The UK disability arts movement has developed over a period of some thirty years, as disabled people have asserted their right to work professionally in the arts and, in doing so, to represent their lives and experience. Disability has not been viewed as an impediment to artistic achievement, but as a fit and proper subject for artistic work - disability as inspiration, not tribulation.

This development has had two major strands: the growth of disability arts organisations and the development of a distinctive set of artistic practices by individual artists.

Of the two, the history of disability arts organisations has been better documented, for example in the Arts Council of England’s Celebrating Disability Arts, which, although edited to make it more of a piece of ACE corporate propaganda, still contains much useful material. But it is the latter which is the real heart of the disability arts movement.

Organisational development started in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the founding of SHAPE (1976) and London-based Graeae Theatre Company (1980).

Neither of these was initially a true disability arts organisation. SHAPE was a London charity providing artistic opportunities for a variety of excluded groups, including prisoners and old people as well as disabled people. Its example was followed elsewhere; building to what became for a time a national network. Graeae, a professional company of physically disabled people, initially had a non-disabled director, technicians and administration. Both were to change significantly under pressure from disabled people in years to come.

Change was in the air for disabled people. It is perhaps no accident that Graeae was founded in the same year as the British Council Of Disabled People. The following year, 1981, was International Year of Disabled People, which provoked a number of developments.

There was at the time growing interest in how disabled people were represented in the arts. In 1981 I, with filmmaker Steven Dwoskin, programmed Carry on Cripple, the National Film Theatre’s first season of films about disability.

In the same year the BBC caused a lot of anger among disabled people when they banned Ian Dury’s single Spasticus Autisticus. The BBC felt Dury’s song was offensive, focusing on lines like, 'I widdle when I piddle/'Cause my middle is a riddle.' But many of us felt that Dury was speaking for us all, and that when he sang 'As I walk past your window/Give me lucky looks./You can read my body/But you’ll never read my books’, he was expressing sentiments that would not otherwise be heard at the BBC.

What really shaped disability arts as a movement was the influence of disability politics. Disabled people in the arts took from it two particular principles: that disabled people’s organisations should be controlled and run by disabled people; and that provision for disabled people’s needs should be through civil rights rather than charitable provision. The adoption of these led to tension with some longer-established organisations, particularly SHAPE.

The key event was the establishment of the London Disability Arts Forum (LDAF). In 1985, a packed meeting at the Albany Empire voted for the setting up of LDAF, an arts organisation that would be entirely controlled by disabled people. At the organisation’s launch the following year, disabled academic Vic Finkelstein, a key figure in the Union of the Physically Impaired against Segregation, delivered an influential paper, Disabled People and Our Cultural Development. Subsequently reprinted in Disability Arts in London magazine, it argued that in looking for access to the arts, disabled people should not be looking for access to ‘normal’ (i.e. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male) culture, but for the creation of a disability culture - one among many in a multicultural society. Finkelstein cited examples of other cultures as including Black arts and music, women’s theatre, working men’s clubs and gay and lesbian journals.

The basic condition of this creation of a culture was that: “we have to make the choice that we want to identify ourselves as disabled people. We have to be willing to express our separate identity. There can be no disability culture without this freely made choice.” (1)

The LDAF model was copied around the country. DAFs (disability arts forums) became the basic model for disability arts provision, and several organisations withdrew from the SHAPE network to become DAFs, controlled by disabled people. This process was led by Arts Integration Merseyside, which withdrew from the SHAPE network in 1986. In the same year it appointed a disabled woman, Mandy Colleran, as Development Officer. Four years later, the organisation renamed itself as North West Disability Arts Forum.

One important early debate was about integration. A number of performance organisations described themselves as ‘integrated’ because they included both disabled and non-disabled people. These came under attack for disempowering disabled people, who were reduced to window-dressing. Activists observed that such organisations were less to do with realising the artistic aspirations of disabled people than with giving credibility to second-rate work. Integrated groups proved, over time, to be unable to compete with disability-led groups; they lacked serious interest in disability issues, and did not really trust their disabled performers. Their work was less innovative, lower quality and just less interesting.

The most significant move away from the integrationist approach has been in the area of work with people with learning disabilities. I can remember seeing performances where non-disabled people worked with people with learning disabilities in a way that reminded me of primary school music and movement classes. Since then, groups such as Heart ‘n Soul (2) and the Bristol based art + power (3) have developed ways of working that empower people with learning disabilities to develop the professional skills that allow them to produce high quality original work.

But not all disability art is driven by organisations. One of the strongest areas of activity has long been the visual arts, a fact first demonstrated by LDAF’s exhibition Out of Ourselves in 1990. Featured artists included sculptor Tony Heaton, painters Lucy Jones and Gill Gerhardi, print-maker and sculptor Nancy Willis, and Deaf print-maker Trevor Landell.

