kickstART! Celebration Highlights

KickstART! 2001 was the first international festival of disability arts and culture in Canada and was a huge success. The festival gave us a chance to present work by artists with disabilities who work in the performing or visual arts. The next festival will be held in 2004 in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

The Opening Ceremonies on August 16th, 2001 featured a song cycle created especially for us by Pat Rix, Australian composer extraordinaire, who brought 21 members of the Holdfast Community Choir all the way from Adelaide. Together with our local Swamp Angels Choir and other guests, they also sang the kickstART! theme song, Anything is Possible, composed by Canadian singer/ songwriter David Sereda, who joined the choir for the evening. Sal Ferreras, well-known local percussionist, put together the “kickstART! House Band” for the occasion, and we were honoured to have Her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, Governor General of Canada in attendance to officially welcome all participants.

Along with His Excellency, John Ralston Saul, the Governor General toured our art exhibit and enjoyed the Opening Ceremonies along with a standing room only crowd in the Roundhouse Community Centre performance space.

Madame Josette’s Nothing Sacred Cabaret

Madame Josette’s Nothing Sacred Cabaret brought down the house at the end of the Opening Ceremonies. In this fin-de-siecle cabaret – Madame Josette’s Nothing Sacred Cabaret – a band of misfits offered songs of loss, love, disability and dreams. Featured were such hit singles as Too Many Chromosomes to Drive a Car, by the Down Beats.

During the following three days, David Roche, American storyteller and humourist, brought back The Church of 80% Sincerity, an hilarious and ground-breaking piece of theatre based on Roche’s own life-experience as a person with a facial difference.

Comic performer Philip Patston self-proclaimed as New Zealand’s first and only gay, wheelchair-using, pierced, vegetarian comic shared his refreshing and side-splitting “fruity, tofu-laden spin on life.”

Edgy, art-driven and passionate, Dis This! from Toronto brought to the stage a unique blend of movement-vocabulary for real bodies, and text and image-based theatre. Their performance spoke boldly as both protest and as an expression of freedom.

Seattle-based dance duo Light Motion gave a memorable performance, challenging stereotypes with innovative expressions of graceful movement.

Joe Coughlin

Local disability activist and award-winning jazz singer Joe Coughlin gave a highly entertaining and soulful performance.

The Society of Disability Arts and Culture’s own S4Dance brought to the stage an innovative and inspiring exploration of the possibilities of mixed abilities dance.

Visual art displays included evocative and informative installations: Outside the Lines: Self-Portraits of Artists with Disabilities, Artitudes, and Hands On, a Tactile Colour Exhibit. The Open Wall also offered a wide sampling of work by other artists with disabilities.

The kickstART! Symposium offered “Survival Kits” for both performing and visual artists, workshops on the global disability culture network, funding and artistic excellence, as well as skills development in story-telling, singing, theatre and movement.

Many thanks to the Canadian and international artists not mentioned above, who helped create what was described by English participant, Moya Harris, as “a brilliant four days.” See a complete list of presenters and performers. See a complete list of visual artists and their statements on the gallery pages.

Read comments from people who participated in kickstART!