 Okay, why don't we go ahead and get started? Good afternoon everyone and thank you for being here. I'm Jean Morrison, I'm the university provost and chief academic officer at Boston University. And it's really my great pleasure to welcome you to this very important symposium that's co-sponsored by the BU Arts Initiative, the College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, our Sergeant College, the BU Dance Program, and BU Disability Services. I'm sorry I won't be able to stay for this symposium, it looks like it's gonna be great, but while the weather outside certainly belies this, as you no doubt heard, there's a wallop of a nor'easter that's heading our way and the way the university makes the decision about whether to be open or closed is on a phone call with the leaders of facilities and I'm on that phone call and that phone call takes place at 1.30 today, so. As soon as we know, we'll let you know. But it's probably wise to be prepared for the university being closed tomorrow, with the inside word. We're really thrilled to host artists in residencies like the Access Dance Company as a core element of the BU Arts Initiative and its efforts to ensure that the arts are an engaging and meaningful part of each and every student's experience at BU. This is our third major residency in the five year lifespan of the BU Arts Initiative and we're committed to providing the BU community with opportunities for deep interdisciplinary engagement with resident artists and their creative works. Such residencies bring new visibility to incredibly enriching opportunities and parts of our culture. They also provide invaluable opportunities for interdisciplinary programming, community connections and help to highlight BU's commitment to inclusion for students, faculty, and staff of all abilities. I'd like to give special thanks this afternoon to the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Boston Dance Alliance, Stage Source, VSA Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Cultural Access New England and their staff for co-sponsoring and consulting on the structure of this symposium and to howl around for live streaming the event. I'd also like to thank Ty Furman, our BU Arts Initiative Managing Director for his seemingly endless enthusiasm and energy for making arts a core component of each and every BU students experience. Artistic talent and innovation are not the province of an elite few, but something for all of us, irrespective of race, gender, sexuality, age or ability to enjoy and to create. I wanna thank everyone here today for their commitment and belief in the potential that lives within all of us to create, that lives within all of us to create works of art and expression that are beautiful, powerful, enduring, and reflect in myrian ways the human condition. We have what promises to be a lively and insightful discussion ahead with some truly remarkable artists, educators and community leaders. So on behalf of the university, I wanna thank you again for your attendance today and I will welcome Ty to the podium and I hope you have a really enriching afternoon. I'm sorry I won't be able to stay. Thank you. Thank you, Jean. And just echoing all of my thanks and a few housekeeping things. First, you may have noticed that we are working with Tamara and her team at Carhartt Creative to do graphic facilitation. So there will be a visual representation of the conversations today. So I wanna thank Tamara, Karen and Grace for their work throughout the day. I also wanna quickly thank Halel for offering us the building for the day. We are so grateful to be able to hold this here. Another housekeeping note, when we get to the Q and A, because we are being live streamed, it's important that the question is done with a microphone. So I'm gonna take this microphone and I will be sitting with it. When we get to Q and A, I'll be the microphone holder. So make sure that you don't ask your question till I find you. Also, there are restrooms you may have noticed right to the right of the elevator as you came up. There are also fountains there, water fountains there. So again, thank you so much for coming and joining us. We are excited about this conversation and I am going to turn it over to Charles Washburn who is going to facilitate this conversation and facilitate the introduction of our panelists. So thank you everyone and thank you. Thank you, Ty and Jean. I am Charlie Washburn and I've got the great honor of moderating this panel. I'm wearing a couple of hats at the moment. I'm the Chief Operating Officer at BSA Massachusetts, one of the sponsors. And I'm also on the steering committee for Cain, Cultural Access New England. And I'd like to start off with just asking my Cain colleagues to just raise their hand. We're going to be infiltrating the groups afterwards. We'd be straightforward. We want to build an action agenda from this meeting. So keep that in mind and hold us to that. Join Cain and keep after it. Because this work is, I think, preaching to the choir here. This is important work. So in the spirit of that raising hands, I would love to meet each of you who I, many of you, I know. But we don't have time to do that. But we do have time to do ask a couple of things. How many of us were born outside the United States? Show of hands. We've got a few. Very good. How about west of the Mississippi? Oh yeah, we've got a few more. How many were born in New England? Yeah, and in Greater Boston? Awesome. Oh, interesting. Notice that there were many more in New England than in Great Boston. How many of us identify as professional artists? Oh, good, solid representation. How about educators? Activists? Yeah, good. Who has already seen Access Dance Company perform? Oh, nice, look at that, very good. All right, that was enough of that jocularity. I'll get down to my real job. What I did, I didn't want to just do a regular typical introduction. So I've asked each of us, each of the panelists, when I introduced them, to share why it is they carved this afternoon out to be here. What's the motivation to be here? I would love to ask each of you, but I can't. So first, to my left, your right is a poet and president and CEO of Soul Touching Experiences, Keith P. Jones. Hello. Keith, what brings you here? Money, no. Well, thank you, Charlie, and thank you to be here in Cain for everybody, allowing us to be here and allowing to have me. One of the reasons I came today was because culture, art, and disability seem to be one of the few areas where your disability can be seen as an advantage, where you can use your creative adaptability to express your art. So that's one of the reasons I came here today. Sure. And to Keith's left and further to your right, Judith Smith is founder and artistic director of the Access Dance Company. So, I think Judy gets the credit for trekking the longest and hardest, maybe not in all of us, but certainly for the panel. So Judy, what motivates you to be here today? Well, arts and disability has kind of been my life's work for the past 30 years. And I had the good fortune of being at New England Foundation for the arts, convening on arts in the military for the weekend. And so it was nice to be able to stay. I don't tour with the company much anymore. And I'm hoping that I'll actually be able to get home before Stella hits. So, but you know, this is just something that I really believe in. I have a passion for, and I'm glad to be here. Great. And now to my right is Yoel Casel. He's assistant professor here at Boston University, assistant professor of movement. Yoel, what brings you to take this afternoon off and join us today? And you've got to see a fan club here. That's good. Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. For me, the question is how do we make the arts, specifically in my practice, movement practice, accessible for all, regardless of ability, financial means, gender, sexuality. And today is really about celebrating our identity and how that identity was stimulated through art practice and how there really is a marriage between the two. Ability. And forgive me for my hearing, but I never hear the word disability. I only hear the word disability. I take disability. I like that. And John, John Calacci is executive director and chief executive officer of the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, venturing here from the great state of Vermont. Welcome, John. Well, thank you. It was sort of the early 90s that I first, I was working at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and my job was to bring new emerging forms out. And back then, the whole disability artist movement was a burgeoning field that was new to me. And so I invited the Access Dance Company in January. And when Judy said, I think that might not be the best time of year to bring this. Me being the curator I was, I said, but it fits my curatorial vision. So come on out in the freezing cold. Subsea wrote this 30 Below. It was 30 Below and her wheel froze and broke. But I would say it was my own ignorance. First it was my interest in this kind of unique idiosyncratic artist that I was learning from the Access Company, Terry Galloway, who's a deaf performance person, crutch master, Bill Shannon. And all of these artists taught me a great deal because in every single encounter I had to learn not from my world view of how to do things, but from their world view. And so it was pretty transformative for me. And then 21 years ago, I actually had surgery that paralyzed me from the neck down. So I left the temporarily abrolled world and had, so I also began talking as an artist. I've always had this hybrid career of arts administrator and artist. And so that began making films on the subject and I had a book come out about it. So I think I'd come to the conversation today from both sides as an administrator and as an artist. Thank you, John. So to get us warmed up, the first question we cooked up was, can you share any artistic choices you've made that may have advanced the cause of inclusion, people with the abilities, disabilities, and particularly in the performing arts? Now, when we did this, I put together four questions, not insisting that everybody replied to everything, but to get and give us a way of priming the conversation. So who would like to take on that first question? Artistic choices that have advanced the cause of inclusion. I'll take it. I've done nothing, no. The artistic thing that we've done is started something we call Crip Hop, which is basically an international collection of disability rappers, poets, music producers, writers, to try to expand access to the larger markets in terms of performance, access to art, inclusion and things like that. So as a part of Crip Hop Nation, we use our platforms of poetry, written art, performance art, there's offshoots of homo-hop to talk about transphobia, homophobia and things like that. So those are some of the things that we've done to take the discussion, not just about people think, oh, that's so cute, just say, well, people can dance, but really understand that it's not about the disability, it's about the ability to perform and put forth really, really good art. And the second part of that would to be to challenge people's notions of what is inclusion, what is accessibility, what is diversity, just because you have a wheelchair doesn't mean you're, just means you got a wheelchair. So that's one of the things that we talk about in terms of pushing this forward, particularly in that academic area where the liberal bastion, it's almost to be safe, but even within the room, your cultural identity or ethnicity cannot be represented just by access to higher education. Liberal bastion. Yes, liberal bastion. Anybody else care to take a? I'm always interested in approach, how we approach the art of teaching and I've always been interested in how do we create an entry point into allowing one to assimilate the material. Not necessarily that they've learned it's about teaching steps, but really about teaching concept that allow us to have container for freedom to happen in terms of assimilating steps. And then if steps were going to happen, how do you didn't synthesize the process of teaching those steps? So it's about finding creative ways thinking outside of the box to allow freedom of embracement and relatability, engaging, exploring the concept, but from that human sense. It's not about this machine it's really pulling out the human, the humanity, and letting the art form in this case in the practice of improvement practice, letting that be a container to stimulate, to inspire and to support that individuality. There you go. Interesting that that seemed very universal in your articulation. I think mine would be almost myopic instead of universal, because I went to, in Los Angeles, about a year after I had the surgery complications and I went to a convening for artists with disabilities and everybody was complaining about how Hollywood's stereotyped. And it's like, who gets shit about Hollywood? They stereotype everybody. It's like, I don't want a mainstream. Like, and from that thing, I thought we gotta make our own images. We have to pick up the tools. We weren't given the access to go to the dance classes, but people like Judy made it possible for others to do that. And so I actually started then, I started making films about it and I didn't care about it if I knew how to make films. And I was just gonna make films. I had a book come out called Queer Crips, Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories. And what I tried to do is become as focused about my reality, not anyone else's reality. This is all I could bring forward is mine. And I found that that was the way, it's fine, let Daniel Day-Lewis win his Oscar for limping around. It's okay. It's like, we're not gonna give those unless we create those images ourselves. And so I went from a completely different perspective about there's no mainstream in this, that it's these multiple little builds into the stream that goes into the ocean. So I was more interested in starting from the grassroots and I called Judy up and I said, could I come and film you as you're improvising? And she allowed me to do that. We didn't know where we were gonna go with it. It became film, became, you know, and it's just, I went with artists that I knew, artists I admired and just started from there. And I found that it's maintained my artistic practice. That's great. And I think I took a little bit different approach and you know, we started Axis 30 years ago and I think the first 10 years we were just trying to convince people that what we were doing was really dance and not just therapy. And I took over the artistic direction of the company 10 years in and decided what I really wanted to do was commission well-known artists to come in and create work. And that was actually very selfish because I wanted to work with these people and I couldn't go to their studios and work with them. And I felt like it would increase, you know, my ability to learn, it would increase the quality of the work that we were doing because it wasn't at the level that I thought that it could be. And the first repertory out that I commissioned we actually premiered here in Boston which was our second home for about a decade when Dance Umbrella was here. We premiered a piece by Bill T. Jones, our first piece by Joe Good, an aerial work by Joanna Highgood and a piece by a French Canadian choreographer who was just becoming known in the Bay Area. And I kind of set the bar high but what it did was it completely changed the way the dance world was looking at our work. And instead of just getting sympathy reviews, reviewers were able to take the work and look at it in the context of what they knew about Bill's work or about Joe's work or about Joanna's work and they actually were able to start writing about it critically. So that was, I think kind of the first choice, big artistic choice that I made. And it definitely, the idea of commissioning these choreographers really launched access into the mainstream contemporary dance world which was not something that we would have been able to get to on our own. But Judy, we've known each other through that period and I think that it's a testament to you that you realized that the early iteration of the company was built on a therapeutic model and that you were getting sympathy reviews and you said that's not good enough. That I want to be taken seriously as an artist, the company taking more seriously and that you were not interested in being the inspiration porn for audiences to