Speak Up - KōrerotiaDANCEability

17 October 2018Female Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” –

“Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Kia ora, you’re listening to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”. I’m your host Sally Carlton and I’m really excited about today’s topic which I’ve kind of tentatively named DANCEability, talking about dance and mobility and accessibility and disability and how these things intersect.

We’ve got a really cool panel of guests lined up. Jo, perhaps we’ll start with you: If you could introduce yourself and maybe talk a bit about StarJam and where you’re from?

Jo Absolutely, so I’m Jo and I am the original Programmes Coordinator for StarJam in Christchurch. StarJam is not just in Christchurch though, we’re throughout New Zealand and we were founded in 2002 with the purpose of empowering young people with disabilities through music and performance. In Christchurch we opened in 2012 and since then we have opened 10 workshops - as of this year we’ve opened our tenth - and we have just over 100 young people who we call ‘Jammers.’ They are aged between 6 and 25 and live with any disability. So it’s very diverse group and people are welcome to join us if they identify as wanting to be a part of StarJam, basically.

As part of those music and performance workshops, four of them in Christchurch are dance ones and they’re led by specific dance tutors who spend an hour and a half every week with their group of 12 young people encouraging them and facilitating their dance workshop.

Sally Very cool.

Lyn Kia ora, I’m Lyn Cotton, I’m the - it says Founder and Artistic Director, so that sounds good! - of Jolt Dance Company. So we’ve been going since 2001, started really small, we were just one little class basically and have grown since then. So we’ve now got 10 classes for all ages right from 5 up to 75 and then we also run education training workshops as well so we’ve got a programme for some of our dancers to train as dance teachers and go and work out in the community a lot. We also do teacher

training as well. Our vision is really about creating equal opportunities for people perceived to have a disability, that they have full expression of their own creative voices through the arts and then also really through that, to really strongly advocate and to challenge perspectives about disability which I think is a really big issue for all of the disability community, that we really need to break down the perspectives and challenge some of those glass ceilings that exist.

Sally And finally we’ve got Rodney on the phone, thank you very much for joining us.

Rodney Tēnā koutou katoa. Ko Tainui te waka, ko Ngāti Maniapoto te iwi, ko Ngāti Rora te hapū, ko Rodney Bell tāku ingoa. Tēnā koutou katoa. My name is Rodney Bell and I’m a dancer of difference. I acquired a disability back in 1991 and I have paraplegia now and I’m a founding member for Touch Compass Dance Company and I sort of freelance around the place now. I feel that I’ve had a vast life experience and I accept and respect differences like gender, ethnicity, language and difference beliefs in the arts and felt the difference of my diverse disability and Māori culture, I strongly understood through dance and I’m looking forward to conversating with you all.

Sally Kia ora. This is a slightly different topic that I’ve dealt with before and I thought it might just be nice to start off with what is it that inspires you to do what you do because I think it’s one of those warm fuzzy type things to get us going.

Jo I think the thing that really inspires me about StarJam is the young people themselves because they provide so much joy into my week so really it’s a bit of a self-indulgent thing I think, my commitment and involvement with StarJam. But StarJam itself, I think, exists to show our young people who might have heard from school or other places that they can’t sing or they can’t dance, that they actually can and that their contribution is incredibly valuable and everyone’s talents look and sound different to each other but they’re still talents and they’re still absolutely worth celebrating. As Lyn touched on before, I think it’s a huge part of our work is performing, doing as many performances as possible at community events or in shopping centres or our concerts with the idea being that it puts Jammers on the stage and it gives them the chance to give back to their community so they’re not always in a position of being helped but rather they’re in a position of helping others spread joy and being awesome. It also really can educate people, I think, performance and art and music is such a powerful medium for inspiring people and changing perceptions and beliefs that they didn’t even realise they hold.

Rodney I’m in a unique position because dance found me so I was introduced to dance by Catherine Chappell, the artistic director of Touch Compass Dance Trust. She pretty much inspired me to… Encouraged me, she could see dance in me that I couldn’t see at that time and that’s what sort of activates me to help others as well. Then through my Māori

experience as well, doing performances or trying to support or presentations at workshops, I always draw on my rangatira, my elders, my grandparents and showed me what it is to be alive and what it is to give because I’ve come from big families as well. My nana on my mum’s side has 16 children and on my dad’s side has 20 so I’ve been brought up around big families and lots of giving and not much taking so that inspires me to encourage and always create and reactivate that energy to help others, inspired me through dance.

