Actual Lives Performance Project
Conceived and co-directed by Terry Galloway
Produced and co-directed by Chris Strickling
A program of VSA arts of Texas,
Celia Hughes, Executive Director

Accredited by VSA arts,
an affiliate of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, this publication is made possible in part through funding provided by the central office of VSA arts, under an award from the U.S. Department of Education.

VSA arts of Texas would like to thank:
the Texas Commission on the Arts
Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Holly Bell and Matt Kaufmann
Southwestern Bell Foundation
VSA arts.

Photos throughout the publication by Bret Brookshire

VSA arts of Texas
Celia Hughes, Executive Director
3710 Cedar Street
Austin, Texas 78705
email: info@vsatx.org
phone: 512/454-9912
TTY: 512/454-6298
www.vsatx.org


What is Actual Lives?
Actual Lives is a community-based writing and performance workshop which establishes theatrical voice and presence for people with disability. We take the raw material of real life and turn it into live performance, focused on what it means to live with disability. Beginning with an essentially private workshop format, participants write from their experience and then translate those narratives into public performance. The autobiographical "I" performed on stage in its unique embodiment, talks back to social and medical practices that shape the lives of people with disability. Actual Lives contributes to this ongoing cultural dialogue about what disability means, privileging the voices and bodies of disabled performers.

Introduction
Actual Lives is designed to encourage a voice for people with disability by providing opportunities to create theatre from personal experience and to share it in a public forum. Actual Lives assists people with disability to access theatre arts as both participants and patrons and to develop theatre in forms that honor the voices of disabled people and plays with (and hopefully disrupts) old ideas about living with disability.

The Actual Lives workshop can create an identity-based writing and performance ensemble that produces material from shared experiences with disability, as well as from the participants' unique individualities. Everyone associated with this week-long process, including support staff and stage crew, is required to write from their own experience and share that writing. In this way, in addition to creating a performance ensemble, a new community is created within the group.

Actual Lives begins with autobiographical writing and ends with public performance. One of its goals is to give voice to a whole range of stories, memories, attitudes and experiences usually not shared with the general public. People with disability are generally excluded from performance opportunities because of the inaccessibility of performing venues. This can limit their potential for self-expression through the arts and also limits public understanding of the social and emotional impact of disability.

Actual Lives recognizes the value of these largely untold narratives. They can transform both audiences and performers by confronting issues of social isolation and desexualization, misrecognition by non-disabled peers, misrepresentation in popular culture and the negative effects of medical discourses that define disability as a personal tragedy. Performing from their own point of view reveals the unique voice of each performer, builds community among them, and allows audiences to experience disability from "the other side."

Actual Lives makes good use of spoken narrative, poetry, comic skits, song and dance, video, and almost any other performance mode. The use of humor and irony are encouraged as a way to take another look at what disability really means.

Motivations
One of the first goals in producing Actual Lives was to create an ensemble of disabled performers who could develop written material that reflects their everyday experiences and then conveys this experience to a broader public. We wanted two results; one for performers, one for audiences. The first priority was to create a sense of community from which to work. The second was to generate material that accurately represented individual lives, being careful to maintain a certain artistic distance and ironic edge. In the process, we hoped to build some practical theatre skills in the performers, related both to producing their own work and as patrons of other performance and theatre work. Last, Actual Lives puts live performance by people with disabilities into the arts venues of the community, creating an impact on the community's awareness of disability issues by building new audiences and broadening the exposure of existing audiences.

Sense of community: All participants acknowledge their sense of having a new community of friends and colleagues. This is especially significant due to the isolation that many of the participants face in their daily lives.

Autobiography as empowerment: All participants report positive experiences with writing from their personal experience and learning to translate that writing into performance. The simultaneous risk and excitement of disclosing your story, and putting your body behind your words on stage, is well worth the work. Participants also report that writing from memory, and disclosing those stories, is emotionally taxing at times, but useful.

Increased participation in cultural arts: Two members of Actual Lives are now pursuing other theatre-related goals, based on their successes in the project. Seven report increased interest in attending shows by other performance artists, both disabled and non-disabled, and all the participants have gained skills in voice support and projection, script editing and staging.

