On Access in Applied Theatre and Drama Education

Colette Conroy, Adelina Ong, Dirk J. Rodricks, Colette Conroy, Adelina Ong, Dirk J. Rodricks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000708486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

This book explores and interrogates access and diversity in applied theatre and drama education.

Access is persistently framed as a strategy to share power and to extend equality, but in the context of current and recent power struggles, it is also seen as a discourse that reinforces marginalisation and exclusion. The political bind of access is also a conceptual problem. It is impossible to refuse to engage in strategies to extend access to institutions, representations, buildings, education, discourse, etc. We cannot oppose access or strategies for access without reinforcing marginalisation and exclusion. We can't not want access for ourselves or for others. However, we are then in danger of remaining immersed in a distribution of power that reinforces and naturalises inequality as difference. For applied theatre and drama education, the act of creating, teaching, and learning is intrinsically connected to choice, along with the agency and capacity to choose. What is less clear, and what still interests us, is how the distribution of power and representation creates the schema for an analysis of access and diversity.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance.

1 ‘Talking back, talking out, talking otherwise’

Dementia, access and autobiographical performance

Janet Louise Gibson

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates access through the lens of public autobiographical performances by people living with dementia who, not generally construed as subjects in Western cultures, rarely appear on public stages. This scarcity underscores a strong connection between access and subjectivity, as well as between access, political distributions of visibility and aesthetic practices: all areas insufficiently theorised in access hermeneutics. Deploying one case study, ‘To Whom I May Concern’, a modality operating in virtual and live performance spaces, I expose access issues to do with the autobiographical performance genre along with the opportunities for resistance to power it affords.

Introduction

Autobiographical performance, traditionally involving some aspect of a life story and performed by the same person whose life story it is,¹ has been taken up by many marginalised peoples, including those with disabilities, to gain agency in the face of oppression, that is ‘to talk back, talk out [and] talk otherwise’ to power (Heddon 2008, 3). However, the genre has not generally enticed those living with dementia to public stages, whether art or community. Intriguingly, this scarcity of public productions sits in marked contrast to the reliance, by applied theatre practitioners and others, on the autobiographical story, in care homes. It seems almost obligatory for older adults living with dementia to tell and remember their pasts as memory fades and cognition falters, often through the form of Life Story Books and performative tellings, and more recently through the use of large ‘Liquid Galaxy’ wrap-around screens displaying Google Maps. Reminiscence has been naturalised as the dominant modality for people living with dementia (hereafter PLWD).

In contrast to the popularity of reminiscence in care homes, the shortage of public autobiographical performances by PLWD suggests that both the form and the mode of the genre, as they are commonly understood, are access barriers, especially for those at later stages of dementia. (For my purposes here I take form to be the ‘makeup’ of the genre, and mode to be the manner in which the genre is performed, while acknowledging the simplicity of this division). With the form, there is a life story, or parts thereof, first written and then performed in a passably ‘normal’ way using a reliable memory, as dementia compromises memory and cognition. With the mode, there is the ability to perform a life story (or fragments) solo, as PLWD are commonly ‘in intense caregiving relationships’ (Basting 2001, 79). Although both the form and the mode need to be factored in to any discussion of access to autobiographical performance for PLWD, as does the dementia type and its severity, closer examination reveals a range of complex issues: vital questions about power and the construction of subjectivity itself, with resonance to access hermeneutics in general. Who is able to have unfettered access to this genre of performance? How does this access (or its lack) accentuate fundamental assumptions about selves, lives, and performer capabilities embedded in the genre? What is the role of telling a recognisable life story (biographia) on formations of the self? Is access to the genre of any value for those who live outside normalising identity categories or would other performance genres be more suitable?

In this paper, I explore these seminal questions and, in doing so, argue that PLWD are not generally construed as (agentic) subjects in most Western cultures. I mobilise this argument by drawing on various ideas from disability, dementia, and theatre and performance studies, as well as deploying philosopher Jacques Rancière’s notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (2004) to make certain points in my case study. Although Rancière did not write on disability or dementia, I think that his ‘distribution of the sensible’ provides a useful, somewhat novel framework for dissecting issues to do with ruptures to the assumed aesthetico-political coordinates of the autobiographical performance genre which occur when people normally excluded from access to an aesthetic form (because of conceptions about their subjectivity) take part in it (2004, 13).

