These are remarks made by Professor Stephen J. Toope at the launch of The Unruly Salon Series at the University of British Columbia Green College

Toope, Stephen J.

English

ScholarSpace at University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Launch of The Unruly Salon Series at the University of British Columbia Green College  January 12, 2008 4:00 - 4:30 p.m.  Remarks by Professor Stephen J. Toope  President and Vice-Chancellor  The University of British Columbia   Members of the global society, the province, the nation, our University and local community, as we enter the traditional territories of the Musqueam people, we acknowledge all our relations.  I am truly pleased to be here today, to play a small role in witnessing the profound growth of the global disability arts, culture, and scholarship movement.  Today, we are here celebrating the launch of The Unruly Salon, and what is, as disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson would say, something that is truly “extraordinary” – extraordinary work from the global disability arts, culture, and scholarship movement. The Unruly Salon Series is unprecedented at UBC in its unique combination of internationally renowned disability scholars and artists, in its attempt to challenge our social imaginations and expand our concept of what counts as education, culture, social justice and humans ‘being’. This series is the result of an outstanding collaborative effort, sprung from experiences of people with disabilities in our everyday workplaces, communities and among UBC’s faculty, staff, and students—and even some of our future students. Dr. Leslie Roman, creator of the Unruly Salon and a Board member of the Society for Disability Arts and Culture (or S4DAC), has worked closely with the Society’s Artistic Director, Geoff Mc Murchy, to create this wonderful series, and their combined efforts have attracted the stage presences of world-renowned artists and performers in disability arts and culture.  The Unruly Salon’s acronym, “US”, is an intentional reference to James Charlton’s book, Nothing About Us Without Us (Charleton, 2000), from which, I understand, ‘us’ has become a mantra in the disability culture movement, inspiring people to speak back, stare back and dispel old myths about people with disabilities. The Unruly Salon speaks with the disabilities community to “us” —in the double sense—as an address by people The Unruly Salon with disabilities in their own voices to the broader public —indeed, the question asked by The Unruly Salon is: “Are we listening?”  Yet, the Series also invites a “we” into the project, by inviting all of us to challenge the systemic oppression of people with disabilities for the removal of barriers— be they physical, social, economic, political or cultural.  The removal of these barriers is a priority at UBC, and I am truly pleased to mention that the Unruly Salon’s “invitation” is reflected in UBC’s Trek 2010 Mission Statement. In that statement, we clearly address our concern for people with disabilities who are members of the University community. The Mission Statement reads that UBC will:  “… [P]rovide its students, faculty, and staff with the best possible resources and conditions for learning and research, and create a working environment dedicated to excellence, equity, and mutual respect… As responsible members of The Unruly Salon Launch society, the graduates of UBC will value diversity, work with and for their communities, and be agents for positive change. They will acknowledge their obligations as global citizens, and strive to secure a sustainable and equitable future for all” (Trek 2010).  I am here today as the President and Vice-Chancellor of UBC, but also as one who greatly appreciates the arts. In fact I am pleased to say that my entire family does, and that some are artists and performers themselves. We truly understand the power of the arts to effect positive change and make an integral contribution to the construction of a truly civil society, and we all applaud you!  Today’s launch of The Unruly Salon is presented by Green College and would not have been possible without numerous sponsors and contributors— notably, the Faculty of Education, and the widespread support of many UBC Faculties. I thank all of you for your amazing efforts towards this landmark series!  It has been my honour and privilege to join in the launch of the Unruly Salon series. Here is no doubt that it (or “US”) will have a positive impact, having now thrown an added spotlight on disability arts and culture, as well as the significant contribution of Canadians with disabilities.  Thank you for inviting me to share in this wonderful launch. Now, let all of us join the Unruly Salon in common scholarly and artful purpose. As one of my favourite artists, Leonard Cohen, writes in “Anthem”:  “Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets In.”    Unleashed and Unruly:  Staking Our Claim to Place, Space and Culture Keynote Delivered Via Conference Remarks by Catherine Frazee, D.Litt. Professor of Distinction, School of Disability Studies Co-Director, Ryerson RBC Institute for Disability Studies   Let me begin by adding my words of appreciation and congratulation to all who have contributed their ideas, creativity and labours to the Unruly Salon -- to Leslie Roman and Geoff Mc Murchy and all of their team -- the excitement of this inaugural moment is palpable, even from a distance of 4500 km. east!  