Power of performance: Audience responses have consistently been overwhelmingly positive, based on exit interviews and surveys. For many, Actual Lives is the first time they've seen a person with a disability on a stage. They come with expectations about it being "special theatre" and leave with a much broader, more complex idea of who people with disability really are. Videotaping the performances makes it possible to share this work with an even wider audience.

Workshop Short Term Goals
* Assemble a performance ensemble group that includes people with disability, take them through the Actual Lives Workshop process, in order to generate a culturally useful and compelling piece of theatre that does the work of disability awareness as a product, as well of offering an empowering creative outlet to participants.
* To awaken an interest in playwriting, acting and the general experience of participating in live theatre, and assist people to develop the skills necessary to make effective theatre.
* To awaken people with disabilities to the power of their own experience, the potential inherent in the performance of it and the pleasure in the act of creation and the act of witnessing this creation.
* Linking disabled writers and performers together into a group that has potential to move forward into other creative outlets (including a social group that's fun).

Workshop Long Term Goals
* Creating community among the participants, including members of the local theatre community.
* Creating relationships that otherwise would not have existed.
* Create an awareness of the possibility of art as a professional career for people with disabilities.
* Create and nurture a new theatrical presence and voice in the local community.
* Model and promote full access in the local theatre community; i.e. accessing is more than just a ramp.
* Help re-define theatre itself by introducing disabled performers into the theatre community.
* Make the disabled body and the every-day experiences of people with disability visible and real to theatre audiences.
* Develop new audiences for performance by disabled people.
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Why Autobiography and Performance?
Like any art, writing and performing are built on the premise of compelling as well as demanding attention. Demanding attention is easy. Throwing a tantrum in a public space is one way of demanding attention. But often that attention is short lived (it lasts as long as the tantrum does) or ineffective (it is being heeded only as an annoyance). Compelling attention, on the other hand, implies that the listener has as much at stake in the action as the performer.

That is why Actual Lives begins by writing down compelling, or powerful, memories and ends with the act of performance, when the individual reenacts this memory. It is an old adage of theatre that by performing a thing one becomes it. Thus, the reenactment of a compelling moment allows that individual to then become compelling.

Why Autobiography?
Autobiography gives people a chance to articulate their own lives; to put forth their own arguments, their own interpretations of who they are and how they came to be.

People with disabilities often feel that their stories are taken away from them; that politicians, professional care givers, or members of their own families sometimes unintentionally or deliberately tailor the stories to suit some other political, professional or personal agenda. By writing about their own lives, disabled adults are able to take control of what their lives mean. They can make their own personal and political statements.

The act of constructing an autobiography is an optimistic act, one that implies an acknowledgement (on the part of both writer and audience) of the inherent worth and value of the life being shared. In writing autobiographically the writers also claim their own self worth. It is that premise that makes autobiography the most democratic of acts. The implication is that if one voice is worth hearing, every voice is worth hearing.

Frank, moving, engaging accounts of living with disability effectively counter public misconceptions about people with disabilities. The disability experience is no longer presented as sugar coated or "tear jerking," but as something infinitely more complicated, infinitely more like their own lives.

Why Performance?
Live performance offers the immediacy of shared reality. Someone from both ends of the process is always there. The audience is never alone in its experience of the work; they are always accompanied by someone responsible for the creation - if not the writer then the performer - or, in the case of Actual Lives, by both the writer/performer.

This kind of immediacy gives disabled people a chance to see how their lives play out to a larger public, to check their own perceptions  to see if what outraged them outrages others; if what made them laugh gives the audience the giggles. It also gives the audience a context in which to test their perceptions. Have they been guilty of stereotyping? Do they themselves feel stereotyped?

Performance can be a tool, a way of turning the tables on the larger society. The key is the presence of the body on stage in front of an audience. Outside of theatre the audience controls the medium. They can turn off a TV, a radio, put down a magazine, walk out of a movie without confronting the writer, the actor. The reaction of the audience for better or for worse usually occurs without the presence of the creator.