Sally Rodney, you said that ‘dance found you’ and somebody ‘saw dance in you.’ Do you guys see that in others?

Rodney Yeah always, I think that’s why we’re activators. We just create environments for people to come in and give them directions or support them in ways that they can express because dance is just a lot about expression. I think consciously they are coming to participate in classes and obviously they bring experience in so just giving them the tools to activate those lived experiences and then a range of music and introducing props and stuff like that, to bring those alive. I say that… For example, when I first started dancing, my way in - and I never told anybody - but I was making toast so I was doing the movements to making toast and then I extremitised them and then… Yeah… The toast pretty much grew from there.

Lyn I think there’s a real perception too that only certain bodies or only certain movement is dance and one part of our work that I just absolutely love is working with people who are perceived to have more significant needs or higher needs and we’ve always said in Jolt that the only prerequisite to joining Jolt is a passion to dance because as you said, Sally, you can see that in people. When we meet people you can see that passion, we have a lot of our dancers who have minimal movement - maybe a slight turn of the head, a look in the eye, a slight movement of the finger - but you can sense the energy, you can feel that breath, you can feel that life with the music. And you may have somebody else who is perfectly mobile but doesn’t have that same passion. I really believe that dancers are born and there’s an innate connection to music and movement and our vision really is about that everybody should have the right to access that and to explore that as fully as possible. For me it’s a wonderful sense of discovery: How can you communicate and engage with a person who maybe is perceived to have profound autism - how do you get alongside and how do you enter their world and then together reach out and allow them to explore that?

Jo The dance isn’t just what the audience sees, it’s so much what the performer themselves is feeling and doing during the performance. I think everyone can dance. I’m a firm believer in that and I used to think that I couldn’t dance and I wouldn’t be the person at a party that would go on a dance floor at all but I think from my work with StarJam - and I’ve had a little bit to do with Jolt as well - you don’t have to be someone who is necessarily perceived as having a disability to benefit from increasing

confidence and getting yourself involved in dance.

Rodney I tautoko and I feel like through mixed ability arts always challenging the egocentric sort of mentality and that western mentality of what dance is. I feel like a lot of it is another language too, this language that is universal and especially when you’re in a class of lots of participants of difference, I tautoko you, too, Lyn talking about people you might think that are not understanding what you’re saying but they actually are and just having that trust, having that trust that they are and not trying to do anything out of their comfort zone but just trusting that as long as you are prepared, as a teacher, as long as you are prepared and you do what you do well and you make it inclusive I think…..

Lyn For me it’s about respect and it’s also about the expectation because I think we should always be asking ourselves what is possible and sometimes that whole thing of discovery for me is really what drives me and I find that so exciting to have that underneath everything we do is there is always the assumption that more is possible, that we can always push further, that this person… We will find a way to communicate. My job as the teacher is to adapt, is to watch, is to look and is to frame and shape things in as many different ways I can in order for that person to fully express themselves.

Jo And show people their talents; point out to them when they do something amazing.

Lyn Definitely.

Rodney Got to have a pocket of knowledge, ay, because you’ve got to adapt to these classes, you can’t stick to your plan and it’s not working. You’ve got to be really reactive to how the energy is in the room, that’s the main quality of us being strong empowerers to participants of difference.

Lyn Definitely.

Sally You talked about difference in a group. I notice that Touch Compass calls itself a ‘physically integrated dance company.’ I just thought maybe we should talk about what is that - physically integrated dance - and how long has it been around in New Zealand or is it a relatively new concept?

Rodney It got titled obviously back in the ‘90s after Catherine had been overseas and attended a workshop in the USA and she returned and I think it’s just the term that’s pretty much been used internationally. ‘Physically integrated’ - what does that mean? And I’m glad you brought that up because we all have different lived experiences and we all could put a different name to it so I think that name sort of unifies a lot of different things and you talk about physically integrated, it’s just about when you have a skeletal structure and it’s just about us learning together really, isn’t it?