Congratulations as well to UBC's President Toope and to Professor and Head, Tara Fenwick and her colleagues in the Department of Educational Studies, as well as to Principal Taubeneck and the faculty of Green College for their obvious support of this initiative and for the leap of faith that it represents.  Green College, as I understand from its website, is a community of scholars committed to expanding their understanding of the world, whose intellectual pursuits reach across academic boundaries and into the larger, global community.  This event, then, the Unruly Salon at Green College represents the making of a perfect storm – a convergence of forces generating effects of untold intensity.  For when a thoughtful and engaged audience, a roll-up-your sleeves kind of audience, a discerning, working audience, meets with artists who are uncorked and unruly, artists who make no apologies and who take no prisoners, artists who have something utterly new yet profoundly timeless to say, the encounter will spiral outward in great waves of paradigm-shifting consequence.  What I'm describing here is not something that happens on stage.  It's something that happens in the spaces all around the stage, in the blurring of lines between performer and audience, in the chemistry of curatorial and critical attention, in what each of us will say and do at intermission, over a drink tonight, at the breakfast table tomorrow, at the office on Monday morning. It's all about what we say in our blogs and at our bridge clubs.  The cyclone of disability arts is generated by buzz.  In the words of Virginia Woolf, great “masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice”1.  This Unruly Salon both celebrates and generates the confident claiming of place, space and culture by a people who will no longer be colonized, sidelined or silenced.  At the same time, this Unruly Salon ordains and inducts each of us to pay attention, to make connections, to respond -- in short to contribute to the opening and unfolding of this cultural space.  In short, Salon audience, please unfasten your seatbelts.  You – we – are about to create a masterpiece. There will be turbulence and majesty, encounters with the profane and the divine, illuminations that both affirm and unsettle. There will be nervous laughter, gut wrenching howls, pin-drop silence and riotous enthusiasm.  There will be bafflement, resonance and revelation.  And you will be changed.  For disabled artists are not simply participating in the Canadian cultural domain – they are creating it, shaping it, stretching it beyond its tidy established edges.  The artists in this Salon, in a certain sense, have done their piece.  Bonnie has directed her film.  Geoff has choreographed his dance.  I have written my text.  Likewise, for the next six Salons. The work has been crafted and rehearsed.  So what remains? What exactly is this larger task, the work of creating this new masterpiece?  I shall offer three suggestions.  The work of excavation.  The work of weaving.  And the work of coming to pride.  Briefly, I offer a few reflections about each.  Excavation  Not all of Disability Art is explicitly about the disability experience.  But all of it, I would suggest, springs from disability experience, and to be fully appreciated, must be seen and heard with all of its historic and biographical resonances.  This is what I mean by the work of excavation.  Allow me to explain by drawing from examples in the larger cultural domain.  On December 23rd of last year, our nation stopped in the tracks of its seasonal excesses, and paused to contemplate a great cultural figure.  We had lost Oscar Peterson. We stopped to honour the man and the legacy, remembering not only his prodigious musical powers, but equally the deep cultural history invoked by his name – the aspirations of immigration, the invisible lives of train porters, the racist policies of hotels and nightclubs.2  So, similarly, we said farewell last year to Norval Morrisseau, Eastern Woodlands Ojibway artist, remembering not only his powerful expressive canvases, but also the rising up of Aboriginal consciousness in Canada, pushing back against an era of horrific cultural annihilation, of residential schools and the suppression of languages and ritual practices that so deeply damaged First Nations culture.3  And likewise the final respects we paid this year to the memory of Doris Anderson were infused with respect and affinity for brazen women who led the great second wave of feminism in Canada, standing up to patriarchy, to post-war domestication of women, to unequal pay, harassment and discrimination.4  Art is far more than a way of decorating our world; it is a way of knowing it.  As Margaret Atwood has written, “The arts... are not a frill. They are the heart of the matter, because they are about our hearts, and our [progress in the material world] is generated by our emotions, not by our minds. A society without the arts would have broken its mirror and cut out its heart”5  And so, in our encounters with the Art of Disability, we are called upon to know the heart of the matter, to hold up the mirror, hear the overtones.  What social histories are embedded in the installations of Persimmon Blackbridge?  What struggles and exclusions backstage the croonings of Joe Coughlin?  What are the defining contours of the universe that Ryan Knighton narrates?  Where have our artists come from?  What have they endured?  What have they survived?  These histories, once excavated, enrich every experience of disability art.  