Disability in the arts

Naming oneself part of a larger group, a social movement or a subject position in modernity can help to focus energy, and to understand that solidarity can be found – precariously, in improvisation, always on the verge of collapse.

[8] While in hospital, her therapy required her to relearn the process of completing simple tasks, such as remembering to shut off a water tap after brushing her teeth.

[11] In the UK the One Handed Musical Instrument Trust has the objective of removing the barriers to music-making faced by physically disabled people.

It comments: "There is currently no orchestral instrument that can be played without two fully functioning hands and arms, denying unlimited participation in musical life to those with congenital disabilities and amputees, as well as the millions who may have been injured, had a stroke or developed arthritis.

American playwright Tennessee Williams wrote many plays with female leads who were at least in part inspired by his sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and then left severely disabled by a lobotomy as a young woman.

Characters who reflect Rose's struggle with mental illness include Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Catherine in the screenplay Williams wrote for the 1959 film Suddenly, Last Summer.

[18][19] Leonard Gershe's Butterflies Are Free, about a young blind man who wins his independence from an overprotective mother, debuted on Broadway in 1969, was made into a film in 1972.

[20] In 2019, Ali Stroker became the first wheelchair-using actor to win the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance of Ado Annie in the revival of Oklahoma!.

"[22] Freeman was born with cerebral palsy, and by the age of seventeen, he found himself sanding blocks in Toronto's Adult Interfraternity Workshop for a meagre seventy-five cents every two weeks;[23] a deadening experience he wrote about for Maclean’s Magazine in 1964.

But the real thematic focus [...] is the self-imprisonment, the self-condemnation and self-destruction of those who internalize the system's view of them and thus become incapable of freeing themselves from it.”[27] As Freeman himself stated, “The play was about freedom and having the guts to reach for it.”[28] While the play has many flaws, it is praised for its visceral (“like a punch in the mouth,” Douglas Watt wrote in the Daily News), gut-wrenching characterizations, and it is precisely this “power of three-dimensional humanity that made Creeps such a major dramatic achievement.”[29] Fifty years later, as part of Stage Left's Step Right Up!

Symposium, held online and in Victoria, BC in December 2023, Creeps was positioned as an important theatrical first and is understood as a harbinger of the disability arts movement in Canada.

[30] During the last half century, a number of playwrights have created various kinds of works related to disability, ranging from teens dealing with mental illness, as with as Eufemia Fantetti's The Last Moon (1988),[31] and Joan MacLeod's Toronto, Mississippi (Talonbooks, 1989), to children with physical ailments, as with Lina Chartrand's La P'tite Miss Easter Seals (premiered by Theatre Francais in 1988) and Shirley Barrie's TYA play, What If?

Examples in this vein include Emil Sher's Mourning Dove, about cerebral palsy and featuring a character with Down's Syndrome (first produced by CBC Radio in 1996), and his adaptation of The Boy in the Moon, a true story about parenting a child with a rare genetic disorder (premiered by the Great Canadian Theatre Company in September 2014 and chosen as the closing show for Crow's Theatre premiere season in May 2017.).

[33] Oftentimes, these plays are autobiographical, and there is a growing body of work about parenting children with disabilities such as autism, as with Saskatchewan playwright Kelley Jo Burke's Ducks on the Moon (Radiant Press, 2010), and its follow-up companion piece, Why Ducks, Anyway?, anthologized in 2016 by the League of Canadian Poets,[34] or God’s Middle Name (Scirocco Drama, 2010) and Spelling 2-5-5 (premiered by Carousel Players in 2012) by Nova Scotian playwright Jennifer Overton.

Some notable creators include Lyle Victor Albert, who has cerebral palsy (Scraping the Surface [1995], Objects in the Mirror [1997], Jumpin' Jack [2002]);[39] blind playwright Alex Bulmer (Smudge [2000], May I Take Your Arm?

[2018], Perpetual Archeology [2023]); Deaf playwrights Adam Pottle (Ultrasound) and Chris Dodd (Deafy), and award-winning black, disabled, trans, activist performer Syrus Marcus Ware (Antarctica).

Stage Left Productions in Alberta is one of Canada's longest running disability theatres, and it has produced a number of notable plays, including Alain Shain's solo shows, Still Waiting for that Special Bus (1999),[40] and Time to Put My Socks On (2008).

[45] There are many other shows to the company’s credit, but scholars have deemed Michele Decottignies’ collectively-created Mercy Killing or Murder: The Tracy Latimer Story, winner of the 2006 Moondance Columbine Playwriting Award,[46] to be a “critically important” work.

[54] The name of the theater company comes from the play The Rules of Charity, where John Belluso referenced the apothetae, a chasm in Ancient Greece where infants, who were found by elders to be too small or disabled, were left to die from exposure.

Disability in film has been a relatively recent phenomenon; as Hollywood has "kept its distance, favouring conditions such as blindness, deafness and discreet mental illnesses which exhibit no outward sign of deformity, though good-looking wheelchair users have proved acceptable.

Some members of the film industry opposed the decision to cast Harold Russell, a real-life veteran who lost both hands in a training accident, stating that it was in "poor taste".

The melodrama Johnny Belinda (1948), which depicts an innocent young deaf woman raped and then defending herself from an attempted murder, does little to give the lead character any depth beyond being a typical "plucky" and brave hero.

Marlee Matlin won the Academy Award for Best Actress,[72] and was an exception to the general rule that only non-disabled actors would appear in high-profile film roles depicting someone with a disability.

[83] Post-traumatic stress is a reoccurring theme in the 1970s, as action films that previously upheld American culture and values, no longer did as a result of the Vietnam War.

[95] The tradition of oral storytelling, and the greater ease with which verse stories are memorized and retold, helped John Milton compose the 17th-century epic English poem Paradise Lost.

Assistive technology is also available to help users with a learning disability, such as dyslexia, that impairs literacy, to read and write more easily using computers.

American writer Jim Knipfel took a humorous, irreverent approach with Slackjaw (1999), a memoir in which he details his struggles in accepting the loss of his eyesight to retinitis pigmentosa.

In a far future, young children with severe physical handicaps can be placed in a life-support shell and specially trained for tasks that a "normal" human would be unable to undertake.

McCaffrey, who has described The Ship Who Sang, an early work, as the best story she ever wrote, asked herself one day: "what if severely disabled people were given a chance to become starships?

Subtitling, audio description for broadcast programs, DVD and other home entertainment, and Internet projects, are some of the ways arts venues and groups can remove barriers faced by people with disabilities.