Public moments of intimate self-revelation are meant to be expansive - they are meant to draw people together through the acknowledgement of shared experience. That is what theatre has always done.

The very thing that makes theatre expansive as well as intimate also makes it much more immediately confrontational. Therefore, it has its risks. People who are disabled are sometimes dependent on family and institutions to support them and may fear the consequences of expressing themselves candidly. The pressure then is to side step anything negative or controversial  be it sexual frustration, drug experimentation or the insolence of professional caregivers or agency staff.

But confrontation within theatre is structured confrontation. It is a space in which people with disabilities can confront a society that may not know or value them. It is a chance for disabled adults to confront the people who stop them in grocery stores to ask "What happened to you?" To put such questioning in a context
gives the disabled person the power to take control of the question - to re-present it as offensive, ridiculous or just curious.

Who Participates?
Disabled adults are recruited from the community at large, regardless of their previous writing or theatre experience. The only requirement for participation is a functional communication system (of any kind) and the willingness to share a story. The workshop is limited to 15 participants in order to make accommodations feasible.

In defining disability for the purpose of recruiting participants for Actual Lives, we acknowledged an interest in working with people whose bodies reflect their disability. Atypical bodies are often understood as having cultural meanings, despite what the people who inhabit the body may say about their own experiences. The goal is create a dialogue between people whose bodies have social meanings because of their differences from "the norm," and general audiences that may experience awkwardness in confrontations with these differences. The printed application form simply invites "adults with disability" to
participate. Individuals have to identify themselves as disabled, based upon their own criteria.

Participants in Actual Lives must be as accommodating of the workshop as the workshop is of them. They must be willing to do the work, to articulate emotions and memories that are not always cheery and not always "respectful." And they must be willing to enact or ritualize those memories through the process of performance.
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A "Good Fit"
In general, participants are a "good fit" with Actual Lives when they have the desire to participate in a creative project centered around the exchange of personal stories. Writing from personal experience and sharing that writing takes a willingness to be open and somewhat vulnerable. Participants need to be able to give and take both positive and constructively critical feedback about their writing and their performance. Because of the way the project is structured, participants need enough physical stamina to attend nightly meetings for one week that are approximately three hours in length, and then be able to commit to the public performances. Transportation needs to be worked out in advance.

It is imperative that every disabled person in the workshop must perform. They must grace their language with the presence of their own bodies. That makes this workshop a bit different from others that make performance optional. The disabled have for too long been either encouraged or forced to be invisible.

Working with Children and Adolescents
This is a workshop designed for adults but it has been adapted for middle to high school aged students with and without disabilities. The only caution is that the parents of school aged young adults must be informed beforehand of the frank nature of the uncensored dialogue and conversation that is encouraged. While the subject matter is never intentionally steered towards sex, death or drugs, the workshop participants write frankly and openly. Sometimes these more controversial subjects are on their minds.

Rationale for Creating an Issue-Oriented Performance Group
Identity-based groups work because they have at their core certain shared experiences. However, the process of putting together any group based on a specific set of distinctions or differences can effectively isolate the group. And, when looking at disability, isolation is one of the problems that we work against. Therefore, the end goal must be inclusion into the larger community by:
* creating alliances between people with disability who are interested in performance and their primarily non-disabled counterparts in local theatre groups,
* creating a cultural voice for the disabled performers.

Actual Lives is a vehicle to allow disabled people to represent themselves on stage. Performers decide what they reveal about themselves and to what extent disability figures into that expression. Participants agree from the outset to try to dismiss sentimentalized stereotypes of people with disability; to avoid the maudlin and encourage humor, irony, outrage, and social commentary and critique.

