After hearing Christine Sun Kim’s comments on borrowing the voice of an interpreter and, reflecting on Aaron Peake’s ideas about creating an expanded sensory encounter with an artwork, I found echoes of their views in the interview with Maria Oshodi, in Shades of Noir’s (SON) Disabled People: The Voice of Many (2020 p. 100). Oshodi is the CEO of Extant, a theatre company that supports and celebrates the work of artists with visual impairments. Their production Flight Paths, commissioned by The Space in 2020, was inspired by the Goze, traditional female Japanese travelling musicians, active during the Edo period (1600–1868). Members of the Goze organised themselves into associations and toured rural areas of Japan, contributing to the musical culture of the countryside. Reading the abstract for Gerald Groemar’s Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan, it seems the Goze were appreciated for their musicianship and, in Groemar’s words, would serve as important agents of rural cultural development.
Oshodi explains that those who aspired to be Goze would spend five years in training, working in pairs, and this was reflected in Flight Paths where two blind aerial performers tell their stories and describe their own experiences of being contemporary travelling artists with visual impairments. It was crucial that the performers’ voices were heard and so it was they who described their own movements and actions to the audience rather than a non-disabled person through audio description. Oshodi says: you can hear where the voices of the performers are coming from, where their actual bodies are in space. This put control squarely in the hands of the performer.
Christine Sun Kim believes that she can assert her voice and position in society by collaborating with others to interpret for her. She describes sound as a social currency and says that her interpreters’ voices hold value which she borrows like taking out a loan with a very high interest rate. But Oshodi observes that agency is removed from visually impaired performers when others describe and interpret for them. Her description of the broader power-dynamics in the arts, where people of colour and/or disabilities have to assert their roles and positions in the face of often ‘paternalistic’ or patronising treatment, is both depressing and unsurprising. I read something similar in Khairani Barokka’s Deaf-accessibility for spoonies (2017) where she says that she and her colleagues are often seen not as artists, scholars, nor even people capable of describing ourselves, but objects for charitable gifts.
But I was also struck by the idea that Extant are extending the form of performance in Flight Paths – through a conflation of movement, narrative and voice in space. Oshodi says that she urges the company to make everything they do relevant to them and to think outside the ‘dominant culture’, and this encourages innovation and original thinking. I can site Extant and the Goze in my teaching practice as examples of how empowered creatives/individuals perceive and experience the world from a broad range of original positions and that this should prompt us all to consistently look for innovative thought outside the established orthodoxies.