Lyn I think they keep changing the terminology, too, which I find a little bit hard to keep up with. When I first fell by accident into this work in London it was ‘special needs’ and then it became ‘mixed ability’ and then they talked about ‘integrated dance’ and I really struggle with it because language matters and words matter and articulating our vision really, really matters. So now we’ve shifted and I don’t know if it’s exactly right, we’re shifted to talking more about inclusive arts because somebody… A good friend who is really involved in the disability community said ‘integrated’ is when we take people and we integrate them into the mainstream whereas ‘inclusive’ is when we’re listening to lots of different voices.

I do struggle with the terminology, I don’t know how you feel, Jo, but sometimes it’s a little bit tricky to learn which words are the…

Jo Yeah and even the word ‘disability,’ it’s very shaming, isn’t it? It’s taking away abilities - which is not the case. It goes against what we’re trying to do. We hear about ‘different abilities’ quite a bit as well.

Lyn And ‘diversity’ is often used, isn’t it?

Rodney But then I have a lot of friends who have disabilities and they own that word because that’s their own… Their own culture.

Lyn They said in London when we were there a couple of years ago is that they had chosen… The disability community had chosen to take that word because they were disabled, they were disabled by society’s norms not by their physical or intellectual capabilities.

Rodney There’s a Māori term, whaikaha, that’s just been introduced into terminology around Māori whānau with disabilities and I quite like it, I like that there’s this idea of using different languages as well and introduce a different mind-set, basically means people of strength and that’s quite universal.

Lyn That’s awesome, I haven’t heard that before.

Sally Actually whenever we do a disability-related show, it comes up again and again: Look for people’s strengths, look for what might not immediately be obvious but everyone has got them, look for them.

We might have our first break and Rodney you’ve chosen a song by Eden Mulholland, ‘Streets of San Francisco.’ Was there a particular reason you wanted this one?

Rodney Yes my experience… I used to live in San Francisco and when I was over there dancing on the international stage for three years, I left there and just recently developed an autobiographical work called Meremere and this was one of the title songs so thanks Sally, for wanting to play it, thank you.

Sally Thank you for expanding our horizons.

MUSIC BY EDEN MULHOLLAND – STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCOSally E whakarongo ana koe ki te hōtaka ‘Speak Up - Kōrerotia,’ you’re

listening to ‘Speak Up - Kōrerotia’ and we’re talking DANCEability with Jo Casey, Lyn Cotton and Rodney Bell. I thought we might have a discussion in this segment about what are the benefits of dance - and they are multiple regardless of what your body is like - but just to start off maybe with the physical benefits and move into some of the others.

Rodney Because obviously I acquired a body of difference and had this new vessel back in 1991, limited from the chest down and arms not really moving very well and then they pushed you towards sports or finding different ways of moving them, you go through a spinal rehabilitation process so some basketball and then when dance found me, the thing I loved about it is that you minded the mind and body so there is more awareness of how I moved because I was thinking about it more, it wasn’t just coming from an aggressive place or a competitive place. And over time I’ve found I’ve remained limber, you consciously have to look after yourself to be able to perform - this is just my experience - and then the reciprocity that you get from performing because obviously performing, you have an audience, so the reciprocity of energy that occurs there is very empowering and I’ve noticed over time as well - and I’m not trying to say that people have an unhealthy lifestyle - but I’ve noticed that around my generation gap because I’m in my late 40s now but I feel quite healthy in comparison.

Lyn My background is drama and teaching actually but dance and movement make real sense to me in this community because it is an equaliser, you don’t have to rely on being verbal, you don’t have to rely on articulating things with words that you can really express yourself in a way that is much freer and more open through movement. I find that music is a real language that I can use, music I can take away the words from my teaching by using music because it just naturally encourages and allows expression; it’s a language of its own.

Jo Yes I definitely agree with music being a language of its own and you can’t really have dance without some form of music most of the time. I think the music element of it really regulates our Jammers and can often go the other way as well, we can have music that’s far too hyped up and we really see the results of that. I think what Rodney touched on before that is so important about dance is that it is connecting the mind and the body and it’s not a competitive thing. There are dance competitions but the kind of dance we’re doing it’s not about competition it’s about communication and connection and I think that that’s what dance has over other forms of movement like sports.

Rodney The platform of dance, it can bring all types of bodies together like Jo said, there’s no competition involved so all types of bodies can be

moving in a space so there’s a lot of equity going on as well, it’s quite beautiful.

