6 February 2015
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Our triple-bill showcased extracts from Liz Porter and Penny Pepper’s one woman shows, with a shorter piece by LUA’s Lead Artist, Gini.
Learning to See – Liz Porter
Liz Porter is a Performance Storyteller, Producer and Disability Adviser, based in Brighton. Her one-woman show ‘Learning to See’ directed by Mark C. Hewitt with animated video sequences by Abbie Norris and Rachel Gadsden, explores her journey living with visual impairment.
Liz has recorded short films with her life story at the heart. Themes include: identity and acceptance/non-acceptance, peer pressure, equality, miscommunication and perceptions of disabled people and the whole idea of ‘learning to see’. She plays with metaphors surrounding these themes.
Liz says “This piece of work is not just about metaphor but also about how you ‘tell’ the story.” She hopes that people will be able to watch her story, then, through workshops tell their own.
Lost in Spaces – Penny Pepper
Penny Pepper has been a writer and activist within the disability arts movement for 20 years. She has written articles for DAO, Arts Disability Culture Magazine, Disability Now and Ouch! She is also the author of Desires (2003), a controversially unique collection of explicit fiction focusing on disabled people, relationships and sex.
Her one-woman show, ‘Lost in Spaces’ is part memoir and an exploration of identity and difference, Penny utilizes her long-kept journals, which date back to 1979.
Through memories and personal concerns, the piece links to the universal – from fighting Maggie Thatcher in the 80s and corresponding with Morrissey, to current battles with the government’s harsh austerity measures – pushing her into an examination of the human condition at a time of considerable personal and public turmoil.
To read more about Penny, visit her:
Website: www.pennypepper.co.uk
Guardian Column: www.theguardian.com/profile/penny-pepper
Twitter: @penpep
Vinterblik – Gini
‘Vinterblik’ is a spoken word piece. It is about dying, about the last story, the one you don’t actually get to tell for yourself; the one that continues to exist as part of someone else’s story.
It’s about that thing that will happen to us all; the unspoken, perhaps unacknowledged, fact that each one of us will confront in our own uniquely individual way.
It is a quiet look at the process of dying, written in a time when our society is obsessed with legislation; with corralling everything about life and death into the neat and orderly confines of the law.
Gini says “I call myself a visual artist and wordsmith. I trained as a printmaker, specialising in etching and stone lithography, but migrated from two dimensional expression via life-size soft sculpture figures, to a preoccupation with capturing and performing words – words which I seek to interpret in drawings and three dimensional forms – words which also find expression blogged on Dao.
LinkUpArts has been an important part of my life since its beginning. It is through the process of evolving the organisation that I am learning to trust my disabled gaze and work with the more personal issues that are most relevant to me as a wheelborne artist.”
Banner of Logos (From left to right) LinkUpArts, Salisbury Arts Centre, Disability Arts Online, Big Lottery, Arts Council England