come and say, oh, look how pretty these people look. Aren't they noble, aren't they brave? And so, and the choreographers, you scared them. You know, I like, look. I remember, Bill T. Jones called me up and said, I'm gonna be working with Axis. What do I do with these people that don't move? And I said, oh, they move. You just gotta look differently, Bill. Okay, you look and he said afterwards that it completely changed his worldview of movement. And I think it has to a lot of the choreographers that we've worked with. Most of them have, I mean, the first thing Bill said was, I'm really intimidated. I said, you're intimidated. You know, looking at this dance god, you know, and Stephen Petronio, same thing. Joe was like, I don't know what I'll do with you people. You know, and he's now created three works and one of them we just performed at the Arts in the Military. It's about the veteran's experience of resilience. So, you know, I think everyone has gone away. I mean, Bill loves unison. He had to look at unison completely differently with our company, you know. So, we do, we really offer, you know, a whole palette of movement color that didn't exist before. That comment reminds me of the International Wheelchair Dance Festival and this is going back a ways too, but one of the things you were trying to do was to begin to build out opportunities for people to learn. Not only to learn, to create a language of choreography around these movements, but to actually begin the process of training people to enable them to pursue their careers. So, that is a good segue to the second question I had is about how did you receive the training? How did you learn to do what you do? Again, this can be a popcorn approach and not everybody has to chime in if you don't feel like it, but so what were the training? How did you receive the training you needed? The training, well, the interesting thing about the training is that as an artist who does graphic art, performance, art, and music, there was no real place where you could go and have a disability and say, I wanna learn piano, right? Because as I roll in and say, I wanna play the piano with my foot, they're like, what in the hell are you doing? You know, your feet actually like, no, but they can play the piano. So, the training was a mixture of just desire to be an artist because as an artist, it's not an external motivator, it's an internal need to express your art and I think the way that I learned it in the 80s with the 70s with hip hop being that other art form that was supposed to die, it allowed the freedom because there was no school with hip hop. There was no school of professional break dancing or professional graffiti artists. So as it has evolved into what now, every commercial you all listen to has a touch of hip hop. That was one of those things that we never really saw coming on the horizon. So the way we learned it and the way I learned was through trial and error because as a person with a visible disability rolling on stage, trying to be a gangster rapper, it really is hard trying to get that over like, yo, I got you, dog. And at the same time, you need to be professional. So the way we learned it was just by doing and only now do we get recognized that's actually having perfected our craft. So a lot of that was trial and error. A lot of that was, you know, you just being determined because again, as a person with a disability in that genre or in the arts field, the first reaction people have to you is their own insecurity in terms of, okay, you roll in, the thing about disability is that it challenges your mortality because they look at you and go, but for the grace of God, they go out. So the way we learned it was again, trial and error and perfection. The school of trial and error. Yeah. And I, I'm an, you know, I'm an artist. Well, not an artist. I'm a dancer totally by accident, really. And I was, I used to show jumping horses. I was very, very physical. And I sat still for about five years until I had the brains to move from Colorado to California and I met somebody and started doing improvisational movement which changed my life. But there wasn't a way for me to go learn dance. So I educated by myself by literally going to see every single dance performance I could. I read everything I could. I searched out everything I could which, you know, 30 years ago we didn't have the internet. You know, so we didn't know actually that this form of dance was happening all over the world and popping up at about the same time. I think really is a result of what was happening in dance. You know, we're coming out of the Judson Church. People were much more interested in pedestrian movement, different kinds of movement. You know, coming out of 10 years of the independent living movement and the disability rights for people would, you know, had been happening. So it was kind of this, I think interesting conflagration of those two things. But, you know, even today, the only way somebody can go get a degree in dance is through their own damn persistence. And usually by finding maybe one professor who will really champion them and mentor them. And so, you know, one of the things that Axis has done, we really also realized early on when people said, I wanna learn how to do this. Where do I go? We had nowhere to send them. We started doing our, you know, education with a monthly community dance jam. It's now about 50% what we do. And we're kind of the primary pre-professional training ground for disabled dancers, I think, internationally at this point. You know, and we also realized that we needed to train our own dancers. And so a lot of us that came into this field, you know, it's on the job training. Any other contributions to this question about how do you get this, how do you get the training you need? Sure, for me at a young age, I was about four or five. I wasn't quite finding joy. I wasn't quite finding presence in my expression and my way to express myself. I became hungry for movement expression. I found that movement was a channel to express my inner thoughts and imagination. And it was a way to tell my story. And I often tell people that if I want to know a little bit more about me, just look at my work, look at my teaching. But in terms of training, I would say that the biggest thing for me was I was such a slow runner. It took me a while to assimilate. And I went through a lot of challenges and it really helped me develop my makeup as an educator to look at those challenges in many, many different ways. What might work for this one individual may not work for this one individual. So how do I take the experiences through formal training I've had, informal, avant-garde, characters, all the things I was hungry about, movement all around us, the way we communicate through movement, not about steps again. It's really about how do we use movement as a way to express our inner thoughts and to embrace our identity in relation to impressing the material. It's not about me trying to impress the audience, not about me trying to impress myself, but it's about me trying to impress the material that I'm at. For example, if I have my hands and I'm rubbing at my hand, I'm not looking at her rubbing at my hands. I'm looking at the hands and see where those hands take me. Those are the things I was really interested in. And then that's what the way I was like, oh, this is how I'm gonna train. I'm gonna follow. It gave me poise, it gave me cultural literacy. It gave me things that every day you start again, and depending on which dance form you either start with a plie, you start with a contraction, you begin again, and as you build material, dancers work to perfect material, and if it doesn't work, you drop it. You let it go, and not everything do you hold onto, and that stuff has always been important to me. It was important to me as a dancer, it's important to me today as an administrator. It also was important as I began to start doing my own writing, my own filmmaking about work that I wasn't worried about, that I didn't know the skills, that was gonna be part of the journey of learning these skills, and that I would acquire these skills with discipline was important. And finally, I had surgery at C2. I had a tumor inside my spinal cord at C2, so I have what's called bronzer cord