5 Questions with Accessible Arts Ripple Interns
By Monique Moate
The Ripple: Disability and Culturally Diverse Internship Program is offered by Accessible Arts in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia, placing eight marginalised artists at a range of arts and cultural institutions across NSW and the ACT.
In this interview, 2023 interns Fi Peel (production manager, playwright), Mây Trần (performer, theatre maker) and Phoebe Lupton (writer) and program manager Eugenie Lee (interdisciplinary artist) discuss their lived experiences with Monique Moate (writer and editor) at the intersection of disability and cultural marginalisation, and their endeavours to foster arts accessibility.
The 2023 Ripple Program also included artists Cassandra Li, Faye Chamberlain, Marianthe Loucataris and M Sunflower.
Phoebe Lupton, Fi Peel, Mây Trần and Eugenie Lee (Supplied)
No.1
Do you feel that your cultural background influences your experience of disability, and your work?
Phoebe Lupton: I never see people with my disability in the media who look like me (I barely see people without my disability who look like me!). Even though autistic women are receiving a lot more recognition, and therefore a lot more support now, most of those women and nonbinary people are white. For example, I admire writers like Chloé Hayden and Clem Bastow, but they come from different cultural contexts from mine.The structural racism of the writing scene makes it harder for non-white writers to be taken seriously, and even more so for autistic people like me.
As for how this influences my work, I suppose it puts pressure on me to be that representation, which I’m fine with being at least some of the time, but I guess I don’t want to be seen as the only Eurasian autistic female writer in Australia!
Mây Trần: I’ve been in and out of the public mental healthcare system since the age of fourteen. I noticed early on that in Vietnamese communities, neurodivergency was never spoken about with the nuance and care that I felt was warranted. Autism is genetic; my relatives that have higher support needs than me were diagnosed significantly faster than myself. My mẹ [mum] is one of the most curious and knowledge-hungry people I know, so I’m lucky that I’ve always had someone to listen to and advocate for me. But I know plenty of young Vietnamese people who never received that consideration from their own parents and experienced further declines in their mental health. So certainly, the stigma and general ignorance influenced the way I spoke about my mental health, and who I felt safe around.
But I’ve absolutely seen progress. I think more and more of the Vietnamese diaspora are starting to speak more on the untreated PTSD that runs rampant in our older generation, and the effect that untreated mental illness and generational trauma in our community has on its young people.
In terms of work, as a writer and performer, my lived experiences permeate every piece of work I make. I can’t write from a perspective that isn’t queer and brown and neurodiverse. However, especially in the last few years, I’ve realised that in order to sustain my career in the arts, I’ve had to learn to shift the way I work and make it easier on the body that I plan to use for the rest of my life and in my work.
Eugenie Lee: I was born in South Korea and spent my childhood there. My father is an amputee from a train accident when he was a child and grew up all his life facing ridicule and blatant discrimination due to his visible disability. Through the lens of a child, I witnessed people mimicking his limp and laughing behind his back. I also saw how much my mother was ashamed of his disability. I know his mental strength to push past the barriers to succeed was born out of his life-long hurt and discrimination. When my family moved to Australia, I remember him describing Australia as a safe haven for disabled people. He never talks about his disability and he spends a lot of effort to hide it.
It has taken a long time for me to accept my own disability and I am sure my family history has a lot to do with it. I am fortunate to be surrounded by communities who make me feel safe to work in the art and advocacy fields. My childhood experience is one of the reasons why I am passionate about changing the existing societal attitudes towards disabled people for the better.
Fi Peel: ‘Culture’ is an interesting word for a multiplicity of reasons. When we talk about [it in relation to] invisible disabilities, I get it. I have known ‘invisible disability’ since the age of sixteen, when I learned that I was, indeed, deaf after fourteen years of being trotted in and out of the offices of ENT surgeons. And it wasn’t until a few years ago that the psychiatrist I have worked with since 2011—when he began his training on the mental health units I regularly inhabited—and I started to get closer to the truth. Even with a psychiatric diagnosis that accurately described the ways complex trauma manifests for me, he refused to consider that I might be on the spectrum until he had diagnosed and was treating two of my three children. A little earlier, I had come out as non-binary and more recently as asexual. And although I strongly argue that a queer identity is not a disability, when we apply the social model of disability to a queer frame, it is again the environmental and attitudinal barriers that block access to the inclusive ‘cultures’ that we seek to create.
My childhood identity as an ‘army brat’ is another one I could lay claim to, but my own racial heritage was far more hidden and disparate. It is so disconnected from my cultural heritage that, in a way, that part of me deeply intertwines with the concept of invisible disability. I have always been so ‘white’ that my racial history is taken for granted, even by members of my own family.