From the moment of diagnosis, many PLWD are consigned to the realm of biosocial death, theorised as occurring when a person’s capacity to partake in society diminishes to the point of not being considered a person (Leibing 2006, 248). As non-persons (and non-citizens with many previously understood ‘rights’, like driving a car, removed), they rarely appear on public theatre stages, underscoring a strong connection between access, political distributions of visibility, and aesthetic practices (Rancière’s political project). If they take up the autobiographical performance genre, PLWD must struggle with, challenge and/or attune themselves to the normative suppositions about subjectivity inherent in the structural underpinnings of the genre. I explore these tensions in the latter part of this article through To Whom I May Concern (TWIMC^®), an interactive American-based drama modality operating both in virtual and live performance spaces, which draws on PLWD’s everyday experiences, not reminiscence. In analysing the stage version, I rely on performance theorist Anne Basting’s report in Forget Memory (2009), as well as email exchanges with Maureen Matthews, TWIMC^® founder. For the Internet version, I mix ‘performance analysis’ (Pavis 2003) along with post-structuralist discourse analysis.

I position TWIMC^® as autobiographical from a range of possible terms, including Thomas G. Couser’s ‘illness narratives’ (1997) and Leigh Anne Howard’s ‘performed illness narratives’ (2013; my italics), to buttress the etymological roots of both the noun (autobiography) and the adjective (autobiographical). Derived from the Greek, auto is from ‘autos’ meaning self; bio from ‘bios’ denoting life; and graph from ‘graphia’ for writing (OED online 2017). Using either part of speech underscores the way both the self (auto) and the life (bio) are relegated as non-existent in discursive constructions of PLWD. ‘Graphia’ points to the genre’s beginnings: originally a literary form implicitly bound up with men and based on ideas of autonomy, self-realisation, authenticity, and transcendence, reflecting Western and patriarchal cultural values (Anderson 2001). Furthermore, by holding to ‘autobiography’ and not other terms, the ‘unique authorship’ of the work (Basting 2003, 88) is accentuated, despite the fact that many issues arise from its associations with the ‘literary expression of the self-determined life’ (Couser 1997, 182; my emphasis).

TWIMC^® is not strictly ‘autobiographical’ because, although the performers normally read their own stories, this is not always the case, and their stories do reference and incorporate other lives. Performance theorist Deirdre Heddon makes a useful distinction between ‘autobiography’ and ‘auto/biography’ where the latter refers to ‘the self/other relationship … implicit to every auto/biographical act’ (2008, 126). Since in autobiographical performances, ‘reference to others [is] almost inevitable – mothers, fathers, lovers, friends, enemies’ (Heddon 2008, 127), in this article I assume this reference to be implicit hence I deploy the complete word ‘autobiographical’ rather than decoupling ‘auto’ from ‘biographical’.

Finally, autobiographical performance² is a type of ‘reality theatre’ (Garde and Mumford cited in Wake 2010, 6) taxonomised as a continuum of related yet distinct practices (autobiographical, community, verbatim, documentary, tribunal, and history). Any staging of reality, whether ‘personal, social, political or historical’ (Martin 2013, 5) will be underpinned by normative assumptions about reality. This is a fertile area for discussion in relation to dementia and subjectivity, as will shortly be demonstrated. But first, I will take a brief excursion into the genealogy of access and its hermeneutics.

Access hermeneutics

In published texts since the early fourteenth century, ‘access’, in its noun form, has denoted ‘the power, opportunity, permission, or right to come near or into contact with someone or something; admittance; admission’ (OED Online 2017). However, according to design historian Bess Williamson, its particular import in regards to disability arose in the mid-twentieth century through the development of disability rights movements across the world, when the material struggles of disabled people were connected to other civil rights causes such as race (2015, 15). In the United States, legal scholars and advocates linked both institutional confinement and architectural and transport barriers for disabled people to the core doctrines of citizenship and rights (Williamson 2015, 15).

Along with rights struggles, demands for improved access were theorised in a model of disability, particularly influenced by activists and scholars in the British Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (or UPIAS): Mike Oliver, Colin Barnes, and Vic Finkelstein among others, with the organisation’s nomenclature indicating a primary focus on access for people with physical and sensory impairments. The principal arguments of this materialist ‘social model’ of disability were that whatever the impairment or apparent corporeal dissimilarities from the ‘norm’, the ability of the disabled individual to function in society was mostly shaped by ‘the social recognition of their needs, and the provision of ‘enabling’ environments’ (Meekosha 2004, 723). The model proposed a conceptual distinction between ‘“impairment” as a functional limitation of the individual actor, and “disability” as a socially generated system of discrimination’ (Meekosha 2004, 723). Subsequently, this approach to disability developed widely under the influence of both new social science insights and new social movements, which called for anti-discriminatory legislation.

