[ Silence ] 

[ Music ] 

>>[background noise] There are a number of things that the city of Austin does for the community of people with disabilities. Amongst them we have our cultural funding program that we utilize the hotel occupancy tax to contract for services with our nonprofit arts organizations. Some of these organizations are VSA Arts of Texas and Imagine Art. We also support projects like 

>>Forklift Danceworks has been making work with people with disabilities since 2003. We've been leading annual workshops for people with and without disabilities to come together and dance together and partnership with VSA Texas. We recently launched an entire weekend workshop called Body Shift. And this included six local teachers teaching various classes in contemporary dance, accessible to people with and without disabilities. Body Shift was really born out of a desire that I had to see the mixed ability work really grow in Austin. On the west coast of the United States and in Europe there's a number of companies who do mixed ability work but not in Texas. And so I gathered a number of teachers in town, all who work in mixed ability settings, and asked them what classes would they really love to teach and that's how we came up with the curriculum for Body Shift. And we had about half people with disabilities, about half people who don't identify as having a disability and it was a huge success. I choreographed Sextet, a dance for two men who were visually impaired, their guide dogs and two trained dancers. And with that piece we traveled to the Kennedy Center and to VSA, the VSA International Festival for Artists with Disabilities. I've also served as choreographer for the local Austin Performing group 

>>Actual Lives Austin, we are all focused on encouraging people with disabilities to engage in the arts, specifically in theatre and writing. And it started out as a one week project in 2000 and it's a collaboration between Celia Hughes, who's the Executive Director of VSA, Terry Galloway who's a deaf performance artist and writer and myself. And we really thought it was gonna be a week long and we're in our 11th year and so that is a testament to how much people wanted to continue to do this work. What we do is we write from memory and compulsion and irritation and politics and religion and sex and everything else, from the viewpoint of people with disabilities and then we put those writings onto the stage. The whole point of trying to get this group together and be in the community is so that they can be part of an ongoing cultural dialogue about disability. And we want to be the voice that's a little bit snarky and a little bit irreverent but also poignant and thoughtful and as many different things as we can get in. And one of our trademarks is humor, which both of these guys could tell you about quite a bit in their work in Actual Lives. Without the humor it can get really relentless and difficult to deal with all the other issues. So we infuse everything with humor in the last year so we've been infusing things with, our shows with movement and dance and all original material. It's been quite a ride. All of our performances are audio described for people who can't see the program. We have closed captioning CART which is live captioning and we have interpreters for the deaf. And we only perform in accessible venues that are on bus lines because we're trying to model what accessibility really means and that means that you have to have, if I bring my troop into a theatre company, we have to have accessible bathrooms, we have to have accessible light booths, we have to have accessible entrances, front and back stage. We have to have accessible dressing rooms. It goes on and on. We are pushing that agenda and some years ago we won the Austin Chronicles best theatrical activism award for that kind of sort of saucy insistence that things should be accessible because 20 years after the ADA, things should be accessible. 

>>The Gene and Dave Show, wow, Gene, it's fantastic to be back here at channel Austin again. You know some things just come full circle. I started with Actual Lives and then we started turning it into video, right here in this studio. 

>>Yeah, this is great. We're actually broadcast in Central Texas. Who would have thought a couple of folks with disabilities would come so far in performance arts? 

>>And then we took the camera and got out and about and went to different places in Austin to talk to all kinds of different people and who would have known our show could make it two years? 

>>Yeah, we've interviewed folks all over Austin and we've learned a lot in performance arts. We've grown as actors, screen talent, writers, directors. It just shows that Austin is really a great place for people with disabilities to get involved in performance arts. 

>>VSA Texas, the state organization on Arts and Disability. We're located in Austin and we do a lot of programming in Austin but we are a statewide organization. What we do with, at VSA Texas is we work in the arts, all of the arts, music, theatre, writing, visual arts, anyone, any age, with any kind of a disability who wants to work in the arts, have fun in the arts and learn in the arts. Everywhere you go, anywhere you go you'll find VSA Texas there trying to make a difference in the arts for people with disabilities. 

>>Channel Austin is a remarkable space here in east Austin. We are the community media center, also considered digital media center, for everyone in our community to come and make television or create films of anything they wish. We are very proud that people with disabilities has found this space and come and produce remarkable content. One of the examples is the Gene and David show, yep, and they come, they produce their own show. They get it on the air. It's closed captioned for those who are deaf. And as far as we know it's the only show in the state of Texas that is on the air that is produced and starred in by people with disabilities. We also work with VSA Arts of Texas who brought their summer camp here this past summer, 2010, as well as a few years back and we worked with the Actual Lives program, which is remarkable for people with disabilities, journal writing, taking it all the way to performance art, an amazing, amazing thing that happens here in this main studio at channel Austin. We're very proud to be accessible to people with disabilities, not only in the studio space in the resources that we have available but also we have training classes. So any reasonable accommodation that should be made is made by channel Austin. We're very proud to be a part of the performing arts. We also work with 

>>[background music] My name is Tonya Winters and tonight is my dance performance. I chose dance as a form of empowerment really because it's just been my dream since I was a little girl. I've always loved being on the floor. I've always loved you know being able to move around the floor and I mean it's just always been something that I've loved to do. For me to do this dance tonight, it's huge. I have realized so much being in this dance class and you know getting ready for this performance and I actually realized a lot more about myself. What I found was, is many of the other dancers who don't have disabilities were teaching me more about myself and about how I looked at my body and how they showed me that my body can move in ways that I didn't even understand or know about. I don't feel like I have a disability when I dance. And Ceniza has shown me even more that I have that ability, that I can be a dancer, despite my crutches, despite my muscle tone, despite my fears, despite my nervousness, I can be a dancer. [music]