Sally I’d like to pick up on what you guys were talking about, about the different bodies, and does it make a difference to your Jammers or the different people in the dance companies if they’re dancing alongside other people with disabilities or people who are non-disabled as well? Do you think it makes a difference to how the dancers themselves feel/react/respond?

Lyn In terms of Jolt, we do have quite a bit of diversity and one of the things I love about that is, as Rodney just said before, it’s this platform where people can all come together. So I don’t think anybody notices a difference as long as there’s really inclusive, strong teaching happening to support difference within your class, if someone is physically not able to stretch out an arm, that the person is able to go to them so you’ve done all the adaptation that you need to do and it just brings up this beautiful energy. In our tutor training scheme we do a community class and in that class our youngest is six and our oldest person would be in their 50s. We have people who are wheelchair users, we have people who are living with autism, we have a huge range of people. We have all of the support workers as well so we have about 30 to 40 people in the class and everybody dances together because the dancing together to me comes back to that whole thing of respect and expectation. If we create an environment where some people are caring or helping others then we’re missing that respect and we’re also missing all those opportunities to be impacted by and engaged with people on a really meaningful level.

Rodney Relationship building too, because if I’m going to dance in my wheelchair. I’ve got a relationship with my wheelchair that was mobility at the start - getting from A to B and back - and then you find all these different ways of negotiating with a prop or whatever you use for a mobility device and then you put someone else in the picture, have it be a non-disabled or disabled person, and you have this amazing collision or relationship that’s going on that has a world of its own because like with my wheelchair, there’s places where people can stand and they can spend all day exploring and finding different ways of moving and different ways of relating.

Lyn I have always believed that what are sometimes perceived as limitations are actually opportunities for really unique movement and really unique connections between people.

Sally Rodney, this might be a bit of a personal question but I noticed you mentioned your wheelchair used to get you from A to B and I imagine that as a dancer who uses his wheelchair, perhaps dance has made you see your wheelchair differently?

Rodney Yes most definitely because maintenance is a big thing, for it to perform

well I have to look after it and that comes from being paralysed from the chest down as well. When you do ignore your body because it’s obviously not moving and stuff like that so there’s this departure straight away and then over time you’ve got to find different ways of bathing, different diets, different ways of washing and access and all that sort of stuff and with the chair because I’m always in partnership… Obviously everybody can see me and I’m actually do my best to stay connected in that space and time with my chair because we need each other, basically.

Sally I think that’s a really positive way of seeing it.

Rodney I noticed and watch other people negotiating space in their different vessels as well, you see this light come on and to be acknowledged on their own for their difference and yet their finding different ways of moving through different tasks that you give them to do and it’s quite beautiful watching it over time like giving a class and then five years later watching the way they move around even outside of the dance space, totally different.

Jo A major thing for our classes that we always try and include in every workshop is choreography or movement that comes from the young people themselves, that is theirs that they own and that is when you see their faces light up especially when they contribute something in a movement and everyone else can do it with them and they see the acknowledgement of that movement in other people doing it as well. And I think you do a lot of that in your work as well, don’t you?

Lyn Yes the vast majority of our work in Jolt is based around the movement of the people, so we train in that we build body awareness, we build musicality, connections between people but we also do a lot of improvisation. We do what we call open space which is basically where we go in… We get to a point in the class where we just see what happens so we might place with music, we might put a prop or a stimuli down on the ground and just see what happens and then because our tutors have become really skilled at waiting, at watching and then dancing with alongside the person, something grows and something builds. Sometimes you plan but like you said earlier on, you go on and then something happens and you see something in a class and somebody does something and you just go right, let’s go down that path and see where it takes us.

Sally This is all a really beautiful discussion. We might break for our next song which is ‘This is Near’ from The Greatest Showman. Jo you chose that because it’s StarJam’s song for the year.

Jo Yeah it’s our big end of year concert group song. The Christchurch one is Saturday 17th of November at Haeata Community Campus at 6.30pm.

MUSIC BY KEALA SETTLE & THE GREATEST SHOWMAN

ENSEMBLE – THIS IS MESally This is “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia” on Plains FM 96.9. We’ve just been

talking about some of the benefits that dance can provide and I’d like to expand a little bit and think about some of the benefits of performance. We have touched on this, that idea of being up on stage - I think, Jo, you mentioned that. But I imagine that in terms of confidence building particularly, performing in front of people must be very, very powerful.

