The Creative Minds conference was truly inspiring and it left me with a lot of questions.
I have recently taken over the leadership of the Greengoose theatre course at Bromley College. For those of you who don’t know us we are a theatre course for young people with learning disabilities. I have been teaching on the course for almost 10 years. We have been running for 20 years. We provide students with a basic grounding in performance techniques covering areas including dance, drama, technical theatre, acting, directing and music. We instil some fundamental principles that set our students up as solid performers, amongst others a sense of professionalism, respect for others work, the time to make mistakes and the ability to apply constructive criticism.
What was lacking before Creative Minds was a sense of how our young people move forward and an understanding of our role with the wider disability arts community.
Where do our performers go after college?
They go to the few local organisations offering disability arts provision for a couple of days or evenings a week or they stay at home or in residential care. Up to the point of the conference I thought this was down to a lack of local provision and a lack of funding. These things are an issue but the conference showed me that we as an organisation should be changing our mind set. We need to see ourselves as part of a linear movement which starts at school moves to us at college then on to higher courses, such as the diploma at Central and then into companies.
Am I wrong in seeing it as a journey that our artists must take just like any other artist?
Like any artist learning disabled artists need to develop. School lights the spark, we provide the fundamental tools and arts organisations and companies develop the artists. By identifying a clearer role for ourselves within the disability arts world we can say to our young people look this is just the start of your journey, it doesn’t need to end here, you can go to all these places and grow into a professional artist. But, this can only be done with the consensus of everyone involved right along the journey. I need to know that I can send my young people to audition for companies and that companies and individual artists are willing to come to us and expose our young people to a world of possibilities. My young people need role models who can stand up and say look where I am you can do this too.
I ask that we all collaborate, we come together as we did at the conference and we inspire, challenge and educate our young people. After all they are the future of the Arts world and they need to be armed so they can challenge it.
I thank the conference and all the participants for helping me to start to refocus our aims and examine our place with the wider disability arts community.