syndrome, and the right side of my body has no sensation, and I've lost location in the left side of my body. So many people that have this particular syndrome find it impossible really to stand because there's no relationship to the ground. But in rehab, nothing was working, and I said, you know what, bring the mirror over. And I said, why? And I said, well, that's the kid, I was a dancer, and I was thinking as they get me out of the bed and pick me up and move me into the chair, I have, still, now I have no relationship with the ground, but I thought, well, somehow my body seems like it can hold itself up. So I think I can learn to stand up visually. And they're like, well, that's backwards in the mirror. And I said, hey, nothing else is working, let's bring the mirror over. And it was because as a dancer, I learned, moving in the mirror, that I was then able to look and say, okay, now this is what it means to stand up. And if I hadn't had that dance training, I would not be able to be navigating with a cane right now. And so every day I'm grateful that I had dance training. You know what's so interesting about that, particularly in dance is the idea of repetition, where in a formal dance class, you have your daily warm up, you have a bar in your ballet class, repetition helps develop and stimulate training through experience and digging deeper into that idea. And also this habit of mine of persisting, of staying true to the task and letting that experience inform. And that's what something was interesting about a formal dance class, or a formal dance experience, or any practicum, is that where can you create the experience that allows you to develop your skill sets in a way that can allow you to begin to develop your relation to the skill set. So repetition, you're talking about, you're talking about physical ownership, you're talking about positioning in your body and where you were in the place. But those are values and those are approaches, once again, that are instrumental in developing and helping in the portraying in many ways. So a quick wrap up is you gotta do it, right? You just gotta get out there and do it, make it happen. You might find a place in BU, I hear, and doing it backwards also works, apparently. And I have plenty more questions here, but we got started a little late. I'm going to ask my panel's indulgence. We'll come back to those other two questions. And because I think we want to hear the comments and questions from, this is a remarkable group. I know many of you, so please remember, we'll wait for Ty to come with the microphone and we'll complete the last two questions in our bonus round at the end, if that's okay. So anybody care to Maureen? I'm a dancer and I teach dance and I teach the kids a lot. And one of the things that I find interesting is sometimes I do a dance about disability and sometimes I just do a move because I think it's cool. And then the audience will say, I love what that said about disability. And sometimes I'm like, okay, but not really. So I'm just wondering how you guys feel about that. Well, that's always a good one. Early on, Access did a lot of our work very specifically about disability and one of the things that I wanted to do when I took over the company was not do things about disability because I thought that we could say more about ability. We're not a wheelchair dance company. We're not a disabled dance company. We have non-disabled dancers who are equally important to the work. That said, we also realized early on that there was a social and a political impact to what we were doing because you did not see disabled people on stage and you did not see disabled and non-disabled people creating work as equals. And the other side of that is that people come to work, they come to see things with the baggage that they bring in and with all of the way that we've been acculturated in this country and all of the issues and stigma around disability. But I had kind of a funny thing because I do feel like it's hard for people to see the work, especially for the first time and not just see the disability, but I think after you give people the opportunity to dare at you for an hour and a half, somehow that normalizes air quotes, disability, and they stop seeing just the disability and start seeing the movement. But my friend Sonia Delwey told me once that she did this piece and afterwards somebody came up to her and said, and she's not disabled. So I think this is kind of a contemporary dance dilemma. I love the piece about the cockroach and the refrigerator. And that's also the beauty about dance is that people can come to it with all, I mean we have stereotypes about people of color and gay, lesbian, queer, trans, bisexual people and Muslims and so we're just continually stereotyped and stereotyping and it takes a lot to kind of overcome that. But I think the more that you get in front of people and the more that they have the opportunity to see that you're just part of the gang on earth. I think it's also a marketing issue, both for the artists with disabilities as well as presenters like the Flynn when we present artists. And when Marcus Roberts who's a great jazz pianist plays, Marcus happens to be blind, but I'm not selling his blindness. I'm selling his jazz trio. Larry Bissonette is an artist who is a national spokesperson on autism. But when we did an exhibition of his work, his interpreter said to me, Larry really doesn't want autism to be in the narrative frame of what this work is because everyone's gonna come in and look at, oh look at what this guy with autism did. He said he'd really would like the paintings to be viewed as paintings. And so I think it's a very interesting dilemma about how to balance this who we are and we lead with the artist first. I think we've learned this from the disability movement that you lead with the person first. So in marketing the work, we actually talk about the art first. I also made a short film with some of the Axis dancers. It wasn't an Axis project, but they were working with another choreographer. And I asked, everyone's gonna be nude and I given them the voiceover ahead of time. It's called Dreaming Awake. And but I said to the dancers, let's not have any of your apparatus in there. So if you were in a chair, you'd be on the ground. You wouldn't be in your chair or if you walked with Cain, you wouldn't have the Cain's in there. And everyone, and it was all this falling and releasing and catching and stuff that was happening. And afterwards I can't tell you how many people said, well, no one was disabled in this film. Because when people see your chair, they see your chair. When they see me walking with the Cain, they see my Cain. When I don't use my Cain, people go, oh, you must be feeling better. It's like better from what? You know, and so it's interesting how people don't see us often. They see our apparatus. Well, it's visibility and invisibility both at the same time. And you roll out on stage to do hip hop and they go, oh yeah. Yeah, right, they see the chair. They see the chair and it's interesting because Mo and I have done a lot of things together. And with the inclusive, the disability really, particularly when you have a visible disability, it's really hard. And I use the wheelchair, but when I leave the wheels here, the disability still is very much visible. And the challenge that we have in terms of the art and getting beyond people's presumptions of what motivates the artist is that people are, like you said, acculturated. Disability is having this very negative connotation to it because anything that we do is a miracle. Hallelujah Jesus, keep the guys on the microphone. Oh my God, you go to the bathroom, hallelujah. Right. But it's not, and it's always seen, even this will be for those who are aware of these things as a superhuman feat of the disability community to want to normalize themselves, which ironically, we are just on the spectrum of humanity versus being a whole different group. So I think when you talk about creating, how do you get beyond that is you have to be aware that people are not gonna meet you where you are. You have to meet people where they are. And if you are able to do that with your art, then it gets beyond, oh my God, Keith, you make these with your feet too. That's hot. That's