'Voice and Choice' - Enabling people with disabilities to become arts leaders

At Epic Arts we spend most of our time enabling and empowering people with and without disabilities to have a voice and make their own choices in a variety of contexts. This is our day to day work that 'just happens', its a reflection of our collective inclusive attitude and belief that every person is a creative genius and that every person counts! After attending the 'Living Arts in Post-Conflict Forum' in Phnom Penh last week, I was reminded about the power of enabling people who have been oppressed to become leaders and that it makes a huge impact on the development of both individuals and society as a whole and I felt inspired to record, in someway, how we do this!

Over the last three years I have developed methods of providing voice and choice to artist, leaders, managers and students in Cambodia with disabilities and those without, with the simple attitude that there is always a way and with a little time, space and adaptability those who previously have been told or made to feel like they 'can't' or 'won't' by society, the community, their family and their government, can in fact be enabled to discover for themselves that they 'can' and 'will'.

Over the next few months I am going to try and document the methods used to develop the leadership skills of one of our performers, Savy,  as he embarks on training to become a leader of the Epic Encounters performance team in Cambodia. Savy is deaf and does not read or write, he communicates in sign, (although Cambodian Sign has limited vocabulary), pictures and videos. At the moment he is a whizz at using a smart phone but has no computer based skills. He has been a performer for the past 5 years and recently he expressed a desire to learn about the administration of the performance team; learning our bookings, monitoring and touring systems to enable him to take on new roles in the future.

Savy

So we listened and responded.... With the help of Sokun (another performer in the team) who has strong admin and language skills, we will work together with Savy to explore how we can develop his skills, communicate with him effectively and enable him to have a voice and make his own choices whilst also acting as the voice for the other dancers in the company. 

Sokun

In the context of Cambodia this will have its additional challenges that I think will become clear throughout the process. But I hope that by in some way documenting this process others will be able to see how it is possible to give a voice and provide choice to a person to enable them to grow into an effective arts leader and prove to those who say 'You can't' and 'You won't' that they are very, very wrong!

The video below documents our first discussion with Savy about how he thinks we can begin to approach this development with him. I worked with Savy, Sokun and a sign translator and we used paper, sticky notes, drawings, English and Khmer (and a little bit of miming) to workout the best ways we can communicate, pass information, make a plan for learning and development, discover skills that need to be developed and use the skills of others to help us in this process;

Here are the final 'notes' from our conversation;