Carousel (charity)

Carousel is a learning disability led arts organization founded in Brighton, as a charity, in 1982. Carousel promotes the active involvement of people with a learning disability in the arts, managing projects by and for learning disabled people, thus enabling them 'to develop and manage their creative lives, true to their voice and vision, challenging expectations of what great art is and who can create it.'[1] Carousel works in music, radio, performance, digital media and film. Initiatives include the international Oska Bright Film Festival and Creative Minds, a national conversation about learning disability arts.

High Spin

One of Carousel's first projects was to create an integrated dance company, in which the majority of performers had learning disabilities. This was originally called The Carousel Dance Company and, from 1993, High Spin. Ingrid Ashberry, High Spin's artistic director, told the reviewer Annie Wells, 'Ensuring that the company is 'performer-led' has always been an overriding priority. There is no in-house choreographer as such and the dancers are encouraged to draw on their own experiences, explore their own ideas and evolve their own movement.'[2]

In 1989, the company worked with the choreographers Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie to create 'Banda Banda'. Aggiss described the creative process: 'We gave the performers their voice, inviting each to talk about aspects of their lives. In one section, a sparse gestural piece arose from Outsider Performer Eric Grantham's visit to Brighton's Booth Bird Museum and his subsequent interest in flying.'[3] 'Banda Banda' was performed at the ICA in December 1989, and went on to win the 1990 Time Out/Dance Umbrella Award. According to the Time Out review, 'Banda Banda shatters the comfortable illusion that art is to be revered as the special preserve of the gifted few. The performance stresses that the arts are an invaluable means of self expression and that creativity is latent in, and essential to, everyone, whether they are labelled as amateur, professional, disabled or not.'[4]

Aggiss and Cowie created three more shows with the company: 'La Soupe' (1990), 'The Surgeon's Waltz' (2000) and 'Rice Rain' (2001). Other choreographers who worked with High Spin included Rose English, Ben Craft, Laurie Booth, Miriam King and Maxine Doyle.[2] High Spin came to an end following the decision to move away from integrated arts to projects controlled by the learning disabled artists themselves.

Oska Bright

In 2003, Carousel, in partnership with the community film production company Junk TV, created the Oska Bright Film Festival. This is the world's first and, so far, only International Film Festival showing short films made by people with learning disabilities, which is also produced, managed and presented by a learning disabled team. The festival takes place in the Brighton Dome Corn Exchange every two years. In between festivals, Oska Bright tours the UK and abroad, showing the films and delivering training sessions to people with learning disabilities. Oska Bright visited Israel in 2012 and Canada in 2013.[5]

Reviewing the 2015 festival in Disability Arts Online, Colin Hambrook wrote that Oska Bright presented 'a unique outpouring of expression on film offering a very different vision of the world to the kinds of perspective we are used to on our television screens and in the cinema. It’s that uniqueness that gives Oska Bright its energy and pizzazz....With each festival the evidence of growing confidence and the strength of the disabled voices coming through, grows more compelling....Even more impressive is the fact that Oska Bright has reached 28,000 people worldwide since the last festival in 2013, which is truly phenomenal.'[6]

Carousel has also created a radio show, originally called 'Shut Up and Listen', and now Carousel Radio. The show is aired on Radio Reverb at 2pm on the first Sunday of each month, and then repeated the following Monday at 8am, Wednesday at 4pm and Friday at 5am. It is also available as an itunes podcast. For the show, Carousel invite people with a learning disability to contribute poems, short stories, radio plays, music and sound art. Each show has its own theme, such as 'Body and Health', 'Mistakes', 'Night Time', 'Family' and 'Travel'.

Carousel stages a regular live music night, The Rock House, which takes place at Brighton's Green Door Store and West Hill Hall. Performers include Carousel bands Zombie Crash, Sabien Gator, Daniel Wakeford, Beat Express and Fuzzbomb Flash Band and guest musicians from around the UK. The event was launched in September 2009 by musicians Richard Phoenix (Constant Flux) and Tom Cook, to provide opportunities for musicians with learning disabilities to perform their music live in Brighton.[7] Since 2012, the Rock House has been co-produced by Carousel and Constant Flux. The Brighton event was so successful that it led to UK tours for some of the performers.

