Small Acts of Saying: Re-Storying Disability as Diversity and Difference was part of the research project Mobilizing New Meanings of Disability and Difference.
The research inquiry involved workshops where non-mutually exclusive groups of stakeholders—disabled people, health providers and academics—“talk back” to received representations and make new meanings. Our drama workshops engaged disabled artists and academics, including trained actors and non-actors, and culminated in an immersive devised theatre piece titled Small Acts of Saying.
The director and performer-participants, all disabled people with different attachments to the artistic process (some were trained actors and storytellers and some were not), worked together with and through their differences in research and artistic experiences to become a connected artistic community. During the creation period that took 18 months of immersion and rehearsals, performer-participants wrote and told their stories of living with difference and encounters with the medical system.
It features stories of health and social encounters. The play uses few props and is designed to be staged in diverse spaces. In some performances, actor-storytellers carry their medical files as they move through audiences; and they periodically stop and perform their stories before audience members as a way of “turning the tables” on providers who may now or in the future make decisions that have implications for disabled people’s lives.
In others, the participant-performers sit in a row facing the audience and step or roll forward to deliver their monologue when summoned by officious voice off-stage, akin to a medical professional summoning a patient from a waiting into an examination room.