Who are the Partners?
Begin by determining the level of interest in your community. This could mean approaching already existing arts or disability advocacy groups. For the first Actual Lives workshop, the producer made contacts with a wide variety of individuals and groups, including:
* Governor's Committee on Persons with Disabilities
* Mayor's Committee for People with Disabilities - an appointed task force
* Commission for the Blind and the Texas School for the Blind
* ADAPT of Texas
* Imagine Arts, a non-profit organization that promotes visual artists with disabilities
* Local theatre groups
* Rehabilitation Hospitals - OT/PT and Speech departments
* Center for Independent Living
* VSA arts of Texas (formerly Access Arts Austin) - a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing barriers between the cultural arts and people with disabilities
* Self - Help Advocacy Center, a community-based mental health service provider

Theatre Company
Affiliating with already established theatre companies has several distinct advantages over creating a freestanding ensemble group for people with disability. First, the workshop can draw on the talents of the local group for assistance with directing, teaching performance techniques, voice training, and other technical training. Non-disabled theatre professionals can also make good performance partners in the public performances. They can be valuable assets in terms of the physical resources that an Actual Lives workshop may need - sound
systems, video projectors, light boards, and even curtains. Theatre groups usually have mailing lists for publicizing your event and know how to produce flyers, invitations and other promotional materials to help access local publicity resources like radio shows, local papers, etc. They may have bulk mail
permits. Many theatre companies have non-profit status, so you may be able to write grants with them. Your members may even be able to pick up technical skills by volunteering with a theatre company.

When you are working as a large ensemble group, you have the potential to draw a new audience to any venue based on the performers' personal connections. This can develop a new audience for the theatre group and expand their support base. Actual Lives can also bring them publicity because of its unique focus. Coauthoring grant proposals can sometimes provide funding for the workshop and the theatre group.

Disability awareness varies from group to group and physical access to the stage and backstage areas can often be a problem. The decision to use a theater leads both performers and the theater administrators to discover how accessible the theater really is. It becomes a process of identifying problems and finding solutions.

How Does it Work?
Actual Lives begins with writing and ends with performance. One is essentially a private act, the other is quite public, and both are equally important. Two people usually lead the week-long workshop: one with experience as a writing coach and one with performance experience. Together, these group leaders elicit autobiographical writing and then help participants translate the writings into performance. One other person, a production manager, needs to be on board to make arrangements for the public performance. This person secures an accessible venue, arranges for lighting and sound systems, assists with the material production of the scripts, etc. At least one leader needs to have experience working with people with disabilities.

The Writing Workshop
The first meeting begins with introductions and then proceeds directly to generating writing. Because participants write from personal experience, and then read their writing aloud, a certain level of group intimacy develops quickly. As the group progresses from one writing exercise to another, it is not unusual for people to write about more intimate moments, or from more vulnerable positions. In order to create a safe environment in which to write and share stories, it is important to:
* remain nonjudgmental in responding to writing,
* make it clear that all topics are accepted and nothing is censored, and emphasize respect for each other's opinions.

Actual Lives insists that everyone who attends the workshop writes and shares their stories; even workshop facilitators and stage managers. The workshop environment is a closed community, and everyone is equally at risk, and that shared risk is what creates enough safety to allow the kind of personal investment necessary for generating powerful personal narratives.

Because of the investment in writing, editing is sometimes difficult to accept. Typically, more material is produced in the workshop than can be incorporated into performance. what works as prose will often not work well in performance, so it's important that the facilitators be willing to aggressively edit the writing, and to prepare writers for the shock of seeing edited versions of their writing.

The one-week workshop format allows the focus to be on writing for the first three days, and after that the writing workshop becomes a performance workshop. At this point, the emphasis is on learning skills that will translate the piece theatrically. Participants are asked to select two or more pieces of writing from the many things they've written to use in performance. Much of the work to build the performance is done collectively, so that everyone has the opportunity to shape the show by providing ideas and feedback about staging.

Performance: Moving from Writing to Performance
Performance is the product of Actual Lives, the thing that the community sees. The public presentation represents the outcomes of the workshop, but not entirely. The final script is often just a snapshot of what has been produced in the workshop because much of the work doesn't make it to the stage. Performance provides an opportunity to commit your body to your words and allows performers to experience how their work impacts people outside the group. Performing can be incredibly validating and also somewhat intimidating.

In Actual Lives, performance takes the word from the page and makes it come alive through voice, gestures, physical groupings and movement, and, whenever possible, conventional tools such as lighting and sound design, minimal sets and props.