I wonder sometimes if diaspora discourse has a gyroscopic effect, that once flung from the homeland, the more disconnected you become. When my great-grandfather immigrated to Australia, he had already escaped his homeland of Smyrna and the 1922 Greek Genocide. It makes me wonder how the impact of multiple geographic relocations, on the back of trauma, reworks family histories. More recently, I am coming to terms with the revelation that I am also from the Stolen Generations. This is an even harder history to understand and even trace from a ‘white-man’s’ evidence-based perspective because of the records that were not kept, or were altered, and the truths that have been silenced out of fear and social conditioning.
Does it influence my work? Absolutely! I often think about the line from the 1982 film version of Annie, where Miss Hannigan responds to an intrusive line of inquiry from Grace Farrell with the acerbic quip: ‘Don’t assume nothin’, sweetheart!’ While it holds a completely different implication for my work, it’s always a comic little nudge in the back of my mind to never judge a book by its cover.
No. 2
How are challenges and concerns similar and/or different for disabled artists, and culturally and racially marginalised (CARM) artists?
Phoebe Lupton: I find it hard to tell a lot of the time, because I belong to both of these groups so it’s sometimes tricky to parse which challenge comes from which identity. I think the main similarity is that both disabled artists and CARM artists are expected to be ‘martyrs’ of sorts. We’re often expected to mine our trauma within our art and to be symbols of this rather abstract idea of ‘diversity’. I feel like we should be able to make art about joyful, or even mundane, things and still be taken seriously, but we often aren’t. I will say though that I think queer and trans artists face these challenges, too, as well as possibly artists who are survivors of sexual assault.
Mây Trần: Both groups suffer marginalisation and alienation from society, and to me, the bigotry and ignorance are the largest challenges but come in very different flavours. When I speak about autism, I’m often met with disbelief and some comment about how I’m nothing like someone’s non-verbal autistic nephew, whereas, no one has or could ever dismiss the fact that I’m Asian.
I agree with Phoebe about being required to mine our trauma to be taken seriously. It isn’t as if there isn’t trauma, but I want to make work that doesn’t languish in pain, and doesn't forget that the communities we build are joyful and radical and challenging.
Eugenie Lee: It feels that people tend to put disabled artists bundled together in one category, and CARM artists into another category, and I don’t often see people considering the possibility of the two categories intersecting. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it can be hard to find creatives representing both. It certainly has been tricky for me to find suitable mentors for the eight interns in the Ripple Internship Program 2023 I facilitate through Accessible Arts. This paid internship is for creatives who identify themselves with disability and a culturally diverse background to undergo a 20-week-long program specifically designed to advance their career. Ideally, I wanted to match them individually with mentors who also have similar intersectional backgrounds but it was very challenging to find them, so in the end, they were matched with either one or the other.
Disabled artists bring a unique set of perspectives, and so do CARM artists; their lived experiences certainly bring different perspectives. They radiate a unique breath of energy and life to the table. They are never a straightforward 1+1=2 scenario, as if one category could be pulled out of that person if they wanted to. The disabled and CARM creatives are, to me, the ultimate shapeshifting chimerical being with the capacity to bring complex, multi-layered and multi-dimensional insights and flavour to their work.
Fi Peel: I agree with Phoebe that both groups are often expected to mine our misery in service of inspo-porn. That’s certainly a massive challenge within a world that wants to understand and build inclusivity, but approaches it from a ‘point of difference’. I agree too with Eugenie that each ‘identity’ has its own unique set of lived experiences, but where they intersect, the conversation becomes much more rich and nuanced.
I think the gift to transcend the challenges is embedded in the social model of disability. If the answer to the question is ‘I can’t’, it is then a social imperative to understand what in the environment is contributing to, or even the cause of, the sinking human spirit that cannot rise to share in the joys of the world in the ways that others do. The medical model will have people with disability or mental health challenges medicated, operated upon, treated and ‘fixed’ so that we become ‘like’ the others that don’t ordinarily face these challenges. But therein lies the problem. If I have to take Ritalin to keep up with society’s expectations of ‘productivity’, I tend to start asking why we have to run at a break-neck pace towards the next brick wall. Sometimes that means I have to step back. But I’ve moved past feeling that I’m missing out, because I know I will have the energy I need to focus on the things that are most meaningful to me.
One day during Ripple training, we talked a lot about code-switching. The only comparative experience I could draw on was the first 10 years of my life as the child of an army officer. I think those kinds of childhood experiences teach us to keep up with whatever room we are in, regardless of the particular cultural background we come from. So in that way, yes, I think the challenges for disabled artists and CARM artists can be similar. But then again, I do come from the invisible ‘fly under the radar’ white-skinned perspective. I have never been directly attacked for my cultural heritage. In fact, I have more of a fear of speaking up and identifying myself for fear that I will be considered ‘too white’.
No.3
What role do you think art plays in advocacy and activism?
