From Speak Out
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Monday, May 26 - Saturday, May 31
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Jez Colborne doesn’t mince words about performing as a disabled artist. “I think people without disabilities have to start understanding that we are rising up and there’s really nothing they can do,” says the U.K. native and member of theatre company Mind the Gap. “We have a right to show what we can do. We’re not going to be put down anymore. We’re not going to be thought of as stupid or thick or whatever you want to call us. I am a professional performer and I take pride in that.”
Pride is the byword driving disabled performers to Calgary and the international stage as they prepare to present the 10th annual Speak Out Learning Festival. A celebration of an often misunderstood community, the festival brings together cabaret, workshops, talks and even a pride march on city hall, all unified by an event as loud and proud as Colborne himself.
Colborne, who has Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder whose sociable qualities have also given it the nickname “cocktail-party syndrome,” is an actor, singer, keyboardist and erstwhile film star. After working in a sheltered workshop where he applied labels and took out the trash, he met Mind the Gap’s future artistic director, Tim Wheeller, and found his niche as an improvisational keyboard player. Closing with the festival’s “Disability Cabaret” and speaking as part of Mind the Gap’s “Leading Edge” course on leadership roles for the disabled, Colborne is just one of the artists that make the festival possible.
Speak Out began 10 years ago as a way for Calgary’s Disability Action Hall, a disability advocacy group, to react to issues facing the developmentally disabled, such as cuts to services and more general concerns about the limitations imposed on the disabled — barriers that have yet to be overturned. Denise Young of the Calgary SCOPE Society, a local nonprofit organization working with the disabled, notes that even now, government cuts have made staffing nearly impossible given the rising wages of private sector work.
Three years ago, however, the Disability Action Hall decided to change tack. “We started in a protest mode and decided we wanted to have a little more fun and celebration,” Young says. “We want to celebrate disabled culture, and when you’ve got pride and culture, you want arts and all kinds of ways to explore that.”
Partnering with MoMo Dance Theatre, the festival transformed into its current form, though its annual pride parade and party, which marches on city hall, has remained a vigorous part of the proceedings. Over six days, the festival’s activities run the gamut from dance workshops co-presented by Calgary’s MoMo Dance and London’s AMICI Dance Theatre Company to workshops like Julie McNamara and Caglar Kimyoncu’s beginner filmmaking course.
They’re all ways of exploring the issues embedded in expressing pride by disabled actors like Colborne, and in working toward creating a community that is both empathetic and adaptive. As Wheeller, the artistic director of Mind the Gap, explains, where North Americans tend to use a medical model of disability that diagnoses the source of the disability, a social model encourages adaptation and understanding in a two-way process.
“Yes, people have impairments, but the world has been designed for non-disabled people,” he says. “But the world isn’t really like that, it isn’t ‘normal.’ People don’t conform that easily. We know from nature that diversity is what creates healthy systems, but for some reason in social situations we want everyone to be all like each other. You need to celebrate the difference and the diversity.”
And in that diversity: disabled artists create theatre, music, film and dance. “The joy here is about seeing practices evolving and ideas developing that we can nick from other people and can use elsewhere,” adds Wheeler with a smile.
In that mix of developing ideas, Speak Out aims to create an event that is as collaborative and vibrant as its members, shaping pride into an undeniable voice. While its artists are certainly primed for a good time, their pride also comes with a defiant insistence on being heard.
“We need to keep on having these organizations, these demonstrations, these rallies,” says Colborne. “We showing we’re not afraid anymore, that we want to be there, that we will be there. It’s like we have to keep on rallying, shouting and bawling until someone listens.”
