♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Alex Bulmer, a Canadian playwright
and theatre artist working in theatre, film, radio, and education.
You can find the resources mentioned by Alex Bulmer during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I'm with Alex Bulmer, who is a Canadian playwright and theatre artist,
she works in theatre, she works in film, radio, she works also in education.
She does thousands of things that we will discover today.
Alex, welcome. Thank you for being here.
Thank you so much. It's great to be with you.
I would like to know a little bit more about yourself.
Can you tell us about your background, how you started in theatre, everything that
is part of your history as an artist?
Sure thing.
Well, I had all intention of being in the theatre or being an actor, I guess,
from a very, very, very young age.
I grew up sighted.
I did not know I was going to be diagnosed with an eye condition.
I had no idea.
My ambitions were all coming from a sighted childhood.
And I think that's significant because I think that I do believe that those of us
who had the privilege of being not disabled for
the early part of our life,
carried a certain level of ambition
and a sense of entitlement into our 20s and 30s, et cetera.
And so I definitely had a sense that everything was possible.
I was in second year of university when I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa.
And initially, the doctor said, nobody wants to see a blind woman
tripping across the stage.
So that's a nice start.
I decided to ignore them.
And my drama teacher at university introduced me to this amazing
woman named Jo Jo Rideout, who is a voice teacher and is still
teaching voice to this day in Canada.
And I started to work with her studying voice for actors.
And I loved it, but I wasn't ready
to dedicate myself to being a teacher.
At least I didn't think I was ready.
So I returned to my first ambition, which was to become an actor,
even though I knew I was going to lose my sight.
And I was in second year of acting school at what is now TMU here in Toronto,
when my sight started to reveal the difficulties I was going to have.
And so I decided to leave my training after two years and go to England.
I was accepted into the top training school, the top theatre school.
Actually, it's considered - it was then considered the top in the world to study voice
for acting and for theater.
So that's what I did.
And while I was there, while I was studying voice, I was invited to
be a voice teacher on a theatre workshop run by Graeae Theatre Company.
And Graeae Theatre Company was the UK's, and still is, I guess, arguably -
it's considered the UK's leading disabled-led theatre company.
I hesitated at first.
I thought, oh, no, I don't think I want to be identified as "those people."
But I then changed my mind and thought, no, Alex, be open-minded.
And honestly, I think it took about, I don't know, 15 minutes being in a room
with all these incredible people where I thought, no, I don't not
want to be associated with these people.
I need to be with these people. Like, it just -
My entire sense of self and of
what is possible and the potential
of theatre and performance and creative thinking and imagination
just erupted over that week for me.
And I have never turned back.
I have worked in disability arts since. I returned to Canada and started
disability arts programming here in Toronto.
And I then went on to do a lot of
performance art, a lot of drag work, a lot of queer theatre.
That was my step inside, step towards political theatre,
I guess, was through the lens of queer theatre and queer performance.
Then I wrote a play called Smudge, which was an exploration
of my journey towards blindness.
That play was picked up by a UK theatre company and produced in the UK in 2003.
When I got myself back into that country and saw what was happening
with disability theatre, 13 years after I had first been there,
I just so wanted to learn more.
I applied to the government, and I was very lucky.
The UK government awarded me a highly skilled migrant visa based on
my skill set, which was - I had trained as an actor, I had trained as a voice teacher,
I was part of the disability community, I'd written a produced play.
So I had an unusual set of skills, and the government felt that I would be
a really valuable contributor to disability and performance across the UK.
So that's what I did.
I went and worked in the UK for 15 years, and then I returned back
to Canada, and I've been here for eight years, basically doing all of
the things I've just mentioned.
When you were at Graeae, what was the mood, the ambiance over there?
I wonder if you can tell us a bit about these years as you spent there.
Ok, so, my first encounter with Graeae was, as I say, it was in 1990.
And it was - The room was full of joy
and sassy assness.
There was no precious, precious.
It was just super funny people, really adventurous, wild imagination,
like a real avant-garde feel,
energy in the room and a fierceness.
And definitely - Now, how do I explain this?
Definitely a political - a really strong
political passion behind the work.
But it never felt like the politics were leading the work.
It felt like the art was leading the work and it had
this deep political foundation.
Its roots were coming from a real political belief and movement
in that country that started to really pick up momentum in the '80s,
that disabled people must have equal opportunity across all sectors of society.