Jo We have something called ‘Spot the talent’ that we do in every workshop which gives our Jammers the chance to perform for their peers and it’s everyone’s favourite part and obviously our new Jammers join and some of them were born to perform and they’re totally comfortable with it straight away and for others it can take years of being in workshops before they’re ready to take that step and I think it is that workshops and our other bigger outside performances where we do… It’s easy for us to see the most growth I think, it’s such a big thing.

I think working with our young people, we often forget how big a deal it is until one of them will drag you into doing the performance with them and then you realise oh this is actually quite nerve-racking and for them doing it in front of their peers, people the same age as them, is, I think, even bigger.

Lyn I think there’s a real discipline around performances that builds the skills of dancers in quite a dramatic way like the whole thing of being on a professional stage, working with professional technicians, the focus that you need in performance, the discipline of rehearsals - that you repeat things time and time again until you get them to where they need to be, the backstage etiquette - everything around it is a really good learning opportunity and it’s also again that whole thing of that shouldn’t be denied to our dancers either, that whole ability to work at the top level and to challenge yourself in that performance context is really important.

Rodney I love what you said about backstage because that’s what it’s about too, it’s about bringing that universal access to different centres that you’re performing and that goes for the blind and deaf community as well. I feel as a performer as well - and I get a lot of feedback around people just wanting to say that the dance is beautiful but it’s quite obvious that the dancers are different so the props or the mobility devices get brought into the conversation straightaway so I feel they come with their lived experience and it’s emotionally driven because you’re feeling someone, that they might not have seen that they have a disability, that’s really empowered on stage and they’re really quite [inaudible] and then as the dance goes on it becomes very professional for them and you get the feedback of wow, I couldn’t even see a wheelchair or wow you’re doing great, it’s nice to see you out and about doing these sorts of things.

Lyn I mean, the arts reflect the soul of a nation in so many ways, don’t they, and if the arts are only showing the voices of certain kinds of people then we’re not really reflecting who we are truly as a nation. So like you say

about role models, about seeing different bodies and different movements, different people on stage is really, really important for that.

Rodney You can feel the mind shifting, too, because we bring that strong awareness so the people that go away from the dance see things differently and it might look now to the way that they see disability in their family or out on the street and that. There’s all these pockets of things that are going on outside the dance as well, we must remember.

Sally Jo, you mentioned that time when the dancers can create their own rhythm, I suppose, and Rodney, I know you choreograph some of your own pieces, I suppose it’s maybe quite a unique opportunity for some of these people to express themselves, would that be a fair thing to say?

Lyn Definitely, I don’t think there are many opportunities for our guys to have their own creative voices in any really tangible way. So much is done for our community, so much of the learning for our community is about ‘I’m going to teach you this so I’m going to enable you, I’m going to show you this’ and it’s really rare that people can make choices for themselves, that they initiate what they’re doing, that they can fully express themselves and that independence is a really important part of whatever teaching is going on.

Jo And I think not only that but then putting them in a position of being the ones that teach others, that can help others - which I know you do a lot of with Jolt - and with our programmes we always have Jammers who are mentors to other Jammers usually because they’ve been there a while and they’re more experienced.

Sally Do you find, then, that the confidence that the students are building through their dance classes are having ripple effects to other aspects of their lives?

Jo Absolutely, I think as soon as you’re acknowledged for who you are, as you are, it’s not going to always just relate to dance, it’s going to relate to a whole host of things. And I think the one that we see the most is Jammers will feel too nervous to share their news or engage in conversations at the start but once they’ve done a bit of dancing and they’ve been for a few weeks that’s where we first see the confidence start to grow, the making connections with other people and making friendships.

Lyn It’s about holding your head up and being aware of the world. When you dance on stage it’s very rare that you dance alone or it’s dancing with other people so if your head is up and you’re looking and watching and seeing somebody else, you’re more likely to show who you are and be much more present in the world.

Rodney Yeah nicely said. And you’re representing a lot of people even though you might be doing solo work, there’s a lot of multidisciplinary artists that

have come together to make that work and plus it expands the memory as well because these dances have to be remembered and once they’re remembered… And then that collides with your higher power because I feel the stage bringing on some sort of higher power as well and they’re aware and…

Lyn One thing I say about performance, too, is that every family member, every parent, every sibling, every granny, every aunty, every friend - we all want to see our family members, our children, our sisters, our brothers perform and be celebrated for who they are and I just think that more and more of it should be happening because the joy in that community that ‘This is my child on the stage who is doing that’ and people can see them for who they are.