dope. I want you to do one for me. But it takes a lot of work to get beyond their perceptions because as an artist who does hip hop or dance or whatever, and I roll out my melanin doesn't go away if I leave the wheelchair. So the reality of Keith having cerebral palsy or the masses is you're black, you're on the wheelchair, you got a disability, what gang was you in? What did you deal with you doing? When did you get shot? Verses, oh my goodness, that's just an after-effect of birth and you're a human that has this talent that we can all bop to. That is a different kind of paradigm and to use the art to, one, address your biases, two, to alert you to your biases, and three, to get you over your biases. And those are the three things. I'm gonna play devil's advocate, Paul. Sorry that. Charles, can I just say one more thing? Yes. Because I'm gonna play devil's advocate here because the other side of that is that when I do publicity for access, I always insist that there's one disabled person and one not because I feel like by not calling it out or bringing it to some kind of attention, it doesn't have to be the same thing. I mean, the first thing, we're a contemporary dance company doing physically integrated work and then we have to explain that, but you're gonna miss a lot of people. And somebody rolling down a sidewalk who in a wheelchair who might see a poster of two dancers from Access Dance Company and neither one of them are visibly disabled and they're gonna roll right by. But I know for me, if I see an image of a disabled person on a poster in a window, I'm gonna stop and look at it. And I'm gonna wanna see who are these people? Where are they? What are they doing? And that was a problem when we did the wheelchair dance festival is Jeremy sent, Jeremy Allager sent an email out to all of us saying, why don't we're gonna call this thing? And none of us could figure out what the hell we were gonna call this thing. You know, and so he came up with Wheelchair Dance Festival and one of the companies from the UK almost didn't come because they didn't wanna be labeled a wheelchair dance company. And they don't have images of disabled people in a lot of their publicity and they've lost their disabled audience over the course of their 20 or 25 years. They've lost a lot of disabled audience. So I do feel like we have to make it in some ways obvious so that people like me are going to see it and go, oh, wow, I can see that or that could be me. And if we're really going to embrace inclusion to be able to show that transparent key and instrumental and what I enjoy about access and viewing their work is I see a disabled participant and I see the disabled. I wanna see the disability. That's right. I love the way Wheelchair's moved. Yes, and what's the relationship between those who are able and not disabled and what's the beauty in the artistry and how do they become partners? And I think inclusion is really about all of the able becoming partners. And yet there's marketing guideline and there's marketing approaches but the work that we're doing that we're advocating for is how can this be inclusive for all and how do we show that visually as well? I have an interesting story and then I'll shut up. One of our dancers, Bonnie, who also uses Wheelchair in one of the dance pieces, she was lifted onto a couch. And people loved that she finally got out of her Wheelchair and Bonnie was like, I'm not gonna drop the F word because I'm completely immobilized and I'm stuck when I'm on that damn couch. For me, that's not freedom and that's not interesting. And it was an artistic choice and she was glad to do it and the piece is beautiful but for people, all of a sudden, they're just so excited that we're not in our equivalent. This is what gives us our freedom and allows us to move the way we move. And that's your container. That's your container. Absolutely. And I frankly don't like dancing on the floor. I find it really frustrating. I wrote Jumping Horses. I like to go fast, you know? I don't wanna have to crawl across the floor. Maureen, thank you for a very stimulating question. Yes. I hate to go in another direction but I'm gonna go in another direction. I'm here from Boston Conservatory at Berkeley where I run a bunch of programs for people with autism and starting this fall I'll be founding a new Institute for Arts Education and Special Needs at Berkeley and I'm coming at it from a big part of our work is training teachers. So Charlie asked you about your training and I work all the time with public school, private school, arts organization teachers who are trying so hard and desperately to make connections and to include everyone in artistic education and artistic opportunities and they're struggling. And I wanna know your advice for them. What they need to know, what you wish your teachers had known way back when? Well, I will tell you, I have to jump in because I'm the child of teachers and being the first black child in an all-white school and the only one with a disability right after they passed IBEA until in the 66, what I wish teachers would understand is that you're teaching a student not the diagnosis. That is the crux of it because if you, people have heard about autism and they start thinking about the little blue puzzle piece and then they, oh my God, because right now autism is the sexiest disability they have. Nobody wants to be served in public, right? That ain't sex, you know what? We want the puzzle piece, right? Well, I'm sexy all day. Right, right. Yeah. I'm screaming now. I got you. But the reality is that what teachers, this is a struggle beyond art is that educators have always been taught students with disabilities are not students. They're not in the, they don't have the capacity to learn as our other students. So in the reality is you pull back your teachers and say what baggage are you bringing? Because the training that I do around the country or whatever is you don't leave yourself on the other side of the door. So if you're sexist and you walk into a room with women, that baggage comes with you. If you're a racist, homophobic, or ableist, that comes with you. How do you manage your biases? How do you manage your inherent prejudices towards a child with autism who has behaviors, who wants to do something, but you never encountered that until you decided to be a teacher. Then all of your baggage, and that means you have to be deprogrammed as well. And the other side of it is, we come with our own biases. So we come in the classroom, this don't know nothing about disability. And then so you feel like you have to navigate. So what I wish teachers, what teachers can do and what be you can, is that it's not about, it doesn't mean ignore the diagnosis, but understand you're talking to a human that has sensibilities, that has emotions, that does not necessarily express it the way you do, but if you can't get beyond that, how can your information get permeated to that student? So it's meet the student where they are, understand what your baggage is, and then try to find the common ground to work it out. And I would love to echo that. Yeah, wonderfully. But I think of, this is my bread and my cheesecake. I love this question. I love this question. My mission. Yes, to me it's based on the C words, curriculum, content, communication, creativity, collaboration, and in teaching, how do you allow the teacher to become relatable with the student? What's the relatability factor? To allow them to find them first. It's about who are you as a person, not teach the step, not teach anything yet. And then once they build confidence, or once they build ecstaticism, how do you take that static to allow them to explore their relationship to the form? So that the form is really working in partnership with the function. And then from there, how do you provide experiences that allow them to become rich by the art form? So how did that happen? Perhaps it's collaboration amongst the staff. Who is the support system? Is there an ASL interpreter there? Is there a TA there? Is everyone on the same page in terms of how this material will be processed and how this material will be communicated? And then really letting the students teach you, listening to their responses, and listening to their heartbeat, so to speak, and then