Phoebe Lupton: How do we define things like ‘advocacy’ and ‘activism’? I suppose you can use art to advocate for a cause, and you can use art to activate people towards a cause. But I’m not sure that those things are the same as being on the front lines of a cause. I may make art that advocates for things like autism acceptance, particularly for women and girls, but I’m not walking out into the streets or in front of parliament house, or doing anything like Judy Heumann (RIP) and her colleagues did in protest for the Americans with Disabilities Act. Of course, my particular disability means that I can’t really do those things, and that’s okay, but I’m still wary of calling myself an advocate or an activist.
Mây Trần: I think art plays an enormous role in advocacy and activist spaces. Art has always held up a mirror to the society it’s borne from, and it always will. After burning out to the point of situational mutism in 2019, I’ve had to take a huge step back from the rallies and protests that I was often present at. And my artistic practice is one of the outlets in which I can freely express my dismay and frustration with the social structures that we rail against.
Eugenie Lee: Art communicates with the viewers, readers, listeners and participants through emotions. This is why art is the primary medium for my advocacy more than any other methods. When a person connects with a particular artwork, that can be a profound moment with a potential to rock that person’s soul, core belief or whatever you might want to call it. With this power to influence the audience, it then becomes the artists’ responsibility to think deep and hard about how they should use this capability. This is an exquisitely humbling place to be in. When my participating audience responds in a way I had hoped, then I know my work has planted a small seed into their mind, and it will grow and begin a conversation towards building a more inclusive society. One-on-one performance with a single participant at a time. One quality moment with my participant. One moment of care at a time.
Fi Peel: One of my favourite lines of all time was spoken by Martin Luther King Jr: ‘Almost always, the creative, dedicated minority has made the world better.’ These days, I am almost always surrounded by artists, which often presents a rude shock when I am talking to clinicians, policymakers and politicians. There is a certain open-mindedness that is often subverted in clinical and political settings, which can be extremely disquieting. The gift of artistic thinking is that your brain colours outside of the lines. For some of us, we have naturally retained this childhood skill, but I would argue that it is a discipline that anyone can master through dedicated practice. Sadly though, many within our hallowed halls of government run on too much caffeine and adrenaline to stop, driven by the economic demands of a consumerist world.
As a lived experience mental health reform advocate, I got caught up in that for a time until I realised it was literally making me sick. In some ways, I don’t love the fact that those of us who are most negatively affected by social and economic policy are the ones who have to keep the bastards honest (especially since the demise of the Democrats). But in other ways, I am glad to have found my way back to colouring outside the lines and, now, holding it up for the changemakers to challenge themselves, as they hopefully feel challenged to. The trick, I think, is in getting them into the theatre, or the concert hall or the gallery and having them leave not only misty-eyed and moved, but with a fire in their belly to actualise your call to action.
No.4
In terms of accessibility, what barriers have you faced when seeking to make art more accessible, and how can we best address them?
Phoebe Lupton: In the demographic of autistic people, there isn’t really a consensus on actually how to make things, including art, more accessible. There is so much debate on things like identity-first language vs. person-first language, and whether or not we should use functioning labels, and how to talk about the autism spectrum in a way that includes people on the spectrum who are unable to work or live independently. Often, whether you make one decision or the other, you’re going to offend someone. It’s probably true that we as a demographic need to be more comfortable with that, but also, language is important and I’m not going to advocate for simply brushing off linguistic concerns. It’s a minefield, honestly!
Mây Trần: I’ve only recently started considering my own accommodations after spending years working while ignoring the signs my body was giving me and forcing myself into burnout. The barriers that I faced were ones of my own making and came both from internalised ableism and observing the reverence for working yourself to exhaustion in the arts industry. Now that I’m actively learning about and embracing accessibility in art, I’m beginning to come up against barriers that I hadn’t previously considered. Mostly around funding, or lack thereof.
I come from an independent theatre background and, in retrospect, there was rarely any effort or money put towards making performances more accessible. I don’t believe it comes from a malicious place; when you’re working for free, you’re not thinking about anything other than how you’re fully focused on getting this show onstage with any money you do have. I think slashing funding from the arts will always affect the ability to enact accessibility initiatives.
Eugenie Lee: Making my participatory performances is not cheap, especially if I am to support as many access needs as possible. It costs a lot of money to do it the right way: to consult diverse disabled communities from the onset of the project, to hire Auslan interpreters and audio describers, to embed captioning, and to design wearable technologies to suit different body shapes and sizes, to name a few. When there is not enough funding to support art projects, it can be tempting to skip these accessibility costs for many people and organisations. This temptation is rather ubiquitous because accessibility is not a norm within our society yet. I would like to see the day when planning for access becomes the norm and no one needs to question its validity.
Fi Peel: One of my favourite parts of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is actually in the preamble: ‘Recognizing that disability is an evolving concept and that disability results from the interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.’ When I think about that statement in my own lived experience, I would need to finish my memoir to adequately answer this question!