Jo And enjoy it.

Lyn It’s a right, isn’t it? It’s an absolute right for the community around that person to be able to celebrate who they are.

Rodney I always feel like as a performer I have disciplines in place. I have my mātauranga Māori, like I go into a space especially when you go to a stage where there’s been many performance before you so there’s already an energy there so I always pay respect to that, I pay respect to the ground, I pay respect to the air that I breathe, the audience as well because they’ve taken out time in their lives to come and witness you in that moment which is quite incredible. So I want to make sure those things are taken care of before I perform or perform in a space with others and they dance with me.

Sally As well as the changes that you’ve seen to the dancers themselves, do you see the changes in the audience? You’re talking about the family having that right and that enjoyment to witness it but do you see tangible changes?

Lyn Definitely and I think to begin with, one of the things that annoyed me the most when I first started out was we would get comments like, “Isn’t it nice that they’re doing that” or “Isn’t that lovely” and as we’ve gone on audiences expectations have changed. And it’s not just enough to put people on stage and get them to move about to music, it’s about performance in its true sense which is about challenge, about expectation, about creating something that has artistic integrity in its own right and our audiences more and more have that expectation and it’s framing that within a really professional environment so in terms of the lighting, in terms of the stage and in terms of all of that. When we go into our big biannual show, those kids - we have got over 100 dancers backstage - and every one of them is sitting focused and ready and that’s from our little five year olds right the way through and they know that expectation when they onto the stage. So the audiences, I think, within Christchurch are becoming more and more open to what is possible and starting to raise those expectations.

Rodney I think us as teachers as supporting the dance, I think we should look at every moment as opportunity to educate and bring awareness so those people [inaudible], it’s just finding some feedback that opens their life a bit because I think they just bring that kōrero or that talk from their lived experience because they’ve never come across that before and then people go, “Wow, that’s good, it’s great what you’re doing for disability” and I acknowledge that and I take it back to the dance and what that involved and how many people were involved, I always acknowledge the choreographers and the directors of the dance because oh my gosh, they’re incredible, they’re quite amazing, I really honour the work you do.

Lyn I think our community has been really undervalued and underestimated so for our parents too, we’ve had lots of our parents who have gone, “I didn’t realise that they could do that” and often I have no idea what is possible but I just know that I have to let go of any idea that it’s not possible.

Jo And I think our parents are often hearing what the young person can’t do and they’re faced with that constantly - all of the barriers - so being able to open that up and actually show them all of the things that they can do and have that be the focus is pretty awesome.

Rodney My mum just had the opportunity to witness me dance and in all the years she’s never seen me dance. She just had the opportunity in June this year, I brought my show back down there so I feel like I’m… because it was always, “Are you still doing that ballet?” because of her educated stance on dance - but now she’s seen it, the way we see each other changes, we might talk about that dance but it is about relationship-building outside of dance. Over time, too, I noticed the carers who come in and support the dancers, I always give a few directions to them in the space because you’ve got to choreograph them as well otherwise they’re going in and they’ve got to move their arms for them but I include them in the class and give them a few directions on what not to do or what to do so it just takes away that hindrance of reinforcing them to do what able-bodied people do rather than utilise even if they can only move their eyes, that’s a dance in itself.

Sally Well, we might have our final song then which is the song you chose Lyn, ‘Keep Your Head’ by David O’Dowda. I hadn’t heard of this one.

Lyn No, it’s one we discovered. So this is from a performance we created last year and we did this year in high schools called ‘I Am Sam’ and it’s pertinent to the conversation we’ve just had because ‘I Am Sam’ is based on one of our dancers, Sam, and it really explores what happens when you have a child with a disability and that culture of fear and pessimism that is within that. What I love within this piece is that the words say “If you can place your hands on me then we’ll love from a long time, if you can place your hands on me then we’ll dance” and I think the reality is that if we’re going to have any change in this world, it’s when we have

really beautiful and meaningful connections between people and dance is the way to do it.