But the art and the creativity just seemed to be the lead in the space.
And that was so joyful.
And that was the same as I worked there for 15 years.
And I worked with Graeae for a number of those years.
We were all very political, but it was art that was driving the work,
which I'm not always sure - Well, I don't always feel that,
but I definitely felt that with Graeae.
You also led a quantity of other projects during these years in the UK, because
if I'm not mistaken, the particularity of the UK is that they give some money
to the arts for disabled artists.
Yeah, I think what you're talking about is something called Access to Work.
I truly believe that Access to Work is the game changer.
We don't have it in Canada.
When I talk about it, I talked about it a lot when I first came back,
and then I started not talking about it because I thought,
I'm just probably making people pissed off because I don't want to come across
as if I'm saying, It's hopeless here.
But I wish that we could galvanize as an arts community.
I don't mean just the disabled arts community.
I mean the entire arts community.
Because what Access to Work does that's truly significant is that
it enables people to be self-employed.
So yeah, you can work for a company in Canada, and that company can...
When I say company, I don't mean necessarily an arts company,
but just any organization.
Go and have a full-time job with an organization.
Go work for TD Bank. Well, yeah, sure.
The organization, the business, can apply for funds to cover
the access needs of their staff.
But that funding stays with the company.
It doesn't go with the staff member, when the staff member decides it's time
to leave or go freelance or whatever.
So it's always attached.
That access funding here in this country is always
attached to businesses or employers.
And in the UK, it's directly attached to the disabled person.
So if you want to be a freelancer, if you want to be self-employed
and be an artist or an actor or a director and work for all sorts of different
companies, which is what most self-employed artists do,
or get project grants to do their own work,
you have Access to Work funding all year round.
As long as you make a - It's a threshold.
I think you have to make £6,000 a year.
If that's what you're making, you can get Access to Work.
I can just give you an example.
I just had mine reapproved because I'm moving back to the UK.
I'm going to spend more of my time back in the UK.
I'm going to have £100,000 to support me over three years.
So it's something like, I think it's something like 38.
So it's more than that, more than £100,000, which is, I think,
I don't know what that is in Canadian dollars, but it works out to be something like
$68,000 per year, guaranteed for three years.
So that's a game changer because that means I have somebody
who can support me even if I just want to go to the library and read a play.
It's amazing.
I should say it's not amazing.
It just makes sense because it enables people to work and thrive.
And it gives someone else a job.
So two people are working.
And economically, if people are interested in the ching-ching of it all,
the dollar signs, it actually - Every pound invested in this program returns
a pound and a half to the treasury, so it easily pays for itself.
Plus it really supports the initiatives.
Okay, let's build a project together with this and that company
and there is this kind of freedom of creation that comes with it.
Absolutely, because you're so right.
It liberates a disabled artist to move widely across the arts sector,
as opposed to only being able to work for organizations
that are eligible for access money.
So here in Canada, the Arts Council gives access funding to disabled led companies,
arts companies, because they have a limited pot of access funding,
and so they prioritize those companies that are identified as disabled led.
Well, that's great that they're prioritized,
but it's not great because it means that a disabled person really is only guaranteed
to have their access funds met working for only those companies.
I just think all artists need the - Well,
all artists deserve the opportunity to work with
whatever organization is interested in collaborating with them and vice versa.
I find that really problematic.
I think it also is preventing disabled leadership from flourishing
in this country because, and I can speak from experience,
if you're disabled and you're the leader of an organization, an arts organization,
whose board doesn't want to transition into the potential of being
disabled led, then your organization isn't eligible for access funds.
So how in the world can you take on a leadership role if the organization
isn't eligible for access funding?
I had to leave an artistic director leadership because of that.
So there's a lot of...
Yeah, the funding structures definitely make a difference, I think.
All that said, I am really
encouraged by the state of play
in Canada now versus what it was, let's say, when I left in 2003.
We've come a long way, and I think our potential as artists is just so strong.
I really believe disabled artists bring so much to culture
and creativity and sustainability.
I mean, we, I think more than most people,
we understand how to negotiate
barriers and how to pivot
and how to be flexible, which are all...
These are all words that are associated with creativity.
I think we're inherently great leaders because we're constantly having to find
solutions to lack of access.
Basically, we rock.