modulating your curriculum, having a plan, a backup, perhaps not, but really modulating the approach and where you take the journey based on the feedback and the energy and the temperature you're receiving from the students. We at the Flynn have been doing a lot of work around trying, striving to be more inclusive. And one of the big initiatives we undertook is to try to understand how we could be more welcoming to audiences on the autism spectrum. And so we worked with the Chicago Children's Theater and they did work specifically with a small-scale work for young children on the spectrum. And but we were hearing from the parents that they really appreciated that there were these separate experiences, but what they had hoped for is that the Flynn could find ways to have their families participate in fuller experiences at the Flynn. It's a 1,400-seat theater. And many parents said it's so stressful for them to come that they started fighting with their children hour before coming to the Flynn by the time everyone's there. Everyone's hysterical and everyone's being told to be quiet. And so we worked with the Theater Development Fund and they took us on as a pro bono. And we had to really face our own prejudices in our own ignorance, in our own fears about this unknown reality for many of us. We had a parent advisory group working with us and then we worked with a theater company and for the large fall. And basically, we kept the lights up a little bit. We lowered the sound levels. We didn't change any content. We left the lobby doors open. We had noise-canceling headphones. We had fidgets. Kids could bring them in. It was allowable now for the kids to walk up and down the aisles with a pairing or with a sibling if they wanted to. The artists we worked with, we've told, well, now you're gonna hear sounds that may not seem appropriate sounds to you, but they're appropriate sounds. And so they were totally fine with it. And we had coloring stations. We had a quiet room. And we had social stories online. And what we found, everyone had so much fun. We now do all family matinees like that. That is no longer for specialized audiences. Suddenly parents would say, oh, we can bring our toddlers. It's okay to walk up and down the aisle. And our ushers though had to be educated to sit down. Don't talk. Don't act. Because that's what we teach people to do in these darkened spaces and theaters is to be quiet and pay attention to what. And so it freed everything. But our box office staff had, everyone had to change. And it was transformative. And it was how to just be welcoming. I do think now though, I mean, we have this a lot with dance. Is that dance teachers do wanna be inclusive. And they really don't know how to do it. And so we have started doing a lot of teacher training. We have our own intensive. We just did a teacher training in New York. This is something that we're really taking on and that other inclusive companies are. Because you can't just start from zero. And there are people out there now from whom you can go learn. And learn how to teach. And one of the things that I did was to set up master classes where we would bring Bay Area dance teachers to us. And we have some of our community, our company. And so they have kind of a safe container by which to really try out all of their teaching methods and make adjustments. But I do think that, especially with dance, that there needs to be some kind of training. And that people need some groundwork to start with. I mean, we started from scratch and we made it all up. But it took us a long time. And now if we're asking people to make their dance classes inclusive, then they need to have the ability to develop the skill to do that. And what most of them found is that they really didn't do things that differently. They had to just open the box a little bit. And how do you do that? That's the key. Like how do you, do you think outside of the box? If you're teaching dance, do you necessarily teach steps? Or do you rely on other senses? Do you rely on visual arts? Do you rely, I know like with autism, with the work that we used to do with Boston Ballet Education Community Initiative. We had autism class where we would have them start in chairs just something they felt comfortable with, felt heroism, just feel it, and then translate that feeling to a part of your body. So it's just about how do you approach it? And what is the entry point? And I think there's many amazing teachers out there, but there's quite a challenge to teach a particular type of group that allow them to still be translatable to all the groups. So that's the key in having that training, that dance training, but how do we go about that? That's the answer, that's the question too, that's most enriching and interesting. And it's not an easy, you know, and it's really hard to be everything to everybody. Yeah. Just a shout out, I know Ruth has a question and Chris has a question. I want to just acknowledge if some of us in the room went to the dance training for teachers on Friday night, I know that there's at least one hand going to go up. So thank you for that and to the dance complex. And I know that Chris has a question as well. Anybody else with a burning question? So I get a sense of, so we'll come back. Ruth, you have a question for her. Well, I don't really have a question. I just want, you're just validating everything that we talked about 20 years ago during the International Wheelchair Dance Festival. It's a continuation of the same conversation. What the most profound thing that I learned at the International Wheelchair Dance Festival was that dancers' conceptions of their own bodies, of beauty and of dance change when you see people with all different kinds of abilities dancing and using wheelchairs as props. And rolling on the floor. But they're not props, they're how we move. They're how you move. They're an extension of our body, they're not a prop. Oh, forgive me. I'm still learning. So I just wanted to thank you for changing that. My husband, as you know, had a physical disability and used a wheelchair and also a ventilator for the last 22 years of his life. Before he got the ventilator, he, we were watching TV one night. We were watching a dance performance and he felt depressed because he couldn't dance. So the Wheelchair Dance Festival changed our lives in terms of using contact improv for allowing both of us to be able to dance together. Just thank you. My question is about authenticity and casting. Authenticity and casting. What are your responses to educating populations of varying disabilities, educators being persons without disabilities. You know, like these little pop-up workshops that may go to, let's say, the Perkins School for the Blind or the Horace Mann School for the Definite Artist Educator that doesn't have a disability teaching those populations. What's your response to that? What's your response to casting in film, theater, stage, individuals without disabilities representing disability? And I could fill in a couple of other. But you get the idea, casting, authenticity. What are your responses, reactions to that? That's very interesting. In terms of teaching as an educator, going into a classroom, I have the advantage of the shock and awe, right? So you come in and they're like, okay, you're gonna have a teacher come in and teach you a hip-hop. All right, and then I roll in and they're like, what in the hell? But what it does do is it sets up the dynamic because that instantly charges the conversation about what shocks you about me rolling into this classroom in terms of authenticity. What shocks you because as much as we're talking about coming to dance or coming to performance or coming to casting, people come with a history already. So when you talk about how does that shock at all work, usually if there's an educator who has chosen to do this, hopefully they have taken the time to understand what they're actually getting into. Cause there's a difference like, would you volunteer with kids with disabilities? Sure. And then you get there, you're like, what? I don't know. Why is he running that way? Who's standing on the back of the wheelchair? Why is he beating them with a crutch? What are the deaf kids talking about? And they're all pointing at me. They don't understand, right? Because