Tripping the dadafantastic

Playwright Kaite O’Reilly sampled the feast of Deaf and disability culture at this year’s DaDaFest in Liverpool

The heavens opened, La Machine’s giant spider stalked the streets and the city centre was temporarily closed down by Deaf performance artist Aaron Williamson.

Williamson’s You can’t come through here, you’ll have to go round the back was as much an act of mischief as social reversal, with Williamson taping off streets and suggesting short detours for non-disabled members of the public but letting disabled people through –no doubt on their way to DaDaFest.

DaDaFest International 08 was an impressive four-day festival, programmed by Garry Robson and organised by North West Disability Arts Forum and filled with exhibitions, performances, film, opera and street theatre – queer, straight, camp and burlesque: a smorgasbord of talent, unfortunately too extensive for all to be mentioned here.

The festival base was at A Foundation, one of the region’s noted contemporary arts spaces, and it was wonderful to see a range of stimulating, accomplished visual art exhibited within the airy gallery spaces:

Ju Gosling’s cool deconstruction of the myth of a “scientific model of disability” in Abnormal joined Gus Cummins’s moving and fascinating exhibition about epilepsy, using EEG data and MRI scans of his brain during temporal lobe epileptic seizures (“here’s my brain in five millimetre slices”).

Alison Jones’s lyrical sound installation Art Lies and Audiotapes interpreted Gustav Klimt’s erotic drawings using audio descriptions created by female volunteers at the Tate for the non-sighted artist.

This simple but clever sonic work sought to create what Jones coins “voyeurism by proxy”, raising questions about interpretation, censorship and commonality.

Kevin Connolly’s The Rolling Exhibition captured the reactions of people around the world to his physiognomy (he was born without legs and uses a skateboard to get around) and he records curious speculations about what may have happened: car accident? shark attack? landmine? Iraq? – each suggestion informed by locality. These revealing photographic portraits are captured from the artist’s point of view, inverting the politics of the gaze and creating mutuality, as the subject of the work is unclear: is it the curiosity of the staring bystander or the artist staring back through the lens of his camera?

A live performance that I especially liked was Claire Cunningham’s fragile and innovative Mobile, where the performer constructed and performed on a trapeze of crutches – a graceful, weightless alchemy that transformed the crutches into machines of flight. Her intimate, recorded narratives became the soundtrack to a duet performed with a moving aerial mobile reminiscent of one of Louise Bourgeouis’s sculptures, or a dinosaur’s skeleton.

Understated is not a word for Mat Fraser or for Miss Exotic World beauty queen Julie Atlas Muz’s explicit, extravagant and at times self-indulgent reworking of Beauty and the Beast. Sex show meets freak show – genital puppetry, talking vaginas, masturbation, excess and nudity: a full-on spectacle for those who like their meat raw.

Julie MacNamara’s new play Crossings showed potential, melding the stories of three women across the centuries from a famine ship, the notorious Zong slave ship and a ghost ship docked in modern day Liverpool. Intense and full of integrity, this work in progress provoked notions of hidden histories and the ways that women were – and remain – enslaved.

Another performance in progress, A (Gay, Disabled Transsexual) Love Story as told to the ticket collector at Alton Towers does just what it says on the tin. Energetic and engaging, this likeable work – scripted by Steven Keyworth and embellished with incidents from the life of cast member Robert Softley – deserves to be more widely seen.

Deaf culture was much in evidence, from Krazy Kat’s Petrushka, a magical family show, to the disco-glam gay muscle-men of The Alexandras (above), with sign diva Caroline Parker arriving in a gladiator-drawn electric blue swan. This high camp soon got everyone signing and dancing.

Meanwhile, the charismatic Ramesh Meyyappan applied his superlative visual storytelling to Dario Fo. Australian Rob Roy Farmer jailhouse rocked and Common Ground revealed another work in progress.

DaDa also offered vital networking opportunities, talks and public discussions, including the release of a draft manifesto from Vision 21, which they hope will eventually lead to the first Deaf and disability arts manifesto. Information will be distributed through local disability arts networks and from Arcadea, Shape London and Disability Arts Cymru, all of whom invite feedback.

Like many festivals, the event had an enjoyable rawness but the production values could have been higher and too much work was incomplete. (Polished work that has realised its full potential would be satisfying to see.) But by the end, although I headed for the train sleep-deprived and over-stimulated, I was looking forward to the next festival in two years and feeling dadafantastic.