Theatres of Learning Disability

Good, Bad, or Plain Ugly?

Matt Hargrave

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137504395
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Winner of the TaPRA New Career Research in Theatre/Performance Prize 2016 This is the first scholarly book to focus exclusively on theatre and learning disability as theatre, rather than advocacy or therapy. Hargrave provocatively realigns the - hitherto unvoiced - assumptions that underpin such practice and proposes that learning disabled artists have earned the right to full critical review.

Part I

The Surrogate

1

The End of Disability Arts: Theatre, Disability, and the Social Model

The companies reviewed in this book are all, to varying degrees, subject to the discourse of disability rights, which has been prevalent in the UK and other parts of the world since the late 70s. This has been an emancipatory process seeking to uncover and dismantle the mechanisms by which all industrial societies operate an ‘ableist’ ideology: that is, the structures of thought and social organisation that validate able-bodiedness and high cognitive functioning as the validating ideal of humanity. In the first part of what follows, I introduce the reader to the changing definitions of learning disability. I then place contemporary performance in the context of identity politics, in particular the type advocated by adherents of the social model of disability and its cultural vanguard, disability arts. The role that theatre has played in the formation of a ‘disability culture’ is analysed, with underlying tensions between theatre as a mechanism for social emancipation and theatre as an art form considered. I conclude this chapter by considering such frameworks in the light of the burgeoning professionalism of theatre involving learning disabled artists and argue that the theories of art and culture based on the social model of disability are inadequate as a means to analyse work of increasing aesthetic complexity. I argue that a paradigm shift has already occurred in practice that is not yet reflected in its analysis. Whilst, as I demonstrate throughout the book, such theory has been available for some time, it has not been significantly applied to the rich seam of aesthetic collaboration between disabled and nondisabled theatre artists.

What is learning disability?

Mind the Gap’s website announces ‘powerful, bold, award winning theatre … Learning disabled and non-disabled artists working in partnership’ (mind-the-gap.org.uk). Australia-based Back to Back suggests a more detached political vantage point:

Back to Back’s ensemble is made up of actors perceived to have intellectual disabilities, a group of people who, in a culture obsessed with perfection and surgically enhanced ‘beauty’, are the real outsiders. (backtobacktheatre.com)

A statement by Vanessa Brooks, Artistic Director of Dark Horse (formerly Full Body & The Voice), implies the wish to transcend all categories:

We actively discourage any dissection of disability beyond what is strictly necessary, focusing on the art, the performance and, most importantly, the audience. We aim to deliver productions which engage, provoke and entertain [their emphases]. We prefer not to define ourselves as a ‘learning disabled theatre company’ but as an exceptional producing theatre company at the cutting edge of contemporary theatre. (www.fullbody.org.uk)

How does a learning disabled actor differ from an actor ‘perceived to have intellectual disabilities’? Linguistically this implies that one actor possesses a disability whilst another is only labelled as having it, the distinction being between learning (something one does) and intellect (something one has). More radically, Brooke’s overt rejection of learning disability implies that the term is outmoded; her active discouragement of ‘any dissection of disability beyond what is strictly necessary’ begs the question: what is necessary and what is not? The definition of learning disability is clearly very important to these companies, but not in the same way. For The Shysters, a UK company active between 1990 and 2008, it was both core and marginal to their practice. They said:

[We were] happy to talk about a ‘learning disability culture’ and also feel we have made a contribution to it. However, learning disability is a label and as such something the company’s actors frequently and understandably reject. Learning disability is central to our work, but we also want it to be invisible within it. (Quoted in Karafistan 2004: 276)

There is, then, an ambivalence about learning disability, suggestive of a club to which few of its members wish to belong – or at least, of a club in a perpetual tension about how to refer to its membership.

A similar inconsistency is prevalent in academic analysis. American philosopher Licia Carlson prefers to ‘use the phrase “persons with intellectual disabilities” as opposed to “the intellectually disabled”, foregoing the use of quotation marks ‘for clarity’s sake’ but recognising that they are far from ‘self-evident […] or unproblematic terms’ (Carlson 2010: pre-contents). British disability theorist Dan Goodley reverses the link between impairment and classification, noting that ‘social structures, practices and relationships, continue to naturalise the subjectivities of people with “learning difficulties”, conceptualising them in terms of some a priori notion of “mentally impaired”’ (Goodley and Moore 2002: 211). This view is in keeping with the UK social model that argues that there is no such thing as mental impairment; rather, there are social practices, which create the idea of impairment.¹