Richard Phoenix told the Guardian that the aim was enable learning disabled musicians 'to perform live to integrated audiences in environments that aren't necessarily so safe, where it's not just a learning disability event. We want musicians to be part of the wider community and part of the wider music scene.'[8]

In 2013, Zombie Crash, Carousel's learning disabled metal band, toured the UK, supporting the Finnish learning disabled punk band, Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät (PKN). The music video for their song Hardcore on Tour was later premiered on the Louder than War website. Guy Manchester of Louder than War described Zombie Crash as a 'British learning disabled metal band who’re attempting to reach out to a mainstream audience – and on the strength of the video...I’d say they totally deserve to achieve their goal.'.[9] The video also impressed Radio 6 Music DJ Marc Riley, who tweeted, 'These fellas are so cool....They've learning disabilities but are riding a Heavy Metal Beast! I salute em!'[10]

Zombie Crash's first London gig, in 2014, was sold out, with around 700 people attending. According to Richard Phoenix, 'A lot of audience members said they didn't know what to expect or how they were going to react to the musicians but in the end people were just into the music and forgot they were watching people with learning disabilities.'[8]

Daniel Wakeford is a singer-songwriter, known to a wider public through his appearances on Channel 4's BAFTA nominated show, The Undateables.[11] With Carousel, Wakeford has recorded three albums of his own 'nakedly emotional'[12] songs, and regularly performs live. His song 'The Black of Lonely' was the UK's entry to the 2014 European Song Festival, held in Sweden.

Creatures of the Revolution is a 2016 collaboration between the band Sabien Gator (Fraser Caygill, Stephen Barnett and Shaun Moor), performer Matthew Hellett (aka Mrs Sparkle) and digital artists Sarah Watson and Jason Eade, with Simon Wilkinson (Circa69). The band perform live against video projections and film, in a 'journey into a gothic fairy tale [which] blurs the lines between reality and imagination'.[13] The show, funded by Youth Music, was performed as part of London's South Bank Centre Unlimited Festival on 6 September 2016. The South Bank promo can be seen here on youtube.

The Blue Camel Club

The Blue Camel Club is a Brighton club night, held four times a year in Brighton's Corn Exchange. A typical line-up was described in 2015 in Disability Arts Online: 'Carousel’s Blue Camel Club is the big night out for hundreds of learning disabled music and dance fanatics in Brighton and beyond. This month’s line-up features London band The AutistiX, drum ensemble Unified Rhythm, the fabulous solo artist Catherine O’Rourke and the ever popular Carousel Singers. There are DJ’s, roaming radio reporters and films from the Oska Bright Film Festival. It’s the place to meet friends, hear great music and dance the night away, run and presented by a learning disabled team.'[14] Carousel has worked in partnership with West Sussex Arts Partnership to develop other Blue Camel styled clubs across West Sussex including the Blue Wave, Blue Oasis, Blue Starfish and Blue Bird clubs in Bognor Regis, Horsham, Worthing and Crawley.

Gold Run

For Carousel’s 30th birthday in 2012, the organisation collaborated with the music education department at Glyndebourne and artists from the Pallant House ‘Outside In’ project to create 'Goldrun'. This was a Cultural Olympiad show telling the story of the Special Olympics through song, film, music and visual arts. 'Goldrun' featured Carousel's new choir of 25 learning disabled people aged 16–35. They were helped by Glyndebourne to write a musical score, using their own words to tell the story.[15] The show was performed at Glyndebourne, the Brighton Corn Exchange and Chichester Festival Theatre.

Creative Minds

Creative Minds, launched by Carousel in 2013, is a national conversation about learning disability art, and where it sits in the wider arts world. It encourages debate and discussion amongst those who set artistic agendas – from artists to venues, arts organisations to critics. Gus Garside, co-ordinator of Creative Minds, said, 'We know that work created by learning disabled artists and performers is not significantly represented in venues and galleries. It’s only by candidly discussing the barriers that we can begin to remove them.'[16]

