Actual Lives : Cripples in the House

In the early morning hours of the 11th day of November 1989, my buddies and I were partying, without a single thought of the frailty of these mortal lives that we are all participating in. At approximately 3:30 A.M. we entered the intersection of 6^th and Lamar, through a flashing yellow light, only to be broad-sided by a speeding car with no consideration of a flashing red, westbound on 6^th . Things started making sense again about the 20th of January 1990. Now, going on eleven years post head injury, I understand that our lives are tottering like dew drops on the petal of a lotus blossom.

Adam Griebel
Actual Lives, 2000

Since August of 2000, I have worked with deaf writer and performance artist Terry Galloway, Celia Hughes of VSA arts of Texas, and a group of disabled adults to create the Actual Lives Performance Project. ActualLives consists of simply staged, autobiographically-based solo and ensemble pieces that critique cultural and medical attitudes toward disability, reassert the sexuality of disabled people, trouble the reduction of disability to metaphor, and attempt to engage the imagination of audiences in re-envisioning what it means to live with disability. Thiscommunity-based workshop and performance designed for adults with and without disability fits into an aesthetic tradition of what Marvin Carlson calls "socially engaged performance," which is "performance work based primarily upon autobiographical material and frequently dedicated to providing a voice to previously silenced individuals or groups" (165). Much as early feminist and queer performance helped to establish a cultural voice for members of those groups, Actual Lives engages the specific concerns, desires, and needs of disabled people and puts those issues front and center before largely non-disabled audiences.

Galloway's experience as a deaf performer working in predominantly hearing environments prompted her to develop a theatrical tool that could give voice and presence to people with disability. She first used the format for the Actual Lives workshop in 1993 in Manchester, England and has since conducted similar workshops that range in length from one day to one week. She uses a process of writing from memory to elicit the raw material of actual life and then turns that writing into performance by teaching participants how to use their bodies and/or simple props and staging to convey their stories (fig. 1).Though Galloway has concentrated for most of her career on work with hearing, non-disabled theatre groups, the recent productions of her Tallahassee, Florida theatre company, the Mickee Faust Club, reflect a conscious effort to integrate disabled and non-disabled performers. I was motivated to develop and produce Actual Lives in Austin after writing and performing an autobiographical narrative as part of an Actual Lives class that Galloway taught at the University of Texas at Austin in 1998. My exposure to issues of disability through my work as an Occupational Therapist, combined with my experience as a writing instructor at the University of Texas at Austin, put me in a good position to facilitate the writing process (the "page" part of this page-to-stage project). Our third partner was Celia Hughes, Executive Director of VSA arts of Texas. She was intrigued by the project because it offered a way to provide disabled adults access to the arts as more than patrons, as performers. As an affiliate of VSA arts, an international nonprofit organization founded in 1974 by Jean Kennedy Smith and affiliated with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, her organization is dedicated to reducing barriers between the cultural arts and people with disability.

Through our collaboration, we brought fifteen adults with disability together for one short week in August of 2000 to write and then translate those writings into a standing-room-only public performance that became Actual Lives: Cripples in the House. Since that time, the group has continued to write and perform, most recently at the Vortex Theater in Austin, Texas on...