Weaving  Our second task, as a working and engaged Disability Arts audience, involves weaving together the threads that may make more apparent, the emergence of what some have called a Disability Aesthetic.  I cannot spell out for you – at least not yet – what I mean when I invoke the notion of a Disability Aesthetic, but let's be having that conversation.  A Canadian Disability Arts canon has emerged in recent years and I believe it is incumbent upon us to begin the task of describing its principal features.  What are the artistic and aesthetic dialogues, the points of contact between Tania Willard's prints and Bonnie Sherr-Klein's documentary films?  In what way does Geoff Mc Murchy's choreography connect with David Roche's storytelling, or Victoria Maxwell's dramaturgy?  Is there some shared idiom or logic?  I have only the most preliminary of thoughts here, but in the spirit of creative collaboration, let me suggest that the canon is expressed at least in part by the authenticity and intentionality of voices connected to experience – unsentimental, uncompromising and unflinching voices of artists who work with and not in spite of disability.  To this I would add the markers of fullness and amplitude, characteristics of work produced by artists who assemble a wholeness of self and context, who embody disability and embrace its ways and means.  Thirdly, I would feature the transformative capacity of Disability Art -- work that invariably moves outward from the particularity of disability experience toward that which is universally human.  What is most distinct and important here, I would suggest, is that this transformative work does not claim, sweetly and imploringly, that we are just like you, but rather is work that knows, in some deep and sustaining way, that you are just like us.6  As well, I would recognize the spirit of this work’s own audacity, its swaggering savvy, its determination to speak back to power, to disrupt comfortable narratives, to confront and reshape conventional accounts of grace, beauty, lyricism, strength, rhythm and form.  It's just a mere stub of a list, and for present purposes it ends here.  But it is a work in progress, and I welcome and eagerly await the contributions of Salon weavers in the weeks ahead.  Coming to Pride  Finally, the shared project and the great payback of this masterpiece – coming to pride.  We don't get anywhere without pride.  We don't get past the averted stares, the whispered judgments, the shabby offerings, the sorry excuses – without pride.  Before we can begin to push back against injustice and indignity, before we can rise up from the swirl of rage and despair, before we can speak back to a script that casts us as tragic victims and bitter villains, we must have pride.  Pride is where the journey of emancipation begins.  Pride for who we are.  It is a deeply personal experience, this casting off of shroud and echo.  Yet coming to pride is a delicate alchemy that can only take root in the fertile ground of community.  It is our connection to each other that transforms stigma to grace, personal burden to collective struggle, shame to honour.  We know that art has both intrinsic and instrumental worth, that it has value both in and of itself and also as a means to interpret, to understand, to share, to repair.  Art brings us together.  Good art is both the product and the sustenance of human imagination. And so Art brings us together in ways that invoke moral imagination, summoning us to justice, dignity and all of the great quests of human progress.  It is perhaps only through art and its activation of imagination that we can both conceive of, and be moved resolutely toward visions of equality and justice.  That is how we come to pride, together.  And so, with pride, I offer a toast to the Unruly Salon and its unruly actors and protagonists; to our history and resistance; to our creativity and choices; to our place, space and culture.  Endnote  1 Woolf, V. (1989) ArRoom of one's own. Fort Washington, PA: Harvest Books. 2 For a compelling reflection upon Peterson's life in its historical and ethnoracial context, see remarks by Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, on the occasion of the Oscar Peterson Memorial Concert (12, January 2008, Toronto).  Available: http://www.gg.ca/media/doc.asp?lang=e&DocID=5259 3 For a tribute to Morrisseau's place in Aboriginal Canadian history and culture, see statement by Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine (4, December 2007, Ottawa).  Available: http://www.afn.ca/article.asp?id=3977 4 E.g., Michelle Landsberg's description of Anderson as “one of the key figures in Canada's feminist history”, in Doris Anderson, The Mother of Us All.  Landsberg, M. Chatelaine. Toronto: May 2007. Vol. 80, Iss. 5; p.17. 5 Atwood, Margaret.  "The Art of the Matter”, excerpted from the 2004 Kesterton Lecture.  Globe and Mail, 24 January 2004. A19. 6 The author is grateful for this insight to moral philosopher Eva Feder Kittay, for her reflections about her daughter Sesha's place in the universe.  Feder K. E., & Kittay, L. (2000). On the expressivity and ethics of selective abortion for disability: Conversations with my son. In Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights. E. Parens and A. Asch (Eds.), (pp. 165-195). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.     

Launch of The Unruly Salon Series at the University of British Columbia Green College

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Launch of The Unruly Salon Series at the University of British Columbia Green College

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