In March 2014, Creative Minds organised a conference at Brighton Dome, bringing together arts organisations, venues, producers, critics and learning disabled artists and performers. Arts critic Bella Todd discussed the issues raised: 'It’s a bold question to pose, especially at a time when funding cuts conspire to put all creative organisations on the defensive: how do we perceive, discuss and measure quality in work by artists with learning disabilities?....It was the kind of conference, inevitably, where every answer seeds two more questions, complicated by the fact we’re lumping together artists with diverse disabilities, working in different art forms, with varying levels of professional engagement. And that’s before you get started on the subject of how we decide any art is ‘good’ in the first place. But I came away feeling how vital it is that we do have this conversation.'[17]

Since the first conference there have been four more, in Bristol (2014), Ipswich (2015), Manchester (2017) and Birmingham (2017) [18]

Curing Perfect

In 2015, Carousel launched 'Curing Perfect', an interactive online graphic novel, available as an iphone app. It was created by a team of learning disabled artists, collaborating with the digital artists Alex Peckham (Blast Theory), Simon Wilkinson (Circa69) and Drs June Jones and Geoffrey Brown of The University of Birmingham. 'Curing Perfect' uses digital media to engage the public in the difficult issues of ‘curing’ disability and creating the perfect person. According to Becky Bruzas, Curing Perfect speaker and presenter, 'A year ago I read an article that claimed Downs Syndrome could be cured. It made me think about my condition, which is incurable, and about the future and what could happen.'[19]

Curing Perfect's storyline has three chapters, allowing the player to move through various locations in an imagined city, represented on a map. As they explore the city, players are challenged to create the perfect person and interact with what they find. The imagined world has been illustrated by William Hanekom, with a story-line by Jason Eade, who are both learning disabled. The game is voiced by actress Sarah Gordy (Call the Midwife) and other learning disabled artists.

Training

Carousel runs a broad range of training activities and workshops. Each year, around 12 learning disabled artists are supported to achieve Arts Awards certificates. The charity also trains learning disabled artists to become Arts Award assessors. The Volunteers Training Course is a series of practical sessions linked to different areas of Carousel’s work. Each year 10 people train alongside the artform teams, gaining the necessary skills to support learning disabled artists. Workshops for schools and organisations, and training for venue staff also form part of the company’s core activity.

In 2016, Carousel produced 'Nothing About Me Without Me', a disability equality teaching and learning resource for PSHE education, for Brighton and Hove City Council.[20] The title is a slogan 'adopted by the Disability Movement in the 1990s to communicate the idea that no policy should be decided by any representative without the full and direct participation of members of the group(s) affected by that policy.'[21]

References
  1. 'What we do', Mission statement on Carousel's website
  2. Annie Wells, 'High Spin Dance Theatre Company', Critical Dance Forum, 24 July 2004
  3. Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie, Anarchic Dance, Routledge, 2006, p.51
  4. M Clements, 'Carousel and Virginia Farman ICA', Time Out 6–13 December 1989, p.72
  5. The Oska Bright On The Road blog on Disability Arts Online
  6. Colin Hambrook, 'Oska Bright Film Festival 2015', Disability Arts Online, 10 November 2015
  7. The Rock House website
  8. Patrick Strudwick, 'On stage talent counts, not disability', The Guardian, 1 April 2015
  9. Guy Manchester, 'Watch This! Zombie Crash -The Learning Disabled Metal Band- Release New Video In Which They Make Mincemeat Of A Boyband', Louder than War, 30 April 2015
  10. Marc Riley on Twitter, 5 May 2015
  11. India Sturgis, 'I started a dating agency so my son could find love', The Telegraph, 30 January 2016
  12. Robin Murray, 'Daniel Wakeford Announces New Album', Clash Music website, 7 June 2016
  13. 'Unlimited: Creatures of the Revolution: music/film/sound/wonder', Disability Arts Online
  14. 'Blue Camel Club Night, Corn Exchange, Brighton' Disability Arts Online Events, 30 March 2015
  15. Liz Porter, 'Gold Run', Disability Arts Online, 11 April 2012
  16. quoted in Carousel's Annual Report 2014-15
  17. Bella Todd, 'Creative Minds South East one-day conference' Disability Arts Online, 12 March 2014
  18. http://www.creativemindsproject.org.uk/events/
  19. Becky Bruzas, quoted on the Arts Council website
  20. http://www.carousel.org.uk/nothing-about-me-without-me/
  21. Introduction to the 'Nothing About Me Without Me' pdf
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