YDAS Disability Pride Starts Here (writer) 2023
Disability Pride Starts Here - youth disability advocacy service
disability pride starts here (2023)
In 2023, YDAS ran a ‘Disability pride starts here’ project. Several Deaf and Disabled young people were commissioned to create responses to the theme.
Access and excellence
by Flick
It is an act of defiant hope to implement community in spaces you have traditionally found isolating - whether that be in big ways or small. This has been the small act of revolt that myself, and collaborator Tansy Gorman, undertake in our aim to bring access methodologies created and fought for by disabled advocates long before we had the courage to do so, to teams that would otherwise have not prioritised them.
I’m Flick. A writer, dramaturge, and creative producer in Naarm/Melbourne’s independent theatre scene. A core pillar of my practice - and opening shout of my personal manifesto - is to bring access to traditionally non-disabled spaces. Using lived experience of disability to model an inclusive, empowering, and creatively robust way of making art. This is best described through the partnership of exposition and creative response. It’s in this form that I hope to reflect the pulsating complexity of being a purposeful minority in a space, and the difficulties and empowerment it brings as a dynamic and evolving practice.
Tansy and I arrive an hourly to each rehearsal, development, or call time. We need it. To manage anything from the day in general, the space, our plans, problem solving. At the mercy of our own minds and bodies, it’s about both ensuring we’re able to be punctual as lead creatives, to then also allow others the opportunity to regulate, prepare in their own ways, and have access measures set up in whatever way the context demands. Our practice is about routine, constant checking in, and flexibility where it matters…