‘Learning disability’ entered classificatory vocabulary, in the UK, in the 1990s with the introduction of the Community Care Act. Prior to this, since the formation of the NHS in 1948, ‘mental handicap’ was the designated term, which, until 1959, was indistinguishable from ‘mental health’. The World Health Organization defines learning disability as ‘a state of arrested or incomplete development of the mind’ and cites three diagnostic criteria as integral to it: IQ; social/adaptive dysfunction; and early onset (www.bild.org.uk). The British Institute of Learning Disability (BILD) estimates that 985,000 people in England have a learning disability (2% of the general population) though they believe this to be a conservative figure. Similarly, the Department of Children and Family Services in 2006 reported 2.6 per cent of the school population as having Special Educational Needs (SEN) (ibid.). So too, there is much debate about the use of the differing terms ‘learning disability’ and ‘learning difficulty’, the latter a term preferred by the international advocacy group, People First. BILD suggests that the distinction can be made on the basis of quantity or severity. For example, someone with dyslexia might have a specific difficulty but not qualify – or wish to identify – as having a general impairment in intelligence. This ‘quantity’ approach is reflected in the SEN statementing system that rates learning difficulty on a sliding scale: moderate, severe, and profound.

Foucault uncovered the mechanisms by which institutional practices defined ‘disciplinary subjects’ such as the mad and the deviant, so that ‘penitentiary technique and the delinquent [became] in a sense twin brothers’ (1979: 255). Licia Carlson, who applies Foucault’s methodology to what was once called ‘feeblemindedness’, notes that ‘within the complex institutional world, intellectual disability was both found and made, knowledge was remade and reported, patterns were recognized, invented, imposed’ (2010: 22). By the late nineteenth century, language had become underpinned by the science of eugenics, which sought to objectively quantify degrees of deviation from the human norm, and operated via two core methods: IQ testing and incarceration. The history of what we now refer to as learning disability has reflected the parallel story of the rise and fall of the ‘total’ institution, a story that only concluded in the 1970s and 1980s with the closure of Britain’s long-stay hospitals. Carlson distinguishes between four sets or ‘conceptual pairs’ that have helped to define what is now called learning disability: qualitative/quantitative; organic/non-organic; static/dynamic; visible/invisible. I will summarise each of these briefly.

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, mental retardation was classified in different ways, with phrases like ‘idiocy or imbecility or fatuity […] [referring to] grades and shades of mental states below the normal standard of human intelligence’ (Carlson 2010: 30). The belief that learning disabilities can be reduced to a particular quantity – ‘less or more’ of human capacity – is ‘in part, what has allowed for the infantilisation of this condition’ (ibid.: 29). By forming a subject as one inherently lacking in developmental stages, that subject becomes a perpetual child; or rather, childhood becomes the only reference point for describing the intellectual status of the subject. This allowed for the anomalous creation of a status problematically positioned between adulthood and childhood. Yet to regard the classification as purely quantitative would belie the qualitative distinctions often made. The strong racial element to such distinction is obvious in Down’s own classification of the syndrome he founded: ‘Mongolian Idiocy’. So too, the qualitative difference was often betrayed in language that referenced idiocy as animalistic or subhuman: not part of a human continuum but wholly outside it.

Carlson’s second organic/non-organic binary reformulates the nature/nurture debate. In classifying learning disabilities in the nineteenth century, there were two simultaneous drives: the need to create medical objects and the need to create conditions for dealing with them. The dominance of the therapeutic or pedagogic models, where individuals could be trained in tasks, gradually gave way to a concern for how environment caused impairment. As soon as genetic causal links became dominant, the fault was to be found in families. Eugenics and environment began to inform each other, feeblemindedness becoming linked to social deviance, thus encouraging ‘cure’ and sterilisation rather than improvement or therapy. Carlson’s third binary is the tension between degrees to which intellectual impairments were improvable/curable (non-static) or fixed and incurable (static). Here, there is no obvious correlation between the quantity of impairment and the perception of improvability. Rather, the fear of social depravity informed the ways in which treatment was organised. For example, at one time, the classification from ‘severe’ to ‘mild’ was thought to progress from ‘idiot’ to ‘imbecile’ to ‘feebleminded’, with those at the highest grade of ability the most amenable to improvement. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the medical/reformist establishment began to propagate the view that those most able – the ‘merely’ feebleminded – actually presented the greatest social risk: because they were able to move about in society, relatively undetected, such ‘types’ could spread ‘bad’ genes and contribute to crime and deviance. The ground shifted and such subjects were thought to be beyond cure; thus segregation and sterilisation became more prominent than education or training.

The final conceptual pair Carlson cites is that of the visible/invisible. On the one hand, the growing number of residential institutions sought to render the class of peoples defined as mentally retarded, invisible from society. Within the walls of the institution, however, a kind of hyper-visibility operated, the professional’s ‘normalising gaze’ boring into every aspect of a person’s life, defining them in new ways as new types of human or sub-human subject. The IQ test moved the goalposts. As soon as testing became prevalent at the start of the twentieth century, a new form of feeblemindedness was created: that of the moron. The moron was able to act outside the walls of the institution, camouflaged by his/her outward normality, to an even greater extent. The growing obsession with intellectual impairment as criminality upped the stakes of testing. Binet’s IQ tests shifted the diagnostic framework from visible defects to the invisible quantity of intelligence: in other words, to a capacity that could be recorded and scored. A person’s physiognomy, will, and intelligence were thus narrowed down to just one: intelligence; and the IQ test was put to work in rooting out the moron. In a very real sense, then, learning disability became defined by the tension between that part of it which could be seen and that which remained hidden.