The Process of Performance
It is essential to simplify the concept of theatre, to strip "performance" down to the basics. The only basic rule in performance is that the performer connects with the audience. To that end, practiced speech or practiced movement of the body are encouraged. The performer is simply asked to see how far she can project her speech; how clear she can make her language. In some cases the very struggle to speak with clarity is made part of the performance. In the cases where projection or breath support is limited, the performer's voice can be amplified and because the performances can be documented by real-time captioning, the text will not be lost to the audience. But it is important nonetheless that the performers be encouraged to speak their own words, to take possession of their own language, however they can.

Each participant is asked to explore her own physical possibilities. How clearly can each person speak? How much can they move - not just their bodies but also the machines that aid them? How can their pattern of speech or their particular patterns of movements be taken to the extreme? How can these patterns be incorporated into a piece? The willing exploration of the reach and limitations of each body is a true process of discovery; and those discoveries are used to help create compelling images for the stage.

Just as each person is encouraged to find the central and compelling image of their pieces, the group is encouraged to find a compelling image that represents them all. For example, the idea of the disabled being lumped together as one single entity resulted in a tableaux of 13 adults with disabilities crowded together in a line that resembled a Chinese dragon. The text that accompanied the image was "The disabled are often lumped together as a single entity; one great, big, happy smiling beast." At the word "smiling" everyone in unison let loose with a great, big "happy" grin. These simple collective images create a sense of ensemble for the audience and for the group as well. They are often most effective when used at the beginning and the end of each show.

Within each piece it is important to keep things simple. Read each story with a central simple movement in mind, something that pinpoints as well as drives the text. For example, in a piece about his attempt to conquer microwave popcorn packaging, a man with quadriplegia compared himself to a predatory lion in a savanna. His central movement was to weave his wheelchair in and out as he circled the unsuspecting box of popcorn.

There are several simple ways to transition from the page to the stage:
* Look for "performable moments" in the writing. These might include interactions with other people - encourage the writer to include another cast member in the staging of the piece so that the interaction can be fully realized in performance; significant interactions with objects that can used in the telling of the story; movements that might compliment the words (i.e., "a new direction" might be, literally, a performer making a turn on the stage).
* Remember that Actual Lives is not about acting but about performance, and therefore conveys a story or idea through use of the body and simple props. Avoid elaborate staging or extensive prop use, and emphasize the story and the performer's presence on the stage.
* Plan an opening for the show that complements the message you want to send. For example, if you want to emphasize individuality, use an opening where each person comes on stage individually and strikes a pose. If you want to stress the continuity of the group, you might have them assemble on stage in low light, then turn as a group to face the audience as the lights change.
* Organize the order of the performance by grouping pieces that have thematic links together so that the show is as cohesive as possible. Combining pieces with similar themes makes a stronger, more complex performance. Ask performers to identify themes in their own writing and link those themes to writings by other cast members. Encouraging this kind of interactive process helps build a script that everyone supports, since the thematic links are clear and individual pieces are validated as meaningful.
* Alternate group pieces and monologues. Too many solo pieces in a row can be boring.
* Use music, either live music or recorded, as an addition to spoken pieces to smooth transitions between pieces and to accentuate the tone of the narrative.
* Be careful to keep props simple. Sometimes it's better to suggest an object through a movement or gesture than to actually have the object on stage because that encourages audience imagination and keeps everyone focused on the performer.
* Instead of using an individual piece to close the show, consider generating a group piece that will bring the entire cast back onto the stage for a final word. This leaves the audience with an impression of the group, and provides an opportunity to direct a specific message to the audience. It is good to have each participant give their name in the final words so that audience members can associate their name with a face.
* You may want to include video or slides in the performance. If a participant is unable to attend the performance because of a scheduling conflict, consider video taping the individual and then incorporate their material into the performance.