As important as the social model has been in putting access on the global agenda, it has also no doubt fortified ‘thinking in shorthand’ (Thomas 2004, 579): the idea that disability corresponds with circumscribed movement caused by environmental barriers. In actively promoting the idea that access issues for disabled people may be solved through the dismantling of barriers or by material changes in the physical environment, the social model is likely responsible for attenuation of a particular framing of the concept of access today.

Access, along with its universal wheelchair symbol shoring up the connection (Titchkosky 2011, 55), is commonly understood to be about the removal of barriers and/or the creation of opportunities for ingress into socio-material spaces. Yet it is a very much more complex and multidimensional phenomenon than that. Access is, at its core, a perceptual issue. It is about how people are considered to fit with certain places, spaces, events, and other people, or not (Titchkosky 2011). It is about who is perceived to belong and who is not, in whatever arena, whether public, social, aesthetic, and so on. It is about who qualifies as a human subject making it closely allied to discussions about the creation and maintenance of subjectivity. When access is conceived as solely ‘about ramps in public spaces and better signage’ (Nind and Seale 2009, 273), it becomes a gravely reductionist concept, which chances neglecting the concerns of those whose disabilities may be invisible or cognitive, among others. As Tom Shakespeare, Hannah Zeilig, and Peter Mittler maintain in a recent article in reference to the pitfalls of the social model (to which everyday understandings about access are tied as I have so far argued): ‘it fails adequately to contextualize impairments associated with pain; with limitation; with frailty; and with degeneration …’ (2017, 6). They also contend it has not been effective in theorising ‘cognitive impairments … or mental health conditions’ (2017, 6).

Up until of late, it has been rare for access to be considered beyond space (including digital), education, transport, and citizenship (Nind and Seale 2009). However, recent work from Tanya Titchkosky (2011) and Margaret Price (2011) in education has moved access scholarship towards embodiment, in line with a turn towards the body from critical disability studies theorists like Tobin Siebers (2006).

With dementia and access, the literature is sparse, conceivably for two main reasons. One is likely to do with the relationship between dementia and disability, which is ‘like planets spinning on different axes’ (Shakespeare, Zeilig, and Mittler 2017, 1): in disability sectors, dementia is typically perceived as a health issue; in dementia sectors, PLWD do not usually think of themselves as disabled. The second reason is because the concept of access, linked to the rise of the disability rights movement led by those with physical disabilities as previously mentioned, is usually framed within ‘discourses of rights, inclusion, universal design, accessibility standards and support, all dominant themes across access policy, practice and research’ (Nind and Seale 2009, 275). Yet these discourses have very little to do with the lived experiences of PLWD many of whom have been consigned to the land of, what Australian dementia activist Kate Swaffer terms, ‘Prescribed Disengagement^®™’ (2014) which is:

… being told to go home, give up work, in my case, give up study, and put all the planning in place for their demise such as their wills. Their families and partners are also told they will have to give up work soon to become full time ‘carers’. Considering residential care facilities is also suggested.

Changes are starting to manifest (Shakespeare, Zeilig, and Mittler 2017, 1). Dementia activism and rights-based discourses are emerging phenomena and ‘dementia friendly communities’ are now being spruiked across various countries despite some concerns about their potential to be patronising (Shakespeare, Zeilig, and Mittler 2017, 7).

However, as Swaffer claims in her notion of ‘Prescribed Disengagement^®™’, the general state of affairs is that from the moment of diagnosis PLWD become, almost immediately, non-persons awaiting death. This sidelining from access, often amplified as dementia advances, raises questions, many explored in this paper, about the usefulness of validating one’s identity through autobiographical performance: questions related both to the genre’s identity politics pedigree (Heddon 2008) and to deep-rooted suppositions about the type of performing self best suited to this genre (an autonomous rational individual with memory and cognition intact). I will now begin to sift through these, and other issu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Talking back, talking out, talking otherwise’: dementia, access and autobiographical performance
• 2 Streets, bridges, cul-de-sacs, and dreams: does inviting shelter dwelling youth to work with culture industry professionals engender a sense of ‘cruel optimism’?
• 3 Homegrown censored voices and the discursive British Muslim representation
• 4 Access through the shadows: lessons from applied performance practice research at the borderlands
• 5 Enhancing relaxed performance: evaluating the Autism Arts Festival
• 6 Creating welcoming spaces in the city: exploring the theory and practice of ‘hospitality’ in two regional theatres
• 7 Invited hauntings in site-specific performance and poetry: The Asylum Project
• 8 Interrogating wholeness through access aesthetics: Kaite O’Reilly’s In Water I’m Weightless
• 9 The limits of access: the messy temporalities of hope and the negotiation of place
• Index