That's a good definition of us. We rock.
Okay.
Just before arriving, before coming back to Canada, you had the time
to do the 2012 Olympic Games, the London Olympic Games Overture.
That was a big, big thing, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
I don't think that could be done in Canada the way it was done in London, right?
I don't know.
I really don't know the answer to that.
I know that having all of that access funding enabled so many of us
to participate in the Cultural Olympiad, I was - I was writer and co...
I guess I was writer and dramaturge or assistant director
of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, the sailing, all the water sports.
So the Olympics had two centers.
One center was in London and one center was in Weymouth.
And little me from Canada ended up writing
the opening ceremony of the Weymouth Olympics,
the Weymouth-centered Olympics.
That just still blows my mind that I did that.
But I would not have been able to do that.
And also the participants, there were a lot of disabled participants
in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, not just the Paralympics, but the Olympics.
And yeah, that required a lot of accessibility support,
and the infrastructure for that is already there.
And then, of course, the Paralympics.
I mean, what Jenny Sealey did with the...
And she's the director of Graeae.
So basically, the director of Graeae directed the Paralympic opening ceremonies.
And I suppose, just again,
because they have the funding to support
all their access needs, so they're really able to do big, big, big things.
For sure. I mean, everybody -
It's a dream to put all these artists in these ceremonies,
the opening and closing, and also to have no barrier between
the people with disabilities attending or supporting or volunteering,
neither in the Olympics or the Paralympics.
It was an amazing event with some flaws, right?
You always have flaws in that kind of big event.
Oh my God, yeah.
For sure.
Also, I also...
I'm aware that the Paralympics is controversial.
Not all disabled people are keen on the Paralympics, and I do understand that.
Maybe that's a whole other podcast.
But I think the investment in the cultural Olympiad, all the money that went into
creating large scale
arts and cultural events
that surrounded the Olympic Games,
that was a huge investment.
And Disability Arts was identified as a priority.
So that helped.
Actually, out of that came the Unlimited Festival, which is the UK's
big disability arts festival that happens every two years at the Southbank Centre.
They have a huge million-pound budget to commission.
I love it because the structure is basically unlimited commissions,
artists, disabled artists, to create new work that will then
be shown at the festival at the Southbank Centre.
So basically, it's a commissioning scheme, and it's been a huge success,
and that grew out of the 2012 Olympics.
Are you participating?
I have participated. Yes.
I was part of the very first Unlimited Festival.
I had a piece of the very first Unlimited Festival, and I had a film shown there.
I a couple of festivals ago.
And I was initially part of Assisted Suicide: The Musical by Liz Carr,
that was there also a few years ago.
I haven't done anything for a while.
I might pitch my recent show, Perceptual Archeology or How to Travel Blind
for the Festival, because in addition to the commissions,
they do curate a few shows, but largely it's new commissions.
Well, good segue. Can we know more about Perceptual Archeology?
Hi hi hi hi. Yeah, that was good.
That was so smooth.
Amazing.
Yes, Perceptual Archeology or How to Travel Blind is a show
that I created with Leah Cherniak and
a number of incredible Toronto artists.
So Perceptual Archeology or How to Travel Blind came out of
a project I did in 2014, '15 and '16.
Which was a travel project.
I wanted to follow in the footsteps of James Holman, who was this 19th century
traveler, who I guess he was the first known blind traveler
who had his travel documented in journals.
He was a traveler and a travel writer.
And I wanted to be a travel writer,
which was something I had discovered while swimming in a pool in Los Angeles.
And I'll just tell you a little bit more about that in a second.
But basically, the play started off as me trying to travel where he traveled,
and it was a disaster.
(Laughs.)
It went really badly.
And so I just gave up on the idea of following in the footsteps of
some 19th century guy and reimagined
a travel journey that was connected to my
way of being in the world, my sensory strengths.
So I went to the Music Belt of America.
Basically, I followed my ears, and then I walked.
I followed my feet, and I walked in the outdoors for 128 kilometers
across Portugal and Spain.
I did the Camino.
And both of those things were just incredible and really
taught me a lot about letting go of...
Well, yes, letting go of sight, but even more specifically,
learning how to have a blind imagination, because I learned from that experience
that what I was imagining before traveling, in a sense, was
I was always imagining things in pictures, which is so strange because
I have been functionally blind for a number of years, but my imagination
was very much stuck in my sighted past.
