Enrich Festival

Abstract

Reviewed by: Enrich Festival Winter Phong ENRICH FESTIVAL. Herts Inclusive Theatre, Watford, UK. Online, September 5–6, 2020. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, theatre companies sought ways to engage persons with learning and cognitive disabilities. Companies have mainly focused on audience initiatives relying upon relaxed performances to create space in theatre for more diversity. While efforts to include patrons with disabilities remains paramount, there are markedly fewer performance and training opportunities for artists with the same disabilities. Enrich Festival takes on the challenge of creating opportunities for both artists and audiences. Challenging itself to reimagine community arts performance, the festival seeks to overcome socially constructed ideas around disability and overtake the dominant narrative of disability, supplanting it with one defined and performed by artists with disabilities. The Enrich Festival was created and first produced as a live event in 2019 amid increasing social expectations to improve representation through diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Through funding by Arts Council England and Hertfordshire County Council, the festival was designed to provide a venue to showcase visual and performing arts companies working with professional and amateur artists. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 festival forged ahead, taking on the challenge of fostering opportunities for artists and audiences while practicing safe social distancing. Featuring online programming, the festival utilized interactive workshops combined with previously recorded and newly imagined performances. From the onset of the festival, Teatr Bomba Bomba and DanceSyndrome set an early tone for inclusiveness through their company-hosted workshops. Day 1 opened with an interactive physical workshop hosted by Polish theatre company Teatr Bomba Bomba. Led by Janusz Janiszewski through modeled action with more than a half-dozen company members and an English translator, Janiszewski utilized a combination of physical directives and vocal commands reminiscent of Jerzy Grotowski. Participants were encouraged to turn on their camera and curate a personal narrative as part of a digital collective, forming a theatre using gallery view at home on Zoom. Physical storytelling in this environment helped to overcome speech and movement limitations that some participants were likely to experience while defining a character suited to their ability. Click for larger view View full resolution Xandri Selwyn in My Hands and Feet Are Wiggling. (Photo: Access All Areas.) The follow-up workshop was hosted by Dance-Syndrome, a contemporary dance company started and helmed by Jen Blackwell, a dancer diagnosed with Down syndrome. In their workshop led by three company members, participants experienced what inclusiveness and diversity might look like within performing arts. Physically identified by pregnancy, Down syndrome, and wheelchair reliance, the workshop leaders showcased inclusion of bodies frequently excluded in performing arts. DanceSyndrome subverts the common expectation of body type and ability through the simple act of including and showcasing dancers outside expected conventions. DanceSyndrome’s creation of space for broader body types allows aspiring performers to see themselves reflected within the art form. This is not to say that only those marked [End Page 242] with disability can find benefit in such workshops; instead, space created with artists with disabilities allows performing arts professionals and companies to move beyond conventional notions of ability and identify new modes of performance. While these workshops were a form of performance, they were not strictly defined as such. Through curated, forty-five-minute workshops, participants, scholars, and engaged community members were exposed to inclusive training hosted by diverse artist bodies. Click for larger view View full resolution Cast in Zara. (Photo: Andrew Youngson.) The Enrich Festival goes beyond mere inclusion for artists and audiences. Productions in 2020 by Access All Areas, Mind the Gap, and DIY Theatre provided what disability theatre activist and workshop host Jenny Sealy described as protest theatre. Sealy suggested that all actions taken in art by those defined as fringe members of society are protest. In this protest, we find the challenge of equity. While the workshops and training offered by these companies attempts to overcome this inequity, the simple act of performing stories showcasing their life experiences addresses major concerns for these artists and their identified social groups. In the talkback/workshop, Here’s Me, Access All Areas artist Xandri Selwyn and artistic director Nick Llewellyn discussed the process used...