I’m currently working on a show concept which involves a deaf artist as one of a cast of five, in a primarily musical soundscape. Working on a pitch at the moment where I have to provide a $10k budget breakdown with no additional accessibility funding, it actually shapes what kind of concept development I can do. I need Auslan interpreters to work with the artist, so suddenly there’s a chunk of funding just gone. Will we be able to create the same quality of work? I am hoping so, because the richness is in demonstrating to an audience what accessible theatre can look like. Will it take us longer to get it performance ready? You betcha, because I have to sacrifice tech development to be able to get the deaf artist in the room. We’ll probably need another workshop period just to focus on the theatre design aspects. Some new works development programs have funding set aside for additional access costs, but it’s not universal, and in the instances where it’s not universal, we’re still approaching the arts from a medical model. It’s not just about building a larger box so the shortest kid can see over the fence; it really needs to be about removing the fence. And we won’t get to where we’re going unless that becomes universally accepted as best practice.
No.5
Why is consultation with a diverse range of disabled artists important for arts institutions in increasing their accessibility?
Phoebe Lupton: The ‘diverse range’ piece is so important, in my opinion. We are not a monolith! As I’ve already talked about, there’s a lot of diversity of thought among disabled people and it’s important that that be reflected, where possible. Also, when consultation relies primarily on lived experience, one person isn’t going to know everything there is to know about all disabilities. For example, I’m autistic and I know a good amount about autistic people, but don’t know as much about people who use wheelchairs. So, theoretically, if you’re going to hire me to consult your institution, you should probably also hire a wheelchair user!
Mây Trần: ‘Nothing about us, without us’ is often used to impart the sentiment that marginalised groups should only have decisions made on their behalf if their voices are involved in the process, and I think that position should be staunchly held in artistic spaces. If collaboration is unfortunately not on the cards, a lengthy, respectful and considered consultation is the best scenario. Diversity in consultants is paramount to increasing accessibility in our art institutions, because not all people from marginalised communities are going to feel one way about a certain issue, not all of them deal with the same issues around lack of access, and access looks different for every single person.
Eugenie Lee: This is incredibly important because disability is never a single form or experience but hugely diverse. It is impossible (and a dangerous notion) to expect one person to understand or speak up for the rest of the disabled communities.
Fi Peel: I think as everyone has said, in their own unique way—we all have our own unique ways of understanding accessibility, and the only way to get better accessibility is by making your consultation as wide and as diverse as your audience is.
Find out more
aarts.net.au/news/2023-disability-and-culturally-diverse-internships
Phoebe Lupton is a multidisciplinary writer and creative based in Canberra/Ngunnawal land. She is a Ripple Fellow with Accessible Arts and Diversity Arts and a postgraduate student in creative writing.
Eugenie Lee is a queer, disabled woman who is a passionate advocate for disability justice, CripTime, equity and inclusion. On the days when she’s not working for Accessible Arts, she works as an interdisciplinary artist with a conceptual focus on persistent pain whose work is informed by scientific research, creative technology and disability studies. She investigates pain-related perceptions and experiences through various media and technologies that often stem from collaborations with pain scientists, creatives and people with disability. Her works are expressed in the form of participatory interactive performances, installations and paintings. She is a recipient of various grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, ANAT, Accessible Arts and Create NSW and has exhibited at arts institutions and museums in Australia and overseas. Eugenie graduated with First Class Honours from Sydney College of the Arts in 2012.
Fi Peel is a production manager and playwright for Just Hearing and a Playback Company member with Rebus Theatre. They are front-of-house manager for The Mill Theatre at Dairy Road, and executive producer and host of the Communities of Collaboration podcast. They have undertaken production roles with Lakespeare, The Cooperative, Keystone 1889’s Christmas Spectacular and This Is My Brave Australia; been published by Independent Australia, Sync Leadership, Riot Act, Red Room Poetry, Mad In America and A Zine by US; played diverse, revolutionary and Shakespearean characters in Systems and Sanity (Rebus), Tosca (The Cooperative), and Romeo and Juliet (Bathurst Shakespeare Players); and have sung with Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 6, Bearfoot Theatre, Oriana Chorale and The Song Company.
Mây Trần is a Vietnamese Australian performer, theatre-maker, and exhausted person based in Western Sydney. They aim to explore the cultural perception of neurodivergence with intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class. With a background largely in theatre, some of their credits include Cleansed (Old Fitz Theatre, 2022), Hot Mess (KXT, 2021), R+J RMX (Opera House, 2021) and PLAYLIST (PYT, Opera House, 2019). Currently, they are creating a solo work about their experiences as a late-diagnosed autistic with ADHD. Their work reflects their passion for the radicalisation and celebration of queer, POC and disabled communities.