work:

"A powerful, dark, funny one woman drama exploring how we treat human beings in the 21st Century" 
                                                                                                             Express North - Inspiring Women to Celebrate

“Intense, innovative and thought provoking, cleverly written and skilfully executed” 
                                                                                                               The Art of Not Getting Lost, Shout North East

“Compelling theatre – I was completely drawn into the world they created” 
                                                                                                                           The Art of Not Getting Lost, Audience

“This show would not be out of place on a London stage, and if it were, it would shine” 
                                                                                                                                   Audience Member, ARC Stockton

“Vici Wreford Sinnott is an accomplished writer and knows her craft”
                                                                                                                                                     Disability Arts Online

Pauline Heath in Association with Little Cog

3 Disabled Actors and 1 Non-Disabled Actor Wanted For Rehearsed Reading

Occupation is a new play by Pauline Heath which will be presented at ARC Stockton as a rehearsed reading on 1 October 2015.

This new hard-hitting play is showing how people and families have been affected by austerity. And how it affects everybody, not just minorities. People who would never before have dreamed of attending a rally, are now gathering to speak out. What would make you protest? What would you protest about? This piece is taken from the real life experiences of disabled people near you.


1 female actor, playing age 40-50 years to play Parent

1 male disabled actor, playing age 45-50 years to play Ex-Soldier

1 male disabled actor, playing age 18-22 years to play Young Person

1 female disabled actor, playing age 35-50 years to play Professional


Each actor will multi-role, but will have one main character to play.

There will be five days of rehearsals in Stockton-On-Tees, 27 September – 1 October, including a public reading on 1 October 2015. Actors must be available for all rehearsals and performance. The fee is £150 per day, with travel and accommodation covered additionally by arrangement. We also have an access budget.

Auditions will be held on 2 September 2015. To apply, please email us your CV including the name of two referees, a short paragraph stating why you are interested in being involved in this piece, a headshot and on a separate page, please inform us of your access requirements for the audition. The deadline for applications is Noon on 21 August. Please email to Vici Wreford-Sinnott at littlecog@rocketmail.com indicating which part you are applying for in your email and with Occupation Audition in the email Subject line.