they don't understand that we have our own culture, our own baggage that we come with and we expect you to treat us in a certain kind of way. Cause typically when they walk into the room is that sticky sweet talk. Hello everyone. That's so nice of you. Charlie, you're so amazing. Keep yourself talented. Which goes straight to what we've heard all of our lives. Is that anything that we've done is this miraculous event versus just an extraordinary life. Now in terms of casting, a lot of us who are exes that say, you know, what was the movie that just came out? Not Dave yet or the one where the guy became paralyzed and was like so traumatized he wanted to kill himself. Those of us who were watching this say, that's not our life. That's not how we view this. Because that's not reality in terms of the day to day. So the casting issue is analogous to having a white man play an Asian. If you saw Dr. Strange, the white woman played the Asian man. You go back to the year of living dangerously. You go back to, you go back to Hannibal. You go back to, you know, Ben Hurd. There's always been that issue of casting the other with somebody we're comfortable with. So that's the crux of getting past casting. And also having casting directors have the courage to actually cast a person with a disability. I don't look like the typical romantic lead, but I can play the romantic lead. I don't look like the typical villain because if you look at any television show where there's a person with a disability, anybody you know with a disability is gonna be like this bull, right? They're gonna call it out because it's fake. But I guess the way that we can address it is we start our own casting company. We have to start your own and you can put it out there, but we cannot be blind to the fact that disability in this culture has a very specific context and connotation for the larger society. And until we can deal with the fact that people don't want to see us, like if you get married, people are amazed. If you have kids, people are amazed. If you eat in a restaurant, people are amazed. So you don't even, before you even get to the casting, how do you deal with the sociological impact of what people see in the media? It's interesting, Sam Gold just opened on Broadway, The Glass Managerie. And traditionally the young woman in that is someone who seems very fragile and often young actresses decide that they should walk with a limp or something and that she's pretty much housebound. Well, Sam cast a woman in a wheelchair for that role. And the opening thing, she rolls into the theater and she has to get out of the wheelchair and on her butt go up the stairs then she's helped by her mother. And it is a very interesting depiction of the fragility in that character, but it is seen as revolutionary. So it was never revolutionary that an able-bodied actress would be limping around, but it was revolutionary that this woman in a wheelchair was actually playing this person with a disability. So it was, I just thought, how hot that is that suddenly it's new when it's actually real. Right, right, you know? But I do think, I mean, you know, I've been dealing with this for 30 years. There are not enough trained disabled dancers. There are not enough trained disabled actors. There are not enough trained disabled, whatever. And this is a problem because just because I'm disabled and I go do a casting call, doesn't mean I have the skill to do it, you know? And this is a problem that people who do wanna cast disabled people are coming up against. There are a number of, there's not enough of us and it's because of this lack of training opportunity. And I think, John, you really speak eloquently about this. It's also, and I'm gonna let John talk about this, but it's a lack of drive to get better. That somehow, just because I'm disabled, I should get cast in a disabled role. But that doesn't mean that I should go to 20 acting classes a week. John, can you talk a little bit about that because I know it came up for you a lot. Well, when I went to that conference in Los Angeles, I was really, really eager to find community of artists. And I was so kind of stunned just because people were sharing work and there was a comedian who's quadriplegic in the chair and she rolls out and she starts attacking Siegfried and Roy, who were these two outrageously queen, two outrageous queens in Las Vegas who had white tigers and they were just, they were like Liberace, they were just completely over the top. And I kind of love them, you know? But it was like, okay, even here in a disability community, the queers are the ones that are gonna be made fun of and it's a cheap joke, so it really pissed me off, she did that. And then, as she was telling her jokes, she missed her punchline. And it's like, if you wanna be a comedian, you gotta hit your punchlines, but no one was willing to talk to her as an artist. They just saw her as a quadriplegic. And no one wanted to say to her, look, if you wanna be taken seriously, you gotta work on your delivery here. And it was that conference that made, and Judy and I have talked about this a lot, you know? There are a lot of wheelchair-based companies in this country and to my eyes, much of the work is mediocre. And I want, if this is a field, to take itself more seriously, to invest in the training of their dancers, to invest in choreographers, to learn how to work with these incredible, different bodies and stuff. And in every one of the disciplines, we have to do better. And I'm glad Larry Bessamat wants to be seen as a painter, because he works for hours every single day as a painter. And so it's an interesting way how do we challenge ourselves, and you can have that conversation, not even in a room like this, but in a room with disabled people, it's really a thing that we have to grab hold of each other and say, we got to do better than this. Yeah, we have to improve the quality. I could not agree more with everything you've just said. I also think that there's a point that's not happening, which is letting people with disabilities know that it's possible for them to become performers. And that's why they need images. Exactly, exactly. It's not something that people think about. It's not something that a lot of teachers or parents or other people surrounding them are presenting to them as one of the options as they move forward in life. And that's, yeah, it all ties back in again, yeah. So we have planned an afternoon to kind of dig deeper into many of these questions. And so that's supposed to start at 2.30 our time, 9.30 in Tel Aviv. And so we've touched on a lot of what the last two questions were. So if you would each just do a summary, but what is your, the one thing we haven't really talked about is the distinction between advocacy and activism. And so if we might, what is, what distinction, if any, do you see there and what is your call to action? First each time, so you might as well keep up the pattern, you know what I'm trying to say. All right, fine, I'm a little late. It's with you, all right. Activism is the action behind advocacy. Because in order to advocate, you have to have action behind it. And right now, you know, we're wrapping up the discussion. What, it's a distinction without a difference. But right now everything we've talked about really boils down to the reality of the child with a disability coming up in through the system and the society to get to the point that they can think about dancing or acting or being a comedian or rapping because prior to that everything that you've learned depending on your cultural background is either your curse, you're an embarrassment or you're too fragile to do anything. And even within the context of the disability there is this notion of you cannot be allowed to fail. And that notion of not being able to fail which is why everybody gets a participation stick or rivet, it's the notion of being able to fail and not have it be based upon the fact that you have a disability. Because once you fail, then you will appreciate your success. But a lot of students, prior to getting to a BU, what's the disability population of BU? Probably 2%. What is the population of greater academia with children with disabilities in higher education is roughly 3.4% nationally. So if that's what