Steps for Creating Your Own Workshop

Identify the Group Leaders
Ideally, the workshop leader would be one person with a background in performance, autobiographical writing, theatrical adaptation, fundraising and social work. If you have one of those handy you're well on your way to astonishing success. However, it is much more likely that several people with different expertise and experience will be needed. You'll need workshop leaders who can get the money that is needed, who can generate the writing that is needed, and who can adapt the autobiographical material into theatre. They will need, as well, to be able to identify, articulate and solve problems unique to a disability workshop  problems of transportation, health, hygiene and group dynamics.

In some communities, it will be possible to find facilitators with ties to the disability community who'll recruit for you and help organize the workshop. Some possibilities for facilitators are: theatre professionals with interest in non-traditional projects or theatre for social change, creative writers with exposure to disability issues, health care providers with experience as writers or performers. Once you have a commitment from the two people who will lead your workshop, you can tailor the recruitment materials around what they have to offer. When you identify the group leaders, plan the workshop schedule based on their availability.

Determine How Much Money You Need
This will vary from community to community, but in order to proceed you will need to have enough money to cover at least the "bare bones" expenses. The budget should include stipends for the group leaders and other costs such as space rental, script duplicating costs and accommodations (i.e. captioning, ASL interpretation, Braille scripts, etc.). To raise the necessary money, implement a grant writing process that solicits funds from foundations, local companies and corporations, and interested individuals.

Find Workshop and Performance Locations
Venue: Where you decide to conduct the Actual Lives workshop will depend on what is available in your community, but the type and amount of space does make a difference. It must be accessible - both the room and the bathrooms - and should be on a public bus route. The room should be large enough to accommodate both writing at a table and staging some of the pieces in rehearsal.

Access: Finding an accessible theater is of utmost importance. "Accessible" means parking within a short distance of the venue, as well as easy access to the venue from public transportation since many wheelchair users rely on public transportation. Access also means no-step entry to the facility and auditorium. It is important to have an accessible route from backstage to the front of the house, and no-step access to the stage and back stage areas. Full access includes public and backstage restrooms that are modified to accommodate people with disability, including at least one lowered sink, one modified stall, toilet and door, and a set of grab bars. The facility should also be capable of providing audio description, ASL interpretation and captioning, if requested. 

Atmosphere: For first-time performers, a small, intimate space works best. Intimate spaces more closely resemble the workshop atmosphere and can ease performance anxiety. The kind of material produced may also be best suited to alternative venues, where audiences expect unconventional and nontraditional performances.

Technical Decisions: Each venue will vary in terms of available light and sound systems, restrictions on what kinds of props can be incorporated, and other technical issues. Good lighting and sound design add a lot to performance, but it is possible to produce staged readings with minimal technical requirements that still work well. Most staged readings require lights up at the beginning and lights down at the end. Captioning can be a benefit to the entire audience when performers have speech or articulation difficulties. The spoken text is available in print, and that visual access improves intelligibility for the speaker.

Recruit Workshop Participants
Identity the target population from which to recruit: Only physical disability? All disability? Age groups? Be realistic about what you can accommodate. Initial recruitment may involve creating a short flyer that outlines the project, complete with a schedule for the workshops, stated goals, and other information. Disseminate the flyer to the people contacted during the interest survey part of the process. Go to meetings, get on the agenda. Talk it up. Get names of potential performers, and then start calling. Plan to contact approximately three times as many potential participants as your workshop can accommodate, since there is a high rate of drop out before the workshop even begins.

Get Some Helpers
Depending on the needs of individuals in your group, you may need to provide assistance with personal care, with writing or with other physical accommodations (i.e., providing a laptop computer or someone to act as a scribe for people physically unable to write, using audio tape, etc.). Survey these needs during the recruitment phase and then have a person ready to assist if and when needed. We try to provide American Sign Language interpretation, captioning, audio description and Braille programs, and any other accommodation necessary to insure that anyone in the community who wants to attend the performances can do so. In some workshops, we have been able to arrange for a licensed counselor to participate. This helps insure that any conflict or otherwise uncomfortable situations that might arise can be effectively handled. However, this is not necessary. Actual Lives is not therapy and all participants are responsible for their own behavior and emotional engagement.

