The Fair Ground Project has been a long time coming. The barriers for circus artists with disability to developing an on-going and sustainable professional practice have excluded these artists from gaining access to professional development opportunities and employment.
The Fair Ground project confronts this issue head-on by positioning circus artists with disability at the centre of the artistic process, starting with the launch of our inaugural creative development project in August 2016 and then continuing to move towards fully realized new circus performance works, over the next eighteen months. The Fair Ground Project is a long-term project.
The art form of circus is created with and by the body of the performer – it is in essence a physical and visceral artform therefore the circus artform inherently has the power to reposition the body, to redefine physical limitations and to celebrate diversity and difference but our current artistic structures and practice rarely achieves this potential. Now is the time for change because there is a real need for this work and the Fair Ground Project recognizes and understands this need.
The Fair Ground Project proudly champions, values ands supports the disability artist as an artist. ‘ My art isn’t disabled’ (Loki Rickus core company member of TFGP 2015).
Strategies:
- support and nurture disability artists who want a professional career
- create high caliber show outcomes
- support and facilitate Australian circus and physical theatre companies to create work with and for people with disability
- create awareness of access, inclusion and the need for professional training and skills development
- liaise with experienced circus artists to implement safe training practices and facilities for artist’s with disability
- support companies to create creative opportunities for artists with disability
- form national partnerships with training facilities, space providers, and equipment manufacturers to invent new apparatus
- change the public perception of what being disabled means
- push and challenge circus and physical theatre artform boundaries
- focus on what artists with disability can do, and not on what they can’t do
Core Company: Loki Rickus, Emma J Hawkins, Kim Kaos and Gail Kelly.