So I really learned how to imagine with my ears and with my feet.
And I had two incredible journeys.
So I wrote a play about it.
That's basically what the play is about.
It's my whole journey from initially wanting to be a traveler
and a travel writer to the completion of the Camino walk and
two and a half years of traveling.
But the reason I'm just going back to where I first had this idea
of becoming a traveler was in 1996, I was struggling so much with my sight loss.
I was living in Toronto at the time, and I just felt like my world was shrinking.
So I basically just did the opposite.
I got on a plane and I went to Los Angeles by myself.
And the reason I went to Los Angeles is because I had a friend who lived there.
So I thought, well, if I get into trouble, I can always call my friend.
But I wanted to go somewhere I'd never been before by myself
and just see what that would be like.
And I found myself in a swimming pool at a hotel, having no idea what the size
or shape of the swimming pool was and thinking, Gosh, when I could see,
everything was immediate.
Everything, concepts came to me immediately.
I just had to look and, Oh, look There's a pool.
It's round, it's square, it's kidney-shaped, whatever.
It's big, it's small, and I couldn't do that.
So I swam around and around this pool, tracing its edges and listening
to the way that the water, it slapped against the ladder and
how it sounded under the diving board.
And I came to discover the pool through my other senses, but as if I was
a discoverer or an explorer, as opposed to what I refer to as
this immediate way of knowing.
It took time, an exploration to understand the pool.
But once I got it, once I figured it out, I understood that pool
in a way I never would have had I just witnessed it with my eyes.
And that's when I thought, oh, my God, I want to be a blind travel writer.
This is so interesting.
So I eventually did become a blind travel writer and wrote a play.
I think it's not your first experience of writing about your travels
because you traveled a lot.
I traveled a lot. Yes, I have traveled. I have traveled a lot.
I think it might be...
I'm now thinking, Oh, I think this is permanent.
I have some kind of travel gene or something.
It's in my soul somehow.
That's a challenge for someone who's blind because,
blindness is such a familiarity-sensitive disability.
Once you're familiar with an environment, you're not really disabled anymore.
I mean, I'm always blind, but I'm not always disabled.
So it unfortunately does throw me into very disabling or potentially disabling
environments and circumstances.
But I think now that I've I found a way of travel that really works for me,
it's not so - it's not so dramatic.
But yeah, I travel.
I love traveling.
Yeah, I think part of it is it keeps me in the moment.
Traveling really, really keeps me present in the way that acting does.
I think that's what I love the most about acting is that you
have to be so present and grounded.
You have got to be fully in your body in order to be an actor.
It doesn't matter what your body is. That's a great thing about it.
That's why disabled people are great actors because they inhabit their bodies
like any other actor does, and their bodies are so unique and interesting.
But that's I love that about acting, and I think that's part
of why I love traveling.
Does the play start in the pool?
Yes, it does.
Pretty much.
How did you bring the pool on stage?
Ah!
Through the magic of sound!
Yes. We had an amazing sound designer.
We had two sound designers, and they created this beautiful water sound.
Yeah.
The pool is very, very early on in the play, for sure.
Yeah, I can imagine. Okay.
I know you have a great website that goes with that play, so I'm going
to publish that on ArtsAbly's website.
That would be great.
I'm really pleased with that website.
My personal website sucks.
I'm just going to say it.
I have been terrible at social media
and self-promotion, which I need to do
something about that because it's dumb.
I mean, we live in a very digital world.
I think because I'm blind, I just partly ignore it, but I think to a fault.
If anybody goes to my personal website, it's so out of date.
But Perceptual Archeology, on the other hand, is still fresh.
Very good.
We know each other through a group that is called Creative Connector.
I love this group because
it shows the great number of artists
who are working in disability arts.
I wanted to ask you what it is for you to work in the field
of disabilities in arts.
Well, it means an opportunity to reshape a theater and re-imagine process
because disabled people bring
a particular unique set of opportunities
to impact creative practice.
And a lot of that is because of our differing ways of contributing.
I need someone to line feed my lines to me when I'm in rehearsal.
So I wear this little earbud in my ear, and I have someone on a little device
that's reading my lines into my ear.
And that process actually ended up being performed in my play.
I did the whole play with an earpiece in my ear and somebody line feeding.