Line up Accommodations
The "ethic of accommodation" is an anything goes approach; a pragmatic no nonsense exploration of how best to solve problems that arise. These problems are often simply physical in nature. For instance, the speech of a participant with cerebral palsy may not be understood by the participant who is a lipreader. Therefore, it may be necessary for someone else to repeat or write down what the first participant is saying. This simple act of accommodation creates a bonus result. A number of the other workshop members may be experiencing difficulty understanding the participant's speech. Accommodating one person's
disability serves to assist all of the participants.

Evaluate your budget and your participant and community needs. Depending on what kinds of accommodations are possible, people with widely varying levels of ability may be able to participate in any given workshop. Never assume that you know what assistance is needed. Always ask the participant. To include people with significant motor impairments, you may need to provide assistance with writing or other basic needs. Room temperature and the availability of food and water may be critical to some participants.

Workshop Format
The workshop is simplicity itself and as such can be adapted to many different situations and circumstances.

In the beginning a single exercise is given to the participants. They are asked to write for fifteen minutes about their most powerful memory. They are told that they will know the memory has power because it will be foremost in their minds. This focused yet open approach is the key to the writing workshop. There are no restrictions as to content, form or length. It can be written as a poem, a paragraph, a story, a dialogue. How they interpret "powerful" is entirely up to them.

After writing, participants are asked to read to the group what they have written. This is the first step towards performance- the body takes possession of its own language. They also discover what compels their own attention and the attention of their peers. By writing and by reading aloud, participants have gained a sense of what they have remembered, and that what they have written and said has significance- i.e. it has had a public and shared acknowledgment.

After the first pieces are read, the participants are asked to write again. This second exercise is only a bit more subject to suggestion. Workshop participants can be asked to explore their original memory further, to write about a second powerful memory or to expand on topics that might have been brought up in the writing of the other participants.

These writing exercises are a form of layering, a way of allowing a multi-dimensional exploration of what really matters, what really is on the mind of the participant.

Workshop Leader Roles
To effectively coach workshop participants, leaders need to concentrate on fostering attentiveness, encouraging productive feedback and imagining ways to translate personal narrative into performance.

Attentiveness: First, the workshop leaders must set the example of attentiveness. Each memory must be given equal attention and equal weight. That is not to pretend that each memory is equally engaging but each deserves the same quality of attention. If there is any single demand that the workshop leaders should make it is that everyone must be in the room, silently paying attention to the person who is sharing their autobiographical memory. That intense attentiveness is not just a matter of courtesy, but a critical acknowledgement that something important is being said. Cultivating attentiveness can also guide workshop participants on how to become a more involved theatre audience.

Feedback: As the workshop continues, the workshop leaders encourage a dialogue with all of the participants about each piece. The dialogue should be guided at first, with the workshop leaders setting the example of the parameters of response. A totally uncensored response can prove to be not just brutal but pointless; so the first purpose of any response must be to encourage creation. To that end the workshop leaders might then ask particular
kinds of questions of the other participants - What did they feel about a piece? What spoke to them? What did they identify with? What did they find funny or moving? There is always some aspect worth pursuing in any piece, and it is the responsibility of the workshop leaders to find it.

Awareness of performance possibilities: The workshop leaders must pay attention to the pieces not just from the writing perspective but from a performative one as well. They must, from the beginning, be looking for the immediate and then potential performance possibilities inherent in the writing. For instance, the workshop readers can comment on strong delivery, comic moments or unintentional errors in reading that add an unexpected subtext. They may also call attention to the ways that a piece could be performative; the possible physical actions within the piece, the possible dialogues, the possible tableaus. This segue from writing into performance and the segue from leader-guided exchanges into group guided ones should increase as the workshop continues.

Publicity - Getting the Word out
Public service announcements on local radio shows are usually a good place to start. If your community has an alternative weekly publication, it will often have a "listings" service that you can use. Publicity can be as simple as flyers and email distribution lists or as complicated as a four-color postcard and a bulk mailing. It can be as cheap as paper and duplicating costs or as expensive as radio spots. Local theatre companies may be willing to send your performance announcement via their e-mail distribution lists which means that folks who often go to theatre events will receive your publicity material. It's up to you, your creativity, and your budget.

