This year’s festival symposium titled „Cripping Leadership“, curated and organised by Konrad Wolf, took place in Theater an der Parkaue from Saturday 16th until Sunday 17th of November. On both days, the speakers exchanged ideas, experiences, old and new approaches and tools related to disability and working culture in the german theatre scene. Through panel talks, keynotes and discussions, the invited speakers, panelists and participants aimed to solidify what cripping leadership in the cultural sector means for them.
The symposium was opened by Konrad Wolf, who shared his experiences as a director, curator and access consultant in the art field. Following on from this, Kate Brehme, a freelance curator who co-initiated Berlininklusion, illustrates in her keynote how important it is to practise saying no. Due to the lack of role models with disabilities, she had to make her own way in the ableist art world. This was not easy, as the idea of a successful curator who visits and curates as many exhibitions as possible, who works constantly and disregards their physical and mental needs, is still prevalent. As a consequence, Kate Brehme learned the usefulness of “investing time and energy into curating, instead of masking” one’s exhaustion. Essentially, cripping leadership could break destructive norms and create “a career path of quality instead of quantity”.
Afterwards, Inga Laas, mother and part-time project manager with a disability at Migros Kulturprozent IntregrArt, send us into the lunch break with important reminders: To bring about change, crip artists need to “form teams in teams”. Moreover, cripping leadership has the potential to revolutionise workspaces by prioritising care and wellbeing of the individual, creating space for necessary breaks and making it possible to say no. Lastly, she ended by quoting Audre Lorde: “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences”.
After lunch, the panelists Lia Massetti, director of “Tiere treffen Tiere”, Caroline Erdmann and Leonie Graf, both actresses at Theater an der Parkaue, Alessandro Schiattarella, dancer and choreographer and Alice Giuliani, a performer and dancer, discuss “Cripping Directing and Choreography”. A quote and sentiment that stuck with Alessandro Schiattarella ever since his education is: “Everyone is useful, no one is essential”. To counteract this exploitative belief, he deems it necessary to create a common basis with the performers at the beginning of a collaboration by jointly drawing up a list together of their needs, wishes and tasks. And according to Alice Giuliani that’s exactly what cripping leadership is about: a mutual understanding and a space in which access does not have to be fought for in the first place.
The second day started with the performance “Word Play”, in which the two performers Yingmei Duan and Anna Berndtson slowly moved along the path in the centre of the room while cardboards with German words like “Kunst, Kreieren, Zweifel and Barriere” lay on the floor. While moving forward, the two performers jumped over each cardboard on the ground. The interesting thing about this performance was that some words were initially unrecognisable (one was a ‘jumble of letters’, the other was written on blank cardboard) and that the syllable ‘arm’ was hidden under the word ‘Barriere’, turning the word into ‘barrierearm (low barrier)’. So what role does language and its literal overcoming play on the path to access and cripping leadership?
After the lunch break, Kate Brehme facilitated the second panel with the Angela Alves and Claire Cunningham, both crip choreographers and dancers, working and teaching at HZT Berlin. This panel’s theme was “Cripping Teaching” and aimed to clarify what exactly this is and where the potential lies, particularly in dance education. Cunningham, Einstein Professor for the field of Choreography, Dance and Disability Artsa at HZT, sees it as her responsibility to share her privilege as a crip choreographer and dancer. It’s about generating knowledge together with the students, such as in the CripLab or within the framework of their artistic research project “Crip Choreo Care”. And it’s about allowing the time to do so, from returning from bathroom breaks and to articulating your own ideas. It creates spaces in which disabled and non-disabled students (also as allies) can connect, meet, work and exchange ideas.
Her colleague Angela Alves uses her position at HZT to address what she observed as access inadequacies in her own artistic and scientific education. HZT motivated her to create safe spaces for dancers with disabilities and made her realize that this is all about reclaiming spaces – and that this is linked to fundamental political and social change. Alternatively in the words of Kate Brehme: “Acts of disobedience and disrupting create creativity”.
To sum it up, the symposium was very amazing for me as it was such a welcoming, compassionate and fruitful space. The sharing of knowledge from curators, teachers, directors and choreographers with their expertise in Crip Theory and Disability Justice challenges the ableist system that has excluded them all far too long, in the best sense.