Disability should be centre stage at outdoor festivals

Over the years, our organisation has worked to build relationships of trust with disabled audiences, partnering with Attitude Is Everything to make access the “lettering on the rock” at GDIF. Attitude Is Everything has a distinguished history of supporting organisations such as ours to improve access at live events. It was our pioneering access partner back in 2003 when delivering the Mayor of London’s first ever Liberty Festival for disability arts and culture, which was conceived and led by David Morris, the mayor’s senior policy adviser on disability, a much-missed campaigning activist and visionary.

That festival had a huge impact on disabled Londoners, attracting audiences of thousands each year while platforming artists and voluntary sector organisations in London’s most high-profile public space, Trafalgar Square. Achieving an accessible festival in Trafalgar Square was a massive leap of faith – when the festival was conceived, Trafalgar Square was still a traffic island with a busy road separating it from the National Gallery – but thanks to Attitude Is Everything, a plan was forged that made this festival a rallying place for disabled people over many years, made memorable by contributions from, among others, Liz Carr, Mat Fraser, Heart n Soul, Francesca Martinez, Julie McNamara and Caroline Parker.   

Liberty also provided a launch pad for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympic Games, trailing Sway-Pole performances created by Graeae, which went on to provide the inspiration for a groundbreaking aerial theatre training programme at Circus Space (now National Centre for Circus Arts). Unbelievably, it was the first time that disabled artists and volunteers had been foregrounded in a Paralympic opening ceremony and the morning after Margaret Maughan had lit the Paralympic Cauldron, we saw disabled artists featured on the front pages of every national newspaper.

‘It’s important that the lives of disabled people are placed centre stage’

These experiences helped shape the way in which access has become a central preoccupation for GDIF and has led to this year’s festival becoming the first in the country to be awarded platinum status by Attitude Is Everything for its access provision. That journey has been made possible as a result of pioneering outdoor productions by disabled artists and companies including, among others, Marc Brew, Extant, Rachel Gadsden, Graeae, Stopgap Dance (with the unforgettable presence of David Toole), Deaf Men Dancing, Welly O’Brien and 48 volunteer aerialists flying over Greenwich.

So with this platinum award comes great pride in how far some things have come, but also, and particularly given the current devastating context in which disabled people are living (and dying), a powerful sense of the responsibility that this ranking brings. Our whole organisation takes this responsibility on board so that access is a creative, producing, volunteering and communications priority, while our access producer Kat Gill is undertaking detailed work with artists and production teams to create bespoke access for each production and each site, recognising that access is always a continuing journey and not a destination.

To mark this platinum award we are also recommissioning a legendary artwork from Caroline Cardus, The Way Ahead, which confronts issues of access head on.

Back in 2011, the Liberty Festival hosted this subversive, disability arts protest installation, a set of public road signs, which took aim at continuing discrimination and inequality. More than a decade later, Caroline will be creating a new set of signs for this year’s GDIF, addressing current realities for disabled people.

Caroline believes that now, more than ever, there should be new and urgent public statements of hope and protest for disabled people. A series of new signs will be specially commissioned to subvert the current narrative of shame and need, providing a call to disability courage and power, across public spaces and sites at this year’s GDIF. 

For more information about Greenwich+Docklands International Festival go to: festival.org/gdif