you're trying to get to, nobody can tell you constructively how to be a better comedian because they are scared to have you fail. And those are the things that I think when you talk about activism, activism is getting people to understand that we're human and that failure is a part of humanity. But success also is a part of humanity. And it shouldn't be cheap and by the fact that, oh Keith, you got a wheelchair, you get a rivet. No, let me earn my stuff. But if you have to fight every day for teachers to look at you as an actual student, then that's an issue because you're also supposed to be educated already. So what the hell I got to educate you for again? If you're looking at my face. So the conflation about activism, advocacy, art, better opportunities is that before you even get to that question, what opportunities has the parent have to know that their child can be a dancer or be a human and have aspirations in life? Because prior to that, a parent without any disability background has a child, gets the diagnosis, and they go down the rabbit hole of the world with a disability. And they are never supported and they lose relationships, they lose community connections. If y'all go to a place of worship, look around your place of worship. How accessible is it? If you're talking about Christianity, I go to church people, Lord Jesus let me pray, but Jesus don't make no mistakes so why are you trying to heal my disability? This is where we are. So the activism and the advocacy is raising the level of our humanity in the context of our human existence. Quite honestly, we received this question and I was like, I don't see the difference. There's no distinction because they're both advocating for something and perhaps the means of how they go about in terms of an activism advocate, but we're all doing the same thing. And how do we do that? We just as someone who's hearing impaired, how do I allow myself to be in my skin in a field that relies perhaps a bit heavily on hearing music, but how do you redirect your senses, touching, feeling, connecting to be present and to say, hey, this is an art form that I can do, that I can help promote to others. And so by doing that, you are activating something and you're advocating for the importance of this humanity and also the importance of how art can unlock the channels to allow yourself to be who you are. Very good. I, you know, when you said this festival was 20 years ago, it occurred to me that I don't think we've gone much further than 20 years ago. No, that's a problem. That I think there is still a complete cultural apartheid that is reinforced by funding agencies. So the national down for the arts, federal dollars, and we're all supposed to have our accessibility statement there, completely ignored. Not in force. And those grants are given in. Then the states, Vermont, Massachusetts. California. California. You have your accessibility thing, completely ignored. And things are grandfathered in, re-ADA, and so then, so it's, and everyone is filling these things out by talking about architectural accommodations. That was 1990, that's 27 years ago, and we're still talking about the ramps. Like that's the access plan. Most arts organizations, most dance companies, most museums are completely hostile to people with disabilities, and they should not receive federal dollars. They should not receive state dollars. They should not receive money from NIFA. They should not receive money from the Vermont Arts Council. They should not receive money from Grants for the Arts in San Francisco. And all of these agencies are still perpetuating the cultural apartheid by giving public dollars to these institutions that are still talking about ramps 27 years later. The arts organizations themselves are also not doing a very good job. If we look at our online work, it is not accessible. Most of us put videos up now. Those aren't captioned. Even the typeface is inappropriate. You're an audio describer. Many artists, visual artists, and dance artists are said to me, I feel kind of uncomfortable having an audio describer. Like why? Well, they're describing my work. It's like, yeah, you don't want blind people to come? No, they don't. If they don't really want an audio describer to come. But it doesn't occur to them. Like, there's multiple ways in. And by excluding these things, you're not allowing the public to come in. So I think it's a really, my advocacy is around these issues. Like, no, public dollars? You don't get them. I went to Mass Mocha, and I love that place. I went in my wheelchair. There's no power assist door at the front door at Mass Mocha. So I literally fucking kicked the door in at Mass Mocha. And it's like, it's not acceptable. I went to see the new Anselm Kiefer building, a brand new building. No power assist on the brand new building. I fell out of my wheelchair and the docent stood on the other side of the door and looked. And it's like, no, not acceptable. It's just not acceptable. I happen to know the director, so of course we had conversations about it. Oh, I bet you do. Museums, still curators, hang, art. 61 inches is the center in museums. Why? Because that's the center of their view if they're standing. And I say, you know, that's actually no longer appropriate. And they say, and I get challenged. Well, that's how we hang our work. And some people walk in and say to me, that work looks a little low. I sit in a chair and look at it. And so museums are refusing to move it down to this midpoint. So the cultural apartheid is real. It is not any different than 1990 when ADA was passed. And it's a real issue. And I hope that one of the kind of things we kind of deal with is not just empowering dancers with disabilities, but that we really find ways for our public institutions to welcome audiences with various disabilities to come in and have a fuller, more inclusive cultural participation. So that's where my advocacy is at these days. Thank you. Thank you. We're gonna have fun this week. And Judy, your call to action. My call to action. Well, one of the things that I did was about 10 years ago, I started realizing that the field of integrated dance really needed to have a place to meet and a way to do that. And actually it was 12 years ago. Couple years ago, I started this project with funding from Doris Duke Foundation to do a national convening on the future of integrated dance in the USA. It's the first one ever, which is ridiculous, but it happened and I was glad to do it. And we followed that up with six regional meetings. And AXIS is continuing on some initiatives that we've put proposals in now really to advance artistry and training opportunities. So that's kind of my personal call to action. I've turned over the artistic direction of the company to Mark Brew, who I hope you all get to meet this week. He's fabulous. He's also disabled. He comes as a trained dancer to disability. But that's what I'm doing, is I'm really trying to advance artistry and opportunity in this country because we are a decade and a half behind the UK. And it's unacceptable. Well, there you have it, Ty. I'm a little later than I promised, but I think we've had a good conversation. And let me just encourage everyone, please come stick around for the conversations afterwards if you can. We will all be a part of it. And as I say, the various folks from Cain will also be joining us. And Ty, you can give us our direction. Yeah, just very, very quickly. So first of all, thank you again. And what I really hope is that there isn't another meeting like this, 20 years from now, where John and Judy and Ruth and folks like that have to say we had the same conversation 20 years ago. So I hope that you can take their calls to action seriously. And with that, I'm gonna remind our facilitators and tell you all that what we hope out of the next 90 minutes is that you come back into this room at four with three solid action steps, not things that you hope someone else will do, but things that you in your life, in your world, in your career, and your peers will do. And you will hold people accountable too. I know I'm asking that of my colleagues for us in those conversations, and I hope that we can do that. And just a reminder that there will be the graphic facilitation in three of the four sessions. So yeah, so.