#identityweek

[thespiannation]

#identityweek

Friday’s final video celebrating #identityweek. This video focused on the journeys, challenges, victories, and advice from accomplished pioneers to aspiring artists in the field. It’s a great video if you’re looking to learn from some of the best!

[thespiannation]

#identityweek

This conversation will focus on the progress and challenges in the theatre community around access and inclusion for artists, administrators and audience members. Topics may include advances in onstage representation of characters and performers of all abilities, the politics of casting an actor to play a character with a disability if that actor doesn't have the same disability, and more. Panelists include Phil Dallmann (Manager of TDF Accessibility Programs), Laura Kirk (Director of Audience Services for Yale School of Drama and Yale Repertory Theatre), Christine Bruno (Disability Advocate for Inclusion in the Arts) and Alexandria Wailes (representing Deaf West). Moderated by Diep Tran (Associate Editor, American Theatre Magazine).

[thespiannation]

#identityweek

This panel narrows in on the experience of transgender artists, discussing their opportunities and challenges within the theatre industry as well as how our community can better include and support their work. Panelists include playwright Azure D. Osborne-Lee and performers Donnie Cianciotto, Bianca Leigh, Pooya Mohseni and MJ Rodriguez. Moderated by Adam Hetrick (Editor in Chief, Playbill.com).

[thespiannation]

Samuel French, Playbill, and HowlRound present #IdentityWeek, a free four-day panel event exploring racial, cultural, sexual and gender identity in the theatre livestreaming on the global, commons-based peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv from Tuesday, September 27 to Friday, September 30.

[emmagzroberts]

Proud to have been a part of the inaugural #UChicago #IdentityWeek! Check out more photos & narratives on identityweekuchicago.tumblr.com @subversive913 #thingsthatmatter #ourcampus #ourstories

[identityweekuchicago]

Identity Week Photo Campaign

[identityweekuchicago]

Lillian Erickson

  Leaving your family last year was not

as hard as you thought it would be.

Maybe because it's you who was doing the leaving

and not them.

You have insipid white scars but still bruise purple. You like pink

  and wearing dresses but you still

haven't figured out if that makes you a girl or not, you still

haven't figured out if the feminine experience exists

like that poem you wrote or whether you merely

created your own mythology of “females” to

guide you and your vagina forward through life.

You wore pants today but you spilled Harold's on them

  so you took them off.

Now you are half naked, staring at your legs and hating them,

hating the little bumps on them and the indentations the seams

on those pants made. You want to put them back on

but face it, these thighs belong to you and you alone.

Love your mottled little legs and your mottled little face.

If you are you with glitter on your eyes or antlers on your thighs

  you are comely either way. Eat ants on a log, savor

the elements and let your heartbeat

radiate from your palms and soles alike.

Drink the Bartlett elixirs and let their warmth fill you-- people

pretend to be miserable here but don't let that infiltrate you,

you're better than that, you're healthy and free

  and it's okay to be okay, kitten,

purr and cuddle and rebrand yourself

as you desire, like the ads you desire, suck fluid vitality

from your wounds and murmur forward

with the power boost.

  You are a sister and a brother and a mother and a son,

you are a cliché and and and the dirt and grease

from your skin is home to a billion microorganisms.

You are your own world and your own God

feed every vestigial psyche organ and ripple on

[identityweekuchicago]

Nora Helfand

  Coming to UChicago after having recently become disabled meant that two major changes in my life became one. While my upbringing in Portland has largely made me who I am, it is Chicago where I have learned what disability means to me (and the often-unsavory meanings it holds for other people).

  To even describe myself as a "disabled person" rather than as a "person with disabilities" is to take a major public risk. Like most abled people (I was abled until age 17), I grew up with an extremely distorted view of disabled people. I understood them as symbols of pity, and of nature gone wrong. I learned that despite this pity that society harbored toward disabled people, my access to facilities and activities was considered more important than theirs; clearly, these people were so used to constant despair that they surely wouldn't mind exclusion from certain buildings and social activities. I learned that the only disabled voices that mattered were those of people who had "overcome" their disabilities to achieve something monumental - objects of inspiration who stood out from an amorphous "they" whose negative attitudes condemned them to a cursed life of entrapment by their deformities.

  Thus, calling myself a "disabled person" and admitting that something as "ugly" as disability is something I accept wholeheartedly as a part of my identity is off-putting to many, especially since my disabilities are not visible. I learned during my second year here that the Student Disability Services office at U of C has discouraged students from disclosing their disabilities, under the assumption that they must feel shame about them. It is this very stigma that prevents better lives for people with a diversity of disabilities. The pressure I have felt since my diagnoses to become one of those inspirational success stories, free from the shadow apparently cast over me by disability, has nearly destroyed me at times. As soon as I send an email to a professor requesting an accommodation, I am generally seized by a desire to take it all back, to work a little harder and prove that disability cannot hold me back. This borders on absurd every time I am lying in the ER, knocked out by drugs, and cannot possibly do my work. But these are the effects of culture's hatred of disability on my life. I am learning, slowly but surely, how to advocate for myself without apologizing. In doing so, I am signaling my permission to all disabled people to demand their basic rights, and to gain access they have been denied for generations. I dream every day of a world in which people of all identities, including the disabled, have an equal opportunity to claim their deserved place in the world.