Kelsie Acton

This conversation explores the development and premiere production of Songs My Mother Never
Sung Me, an American Sign Language (ASL)/English chamber opera written and composed by
Dave Clarke and produced by Concrete Theatre in Edmonton, Alberta. Staging an opera for Deaf
and hearing family audiences required building meaningful connections to Edmonton’s Deaf community,
both through engaging a Deaf cultural consultant and through a partnership with SOUND
OFF , Canada’s Deaf theatre festival. Prioritizing ASL, Deaf audiences, and casting a Deaf actor in
the role of Mom were significant.

by Kelsie Acton, Caroline Howarth and Mieko Ouchi
The aesthetics of accessibility, where considerations of access shape both the creation and presentation of a production, are a driving force in Canadian Deaf and disability theatre (Canada Council, 2012). In this article, we reflect on sound, music, access and audism in Songs My Mother Never Sung Me a bilingual American Sign Language (ASL) and sung English chamber opera written and composed by Dave Clarke and produced by Concrete Theatre at the SOUND OFF: A Deaf Theatre Festival in 2019. This fictionalized memoir is based on Clarke’s experience as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adult) and explores the complex relationship of a hearing boy and his Deaf mom. In this piece music and sound are not only aural elements, but are also tactile vibration, visual projection, and rhythmic ASL. This convergence of the senses expands conceptions of sound and music to comment on the inequality of Deaf and hearing access in the world beyond theatre production as audience position and ASL comprehension gave audiences differing access to the tactile vibration and ASL.

The Edmonton performing arts community believes that the arts are for everyone. In 2019, a group of performing arts companies came together to tackle the question of how to make their performances accessible to as many people as possible (see below for more information). To do that, we need to find out what kinds of accessibility are the most useful to people in Edmonton.
RESEARCH
Performing arts companies engaged two researchers, Brooke Leifso and Kelsie Acton. In Fall 2019, they developed surveys and conducted focus groups to ask about many of the common barriers to engaging with the performing arts. The surveys also asked about common ways to remove some of those barriers. They worked with a committee (Heath Birkholtz, Simone Medina Polo and Connor Yuzwenko-Martin), and hosted a series of focus groups to find more in-depth stories of barriers to performing arts. A final report was created in Spring 2020 and is now available below.

The arts-based research paradigm prioritizes creativity, relationships and the potential of transformative change (Conrad & Beck, 2016). Arts-based research may be useful in disability communities where people may prefer to communicate artistically or through movement, rather than through spoken word (Eales & Peers, 2016). Participatory action research (PAR) involves researchers working with communities to create research critical of dominant power relations and responsive to the needs of communities (McIntyre, 2008). Both arts-based research and PAR value an axiological approach that is responsive to the community's needs over a dogmatic procedure, meaning that researchers must be reflexive and responsive to the often unexpected realities of the field. Over four months in 2017, eight dancers/researchers from CRIPSiE (Collaborative Radically Integrated Performers Society in Edmonton), an integrated dance company, came together to investigate how integrated dancers practice elements of timing in rehearsal, through an arts-based, participatory process. In this paper I examine the gap between my assumptions of how research should be conducted and the reality of the field, specifically: the tension between university research ethics and the ethics of the CRIPSiE community, the differences between the value of the rehearsal process and the performance as sites of data collection, and the assumptions I had made about the necessity of a singular research question. KeyWords Arts-based research, participatory action research, integrated dance, research ethics, disability In the spring of 2017, seven dancer/researchers from Edmonton's integrated dance company, CRIPSiE (Collaborative Radically Integrated Performers Society in Edmonton) and I came together to research how integrated dancers practice timing in rehearsal, particularly moving fast and slow, unison movement, transitions in improvisation scores, and the coordinated timing of partnering. Integrated dance (also called mixed-abilities dance or inclusive dance) is an art form that brings together disabled 1 and non-disabled people to train, create, rehearse, and perform together (Benjamin, 2002). The group reflected the diversity of CRIPSiE in that of the dancer/researchers involved in the research; four identified as disabled (with a variety of impairments), two as seniors, one as hard of hearing, three as queer and one as a person of colour. We used arts-based participatory research where moving together was one of many ways of investigating our research question. 1 In this article I use the language that I, and the dancer/researchers from CRIPSiE use for ourselves. We draw on the social model of disability (Shakespeare, 2006), using 'disabled people' to draw attention to the ways that people are disabled by physical space, social expectations, attitudes and public policy.

Interdependent Magic, curated by Jessica Watkin, is the first anthology of plays by disabled Canadian playwrights from Playwrights Canada Press. It includes pieces by Alex Bulmer, the Boys in Chairs Collective, Syrus Marcus Ware, and Chris Dodd, as well as an interview with Niall McNeil. In this review, Kelsie Acton considers the ways in which the strength of this volume lies not just in the quality and diversity of playwriting featured but also in the care the editor has taken in framing the work. Watkin offers two introductions, one aimed at audiences familiar with disability justice and disability arts and the other aimed at audiences new to disability culture. Interdependent Magic acknowledges the diversity of disabled playwrights in Canada and the diversity of audiences who will read their work.

Researching and modelling new ways of being together, Kelsie Acton, Christiane Czymoch and Tony McCaffrey met through the Performance and Disability Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research in July 2020. The conference was online, the original, in-person conference in Galway disrupted by the COVID 19 pandemic. Over the past six months, the three of us have continued to talk over Zoom. These conversations inform the video that is our contribution to this special issue of Global Performance Studies. We have reached no conclusions. Rather, what we offer is collaborative thinking in-process, drawing upon theorists as diverse as Mingus (2011), Puar (2009), Yergeau (2017), Bowditch and Vissicaro (2017) and Māori concepts of koha (gift) and mana (honour, respect, right to personhood) as applied to performance. Exploring how we can be together is an essential question for Disability Arts and performance more broadly.

The arts-based research paradigm prioritizes creativity, relationships and the potential of transformative change (Conrad & Beck, 2016). Arts-based research may be useful in disability communities where people may prefer to communicate artistically or through movement, rather than through spoken word (Eales & Peers, 2016). Participatory action research (PAR) involves researchers working with communities to create research critical of dominant power relations and responsive to the needs of communities (McIntyre, 2008). Both arts-based research and PAR value an axiological approach that is responsive to the community’s needs over a dogmatic procedure, meaning that researchers must be reflexive and responsive to the often unexpected realities of the field. Over four months in 2017, eight dancers/researchers from CRIPSiE (Collaborative Radically Integrated Performers Society in Edmonton), an integrated dance company, came together to investigate how integrated dancers practice elements ...

Finding more accessible ways to train, create, perform and work is a major concern of researchers and practitioners (Ajula & Redding, 2013, 2014) of integrated and disability dance. In the spring of 2017 eight dancer/researchers from CRIPSiE, an integrated, disability and crip dance company located in Edmonton, came together to investigate their practices of timing through a participatory performance creation process. Participatory performance creation values researcher reflexivity (Heron & Reason, 1997). In this paper I reflect on the way that collaboratively building an improvisation score, a series of tasks and prompts that the dancer/researchers responded to (Gere, 2003), created inaccessibility for one of the dancers/researchers, Robert. At the time I assumed that improvisation itself was inaccessible. Upon reflecting I realized that the improvisation was accessible and that Robert was improvising in ways valued by both the integrated improvisation literature and the other danc...