The binaries interrogated by Carlson are, I argue, directly relevant to the field of theatre and learning disability. This is because theatre, as a corporeal art form, renders such tensions visible; and where many of the ‘harmful’ definitions have been officially rejected, tensions remain. The relative visibility of people with learning disabilities in the social realm today can be set against their relative invisibility in culture. And when they are visible in culture, it is useful to think of the painful history that is revealed or concealed in that process. Progress from testing to incarceration, to humanitarian reform, to de-incarceration and thus to community inclusion is not unproblematic, as was evidenced by the results of the 1971 Government White Paper, ‘Better Services for the Mentally Handicapped’. This directive overhauled the long-stay system, yet ‘Care in the Community’ – as the UK process of deinstitutionalisation became known – failed to advance the living standards of the vast majority of ex-hospital inmates; and the ‘Longcare’ scandal of the mid-90s – involving the systematic rape and torture of residents – demonstrated the lack of accountability in new residential establishments. The 2001 Government White Paper, ‘Valuing People’, was an attempt to re-think the entire system of care and representation. To a large extent the practice now referred to as theatre and learning disability was only made possible by the move from large hospitals to smaller and semi-independent accommodation. Thus, Goodley and Moore can note that ‘increasingly opportunities for participation in performing arts are seen as an exciting alternative to traditional care provision’ (2002: 4), with art practice another way of being actively engaged in the good life.

In sum, therefore, learning disability is a heterogeneous and unstable category. It has never been a unified classification and has never been resident in any one field of knowledge. Unsurprisingly, it sits at the axis of medical, educational, moral, and political discourses. Indeed, the concept of competing discourse is axiomatic to my analysis of learning disability and theatre arts. I argue that, until quite recently, the dominant discourses within theatre and learning disability have been those of psychology (therapy), pedagogy (social learning), and politics (theatre with a rights agenda). Whilst questions of aesthetics have always been present, it is only relatively recently, in the past 10–15 years, that they have risen to establish themselves as uncontainable within other categories. As a consequence, I argue, the theatres of learning disability are ideally placed to interrogate the meaning not just of disability but of classification itself. As Tobin Seibers notes, ‘the presence of disability creates […] the opportunity to re-think how human identity works. I know as a white man that I will not wake up as a black woman, but I could wake up as a quadriplegic’. For this reason ‘ablebodiedness is a temporary identity at best’ (Siebers 2008: 5).² Whilst I do not suggest that one can ‘wake up’ with Down’s Syndrome, I do argue that such a ‘condition’ is not neutral or stable; similarly, one can, whether gradually or suddenly, experience changes in cognition that deconstruct ‘normality’. I allow the term ‘learning disability’ to act as a multi-layered signifier: one that alludes to actual impairments that are both physiologically real, and alive with aesthetic potential; and active as a metaphor for meanings that may be at once disavowing and powerfully transgressive. I recognise that for many theorists and learning disabled persons, some of the ideas will be difficult, perhaps even offensive. This, I think, is a necessary risk in the attempt to make sense of an important, diverse, yet to date insufficiently considered aesthetic practice.

What is disability arts?

Disability arts is: an art practice that addresses the oppression of the disabled person; a mechanism for self-advocacy and self-governance; the cultural vanguard of the social model of disability; a cultural weapon to be wielded against the twin oppressions of mainstream culture and therapeutically aligned art; and a component in the struggle towards emancipation for disabled people. Disability arts grew out of the British disability rights movement of the 70s, and built itself through the 80s from a position of extreme marginality. It consolidated itself through the 90s in publicly funded regional forums, reached its apotheosis in 2003 in an Arts Council report, ‘Celebrating Disability Arts’, and promptly fragmented into contested pockets of practice, which may constitute a final demise. Whilst it has ceased to be a ‘movement’, it nevertheless remains a touchstone for a substantial body of ideas about what constitutes art, disability, and society, and an understanding of the relationships between the three.

A highly prescriptive, even Leninist, strand of thinking has always been part of the movement, summed up in 1991 by Sian Vasey, a founder of Disability Arts Forum (DAF):

I think we should be adopting some sort of policy with artists who initially don’t address the subject [disability] at all. We should be running some sort of education programme and then watching to see how they develop and if they don’t perhaps we should be dropping them from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Tim Wheeler
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Of Moths and Methods
• Part I The Surrogate
• Part II A Proper Actor
• Conclusion: A Proper Actor
• Envoi: The Bartleby Parallax
• Appendix: Easy Read Summary
• Notes
• Sources and Bibliography
• Index