Gradually the group assembles. It’s not a large group but diverse and everyone has made a real effort to be here. It’s a long time since I was in quite such a situation. It takes me back to when I first left college and worked as an art therapist. There is a mixture of anticipation and nervousness. There is also a bit of the ‘new boy/girl’ at school syndrome. I’m not totally sure what the participants imagine might happen and I think both myself and Dr Vic are fairly open minded about how it will progress.
Having said that, it would be disingenuous for me not to admit I have a germ of a structure already built in my head. The timescales are too short for us to spend as much time as I would ideally like to develop a way of working. We have had to be realistic, there are deadlines to hit and we have to produce something ‘meaningful’ in a relatively short timescale. This group may all be new to each other but they will have to gel quickly or it just isn’t going to work.
I have developed a way of working which uses objects as starting points and this is a definite ice breaker in such situations. Each participant was asked to bring along an ‘object’, a ‘thing’, that means something to them. Being that this is a group who mostly identify as disabled in some way, the implication is that it might be something that has helped or even possibly hindered them in their journey with a disability.
I am very conscious that I have no specific training in working with disability groups, but my attitude is that we are all people and that I have a lot of experience in working with a wide variety of those! Dr Victoria, CEO of Disability North, is on hand to facilitate and generally move things along so I’m not too concerned, although I am no different to any of us in the room in not quite knowing how this will go.
Looking around it’s good to see we have a good cross section of experience and age groups. So to the introductions. Gradually it becomes clear that there is also a variety of attitudes and life experiences present in the room. Some people take the position that it is best to be positive about most things in life and to show the rest of the world that it’s the ability and not the dis-ability of a person which is the most important thing to emphasis. Others offer the voice of experience and identify with both the progress that has taken place over recent years and also the various current backward steps that are evident politically and in social support. Others want to make it clear that despite it not being as immediately obvious, mental health issues can be just as debilitating as any physical impairment.
We try and negotiate a path which both acknowledges this and tries to encompass the fact that the term ‘disability’ covers such a wide range of personal affectations. ‘The dog ate my wheelchair’ hints at this in the title. Our aim is to focus on the people and their experiences, not some generic category of disability into which no one person actually fits.
Having said that, I am presented with challenges I don’t typically have when making films or chatting with/ interviewing people… I am so used to thinking in both sound and vision that when confronted with sign language I have to think again. This is to become particularly pertinent in following sessions. I am struck by the simple fact that the BSL interpreters we have are of course the centre of attention for our two hearing impaired members and consequently, when others are talking, there isn’t so obvious an interrelation with the group as a whole as I’m used to. Attention is necessarily focused between the two signers, and this has an air of exclusivity about it which can be a barrier to wider, fluid discussion. It’s obvious, but not something I would have thought about previously. Reflecting on this after the first session I see how this might be made into something unique and positive as a framing device for our piece.
more updates to come – for locations see:
https://getnorth2018.com/events/the-dog-ate-my-wheelchair/