MUSIC BY DAVID O’DOWDA – KEEP YOUR HEADSally This is ‘DANCEability’ on “Speak Up - Kōrerotia”. Just to finish up, we’re

going to think about the ways that dance enables access and we have been touching on this throughout but I’d particularly be interested in the linkages that you guys see between dance and access and not just in dancing itself but in, for example, attending a dance piece, participating in an audience, choreographing, teaching, all these things we’ve been talking about. How do they then help people in their daily lives?

Lyn Like what you said was that dancers as audience, dances as performers, as choreographers and all aspects is really, really important, as teachers… I think it’s about visibility, I suppose, isn’t it? You mentioned that before, Jo, about you go and do lots of performances in lots of different venues because you want your community to be really, really visible.

Jo Absolutely, we want to showcase our Jammers in the best light in their joyful way and to I guess make them and their dancing and their right to dance and to sing and to play instruments completely normal. It shouldn’t be an abnormal thing; everyone should be able to access the music and so showing people that through different performances is a big thing of what we do.

Sally We’ve been talking about your three companies and your three experiences and these companies are doing fantastic things for a small number of people, relatively, I suppose. What more do you think Aotearoa New Zealand should or needs to be doing?

Lyn An inclusive dance programme in primary schools. I know that Touch Compass is developing… I think it’s for high schools, isn’t it, Rodney? And I know one of your performances is used in the high school curriculum which is fantastic but I would love to see an inclusive dance programme in all primary schools, in more education. I’d like to see it in the teachers’ colleges where teachers who are coming out know how to use the arts and dance as a way of including all the diverse needs of their students.

Sally And reaching students, too, I think.

Lyn Yeah. So for me, it’s education, it’s sharing ideas, getting them out.

Jo It almost comes back to valuing the arts and seeing the value in them which has always been a struggle.

Rodney As an artist, I just want to do quality work that’s respected and collaborate with many dancers or production companies that want to support that and I feel like there’s a lot of respect going on even before

you start moving when you get on stage. The dancers of difference, I feel that they bring a uniqueness to the space and therefore no-one else can tell their story because their movement is their own and they own that and to put that discipline to someone else… You could probably do that where they come from but you could never do it the same as them.

I’ve been going into prisons lately with Meremere so because it’s story-telling too, because I believe a lot of our participants who have been in camp can bring their lived experience in our dance classes and they can…. Now I’m moving into this space where I’m using their lived experience to bring stories through that space where they feel inside and I feel like taking Meremere into the prisons and that, these men can relate without being too direct. They can pick and take things from it because I obviously go through the stuff I went when I was in prison over there, it was quite ruthless over there so they can relate to that and I bring that through dance, through movement and song and music so there’s all these other layers and we’ve got really great response from it.

I’ve just been into schools doing presentations/workshops around disability awareness but channelling that through the medium of dance. The children can relate to the music, they can relate to dance, but then you bring that disability awareness factor it opens their consciousness and maybe they become more creative in a different way or you go back to that relationship with respect, when they go back out into society and see loved ones or people out in the community with disabilities… Their whole…

Lyn I think if you’re talking about accessibility, what it comes down to is that you want to be seen, you want to be seen in this world for who you are and if we can allow space for that to happen then we open up accessibility in so many different ways.

Rodney Yeah and it’s being respected as a person with a disability that can contribute to society in an equitable way, in a place of equity. I feel like -because obviously I have a disability - straight away the potential or our energy to work is cut in half or 60% let’s say and then so we’ve got to go on these special benefits so our potential to earn money so we’re living in this bracket of… And we’ve got all this expense of supports we need in place like care supports and that’s why I acknowledge these parents. They fight hard for their tamariki and then we go back to that fact of when they see in a different light, lighten up in their children’s eyes after they have seen them dance or perform, it’s quite beautiful.

Lyn Definitely.

Sally Well we might finish up there but just before we do if people are interested in getting involved in your companies what might they do? How might they contact you guys?

Lyn We’ve got a website: joltdance.co.nz so you can just flick us an email.

Jo We have a website: starjam.org. You can like us on Facebook to see what we’re doing around the country and if you were interested in getting in touch with me it’s Christchurch@starjam.org

Rodney Yeah jump on Google, type in ‘Touch Compass Dance Trust’ and ‘Rodney Bell’ and lots of stuff will come up and get in touch from there and then you can witness what we do.

Sally Attend a performance would be my final concluding point.

I’d like to say kia ora koutou, thank you very, very much for sharing what has been a really powerful kōrero.

Group Thank you