Staged Reading
The culmination of the workshop is the performance itself. The expectations of this performance will vary with the circumstances. When there are only a few days to write and rehearse, the performance will be a staged reading. Lines are not memorized, costuming is minimal, staging is rudimentary. 

The advantage of a staged reading is that it is an informal performance format. The expectations of a stage reading are much lower from that of a more formal theatrical production. People who have never performed before find staged readings to be much more forgiving of missed cues, mumbled lines and forgotten stage directions.

The language is what is highlighted at a staged reading. And it has its own measure of success - not the number of people in the audience, not the flawless execution of stage business- but the strength of the rapport established between the writer and the audience through language and the presence of the body.

Evaluate Your Efforts
Most grantors will ask for an evaluation of the project. This can be done in a variety of ways. First, audiences can be asked to evaluate the performances by completing an audience questionnaire. This can give you information about why people attended, what was effective and what might have made audiences uncomfortable, etc. Second, ask the performers to evaluate their experiences of the workshop and of the performance. You might also want to have a set of pre-workshop interview questions so that you can document changes in attitude, skills acquired, etc.

De-brief after the Workshop and Performance
Actual Lives generates a considerable amount of energy from the performers and the audience members. Because this work is intensely personal, what happens on stage can create an amazing cathartic effect for participants. Drawing the group back together again within a few days of the performance allows everyone an opportunity to share their responses to the workshop process and the performance. At that point, it is also possible to determine whether or not there is interest in continuing with any aspect of the project.

What's Next?
Actual Lives works fine as a one-week project, and as such has a tremendous value both to performers and to your local community. It does not require a long-term commitment. Further develop the staged reading to realize more of it's theatrical potential, you'll need to pull in more resources, negotiate with your facilitators, and map out a plan for moving on to the next stage. We have re-worked the August staged reading into more polished performances each November.

If participants want to continue to write and perform, they can be asked to incrementally take more responsibility for producing future workshops and performances. They can assist with fund raising, public relations, organizing and directing. Writing groups may develop, depending on available leadership. The group may express interest in moving forward, either by finding more performance opportunities, expanding the group, or developing new written materials.


Best Practices
* Draw in different kinds of theatre personnel for support.
* Use interns who are open to establishing integrated communities.
* Promote uncensored conversation.
* Uphold an "ethic of accommodation".
* Encourage participants to self-edit their material.
* Involve cast members in selecting pieces to be performed.
* Focus on defining the character of the autobiographical "I" on stage as a way to prepare for performance.
* Read pieces to each other right before the staged reading.
* Use smaller theater spaces and avoid proscenium stages.
* Video the process and the performances as evaluative tools and promotional tools.
* Conduct monthly writing meetings as follow-up.

Actual Lives' Founders
The first Actual Lives workshop was conducted in Austin, Texas in August 2000. Over the course of one short week fifteen adults, thirteen with physical disability and two without, wrote autobiographical narratives and translated those
stories into public performance.

Originally conceived by deaf performance artist Terry Galloway, Actual Lives came to fruition through tight collaboration between Galloway, Chris Strickling and Celia Hughes. 

Galloway, an NEA recipient in solo performance, served as writing and performance coach and director. She is the co-founder of two theater companies in Florida and Texas.

Strickling served as writing coach and producer of Actual Lives. She is an experienced Occupational Therapist and a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is studying autobiographical performance by
people with disability.

Celia Hughes, executive director of VSA arts of Texas (formerly Access Arts Austin), a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing the barriers between the arts and people with disabilities, has over 25 years experience working in the performing arts with people with and without disabilities.

For more information about Actual Lives, to book a performance by the ensemble, or to arrange for Terry and Chris to hold a workshop in your area, contact:
Chris Strickling
email: cstrick@mail.utexas.edu
phone: 512/894-7334

Celia Hughes
VSA arts of Texas
3710 Cedar Street
Austin, Texas 78705
email: info@vsatx.org
phone: 512/454-9912
TTY: 512/454-6298
www.vsatx.org