The reason for such a strong presence is that visual artists have on the whole managed to get access to art colleges and receive good professional training. Art schools traditionally have had more room for those who don’t fit neatly into rigid academic boxes. This is not to say that they were particularly welcoming to disabled applicants. But those applicants could be very determined, as Nancy Willis recalls:

I just wanted to get in there. I just lied to everything they thought of, and said yes I can manage this, yes I can do that, yes I can spin round on my head. In those days colleges would use lack of access as a way of saying no. But I was determined to go to art college. I would not have risked letting them refuse me by saying anything would be difficult. (4)

By contrast, would-be actors found the doors of drama schools firmly closed, as Geof Armstrong, now Director of the National Disability Arts Forum, found out when trying to apply to drama school: “As soon as I mentioned I was disabled, they didn’t want to know.”

The reason for this was an ethos that said that only non-disabled people could learn to act:

Until about 15 years ago, the actor had to be a blank slate on which the director could write. Being disabled meant that you couldn’t portray, for example, a non-disabled person. There was a large emphasis on being fit. Being fit meant that you could be unfit. That was the ethos, the starting point for an actor’s training. (5)

The more rigidly organised an area of activity, the more it excludes disabled people. The more hierarchical its decision-making, the more likely that someone in that chain will be unable to handle disability. The smaller the number of gatekeepers, the harder it is to penetrate.

Writing for television, I found that I was able to penetrate mainstream writing, getting commissions for episodes of EastEnders, or a radio series for young people. But I found it impossible to get to write about disability, at least in the way I wanted to write about it. I remember pitching the idea that I’d like to write about how disabled children get fucked up by their parents’ inability to handle their disabilities to a Channel Four commissioning editor who turned out to be herself the parent of a disabled child.

Radio - a much more civilised medium - seemed at first more welcoming. When Radio Four commissioned a pilot for Inmates, a series about a group of friends in a long-stay institution for disabled people, our script was highly praised. The opening scene, which contains the thoughts of Gobbo, the narrator, while he sits on a toilet waiting for a suppository to take effect, was described by a senior producer as “the best opening scene I’ve read in years”. But the then head of Radio Four vetoed it, and the show was never made.

It can sound like sour grapes to declare that such judgements are caused by an inability to handle the subject matter, but I’ve had too many similar experiences over a twenty-year career - and there has definitely been a pattern to them. I turned to stand-up comedy and performance poetry as forms that allowed me to perform material about disability and get an immediate response.

The fact that I was able to do both was largely due to the development of disability cabaret, which allowed disabled performers to perform to disabled audiences. This enabled existing performers such as Johnny Crescendo and Ian Stanton to create new, disability-oriented material and encouraged new performers, such as myself, to take to the stage.

The difficulty of breaking into the mainstream has made disability arts a little ghettoised, and unhealthily dependent on UK Arts Council funding. However, being outside the mainstream can lead to originality and freshness of thought. One feature of disability arts has been its development of imaginative training projects. There have also been projects incorporating a training element, such as writers’ workshops leading to publication of a book - as in NDAF’s Shelf Life, a collection of writing by people with a reduced life expectancy (6) or Disability Arts Cymru’s The Write Stuff, which led to the anthology Hidden Dragons (7).

And we may now not be far from the mainstream. The late Adam Reynolds was two days away from performing Sisyphus at Tate Modern before his sudden and unexpected death; his full-page obituary in The Guardian was written by the director of the Tate, Sir Nicholas Serota. An archive of disability arts is being created at Holton Lee in Dorset, and the first MA course in disability arts is about to start at Bournemouth University.

I believe it was important for disability arts to develop away from the mainstream. We were not wanted, would not have been welcome and would have been swamped. But over the last twenty-five years we have built something significant, defined a type of work, produced individual works that are both part of that movement and highly distinctive in their own right. If we want to enter the mainstream, we have something to take to it - and the mainstream will be all the richer for the addition.

References

  1. Vic Finkelstein, V, 1987 Disabled People and their Culture Development (DAIL 8, June 1987)
  2.  HYPERLINK "http://www.heartnsoul.co.uk" www.heartnsoul.co.uk
  3.  HYPERLINK "http://www.artandpower.com" www.artandpower.com
  4. Personal communication
  5. Personal communication
  6. Kaite O’Reilly (Editor), Shelf Life (National Disability Arts Forum, 2003)
  7. Allan Sutherland and Elin ap Hywel (eds.) Hidden Dragons: New Writing by Disabled People in Wales (Parthian Books 2004)

Allan Sutherland has been one of the most passionate voices on the UK disability scene for twenty years,, as writer, journalist, standup comic and performance poet. He is also the leading historian of the UK Disability Arts movement. As Director of the Edward Lear Foundation, a Disability Arts think-tank, he advises the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (NDACA) and is leading the project to create an oral history of disability arts.