What is Arts Access?
Music and Dance are often considered elite artistic pursuits. Whereas, we believe they are a human right and everyone deserves access to the arts and everyone can be an artist.
The arts are often viewed as divided between “professional/trained” and “community/amateaur'' arts, the term professional reserved for artists who have undertaken rigorous training at acclaimed institutions that use oppressive elitist models, and community for anyone who is not deemed to meet those idealistic oppressive standards. Creatives in the disabled community have for a long time been denied the title “professional” regardless of their skills and abilities due to the structural ableism built into our society and the misconception of disabled people's capabilities.
Who are we to decide what someone else can do, or what they should do? Often “professional” and industry spaces will be designed and created inaccessibly because they are not intended to be designed for anyone from the disabled community to be able to access. This is not limited to the physical designing of buildings and spaces but also how they operate, the support available, their values, and whether the disabled community have been taken into account at all.
Art is inescapably social and since the beginning of time has been used to challenge and resist or communicate ideas and information. In social justice settings, art has been used as both resistance (by the oppressed) and propaganda (by the oppressor), Art is always an act, and social justice requires action. Sensoria partners with multidisciplinary, queercrip, global majority organisations to empower each other in our fight for collective liberation by putting the voices and stories of marginalised people centre stage. We know that all systems of oppression reinforce each other and it is no different in the creative industries.
At Sensoria we aim to increase awareness of intersectional models when looking at prejudice, privilege and systems of oppression in the arts. We hope that Sensoria will go further to champion the practice of collective care as being normalised and to encourage the creation of robust systems of care in the arts industry and beyond.
— Words by Cleo Savva