And it was so much fun because I ended up playing with that line feeder.
As the play went on, we became playmates on stage.
And the line feeder had some funny moments where he just suddenly was taking over.
Basically, my access allowed for a whole set of creative possibilities.
And so anyone who brings that into a room, their unique way of participating,
is going to change the shape of the play, and it's going to change
the way the play is created.
That is magic.
So what working with disabled people means to me is the potential
for something unexpected and brilliant.
And it also means I feel safe.
I feel safest when I am working with other disabled people.
If I'm the only disabled person in a room, I don't feel very safe.
But be it an integrated group or not.
But when there are other disabled people in a creative room with me,
it definitely changes my sense of safety and vulnerability.
I guess it means safety.
Nice. I like that.
I like the notion of safety defined like that because it's also true.
We have this feeling of a community of people working together and
working better together when we understand what it means to be in that - in a group or
in a creative group, even more, I think.
If it make sense.
Yeah. No, it does.
The creative part of it is so powerful and empowering because
a lot of the times, being with a whole bunch of other disabled people,
it doesn't happen very often.
It's not like - It's different than ethnic communities that often
move to the same neighborhoods.
That's why we have in Toronto, Little Italy and Little Portugal.
We don't have Little Disability, but I wish we did.
That's a great idea.
I'm going to start Little Disability.
I said it here. Yeah, okay.
I think we would collaborate on that.
Not I mean, not only the two of us, we would be a lot to collaborate on that.
That's great.
I love it. We have to do it.
Everyone listening, we're going to start a Little Disability.
Okay, I see the time going.
I have one last question for you, and it's about meeting people.
It's about someone who might have in your career inspired or encouraged you
or motivated you, and If there was one person you would think of
in that, these people who had some influence in your career, who would it be and why?
Wow. Okay.
Big question. I know.
Okay, I'm going to answer that.
Yeah. Okay.
I'm not just going to give a single answer.
I mentioned Jo Jo Rideout, the voice teacher.
Jo Jo has been a huge inspiration for me, even though we haven't really
worked together very much since long ago.
She created some foundation in me that I think really
created the soil for the roots for a lot of the other things to grow.
So I take Jo Jo.
Lina Chartrand, who sadly died way too young in her 40s.
She was a disabled playwright in Canada.
Her play, Little Miss Easter Seals, which was actually first done in French.
Do you know what Easter Seals is?
No.
I think Easter Seals was a stamp that you would buy at Easter time, in April.
Or March, whenever Easter was.
And I think it was a fundraiser for disabled children or children with polio.
And it's still existing today, Easter Seals.
I think it is.
And so she - It's the Access2 Card, I think, in Canada.
Yeah. It is.
Okay, that's exactly what it is.
So Lina Chartrand, as a child, was the poster child
for Little Miss Easter Seals.
Lina had polio, and she wrote a play about that experience, and it was
produced in 1988 at Harbourfront Centre.
And I met Lena, gosh, maybe 1993, something like that, '92, maybe.
And I was working for a television program called Disability Network.
It was a CBC television show.
And so I produced a documentary on Lina and interviewed her
while she was the first disabled person to be at the Canadian Film Centre,
the Norm Jewison Film Center.
She was just such a groundbreaker, and she was Oh, full of joy.
And that's my memory of her, was color and joy and creativity.
And she was a lesbian.
And so I just was like, I so wanted to be her.
So I have to say Lina is one of my champions.
And then I'm just going to say that whole group of people
I met at Graeae in 1990, everyone in that workshop, changed my life.
That's my answer, three.
That's only three, but I'm sure there are so many more.
So many more. So many more.
Okay.
Well, thank you so much.
I know we will see each other again in some projects that we
will figure out how to build Little Disability in Toronto first.
Yes.
Absolutely.
We're going to build Little Disability, and I want to do something
with music with you because music has been another part of my life that I
haven't really done a lot with recently.
I love to do something musical with you.
I heard so many great things about you from my UK friends,
John Kelly and Pickles.
They loved you.
Yeah, he's amazing.
I love him, too.
It's a big love-in.
Loving community.
Yeah.
Okay, well, I'll see you soon and have a fantastic day and lots
of great projects and lots of great positive energy in this artistic world
that we are building together.
Amazing.
Thank you so much for talking with me today.
That was fun. Yeah.
Thank you. Have a great day.
See you.
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