Jessica Olivieri - Season of Care

Anthea:

This is Anthea Williams on 2RPH with Sideshow. Today we're talking about the season of care at UTP. And I have with me Dr. Jessica Olivieri. She's the artistic director of UTP. Her work sits at the intersection of visual arts, performance, dance, theater, and is often in a community setting. Jessica also has an experience of chronic illness and dyslexia. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jessica:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited for this conversation.

Anthea:

So first of all, I'd love it if you could tell our listeners a little bit about UTP, formally known as Urban Theater Projects.

Jessica:

Yeah, so UTP is based on the Darug country lands of the Darug people, in Bankstown, it has been for 40+ years now, coming up to 45 years soon. And we're an organisation that has always worked sort of outside of the mainstream. So, it began as a theater ensemble that worked on, you know, in street theater. It turned then into working in a more community engaged style.

And we work in that, continuing that lineage of community engagement and community cultural development-style processes, which is to say, people first over pro... over outcomes. And we are really lucky to have inherited this beautiful lineage of, particularly a lot of really incredible women of color who have set up that CACD model of working, and beautiful processes and methodologies.

Anthea:

Fantastic. And you have been the artistic director for three years.

Jessica:

Yes, I have. I was lucky to come onto the organisation just before COVID. (laughs)

Anthea:

(laughs) I'm sure we'll talk more about that.

Jessica:

Yeah, exactly. Yep. Very interesting times.

Anthea:

Can you tell me a little bit about your curatorial model? Because I know that you think very deeply about what the role of a curator is and how you curate your work.

Jessica:

Yeah. So I think coming into a framework that was traditionally a theater, model, so this idea of the artistic director directing the work that the organisation supports is something that I wanted to challenge. So moving more into a curatorial model where we are more facilitatory, so less about putting our branding on something and more about allowing a self-determined as possible. You know, these words get banded around and they are, they're aims and aspirations rather than easy, kind of, ways to do things.

So yeah, creating a more... a model that is process-driven by the artist rather than, directed by the artistic director. So that's the sort of, I guess, shift that's happened in the organisation over some time. Before my time it was already shifting in that way. But definitely coming from a visual arts background - I went to visual arts school. The idea of the kind of all-seeing, all-knowing artistic director was something that I wasn't really interested in buying into.

Anthea:

Yeah, I can imagine that. And how do you decide then, the artists that you're going to work with?

Jessica:

Yeah, I mean there's still a level of, like, gatekeeping, right? Like, the curator is still the one who has this power, who's on a wage, which is, you know, so important to mention because we work with artists who are essentially freelancers. And, you know, by artists, I mean community who make. I mean directors, I mean dramaturgs, I mean producers. So, you know, we have a huge... I guess I think of artists in a pretty expansive way. But yeah, most of the people who we work with are untaxed, and I'm on a full-time wage. So there's a real power imbalance still. It's not a perfect model.

But we do work, as a team, collaboratively to come to who we will work with. And we work, we think really rigorously about who those people are. We have a policy of historically marginalised peoples first - and obviously also First Nations peoples - first in when we're making decisions about who we're going to work with. And we have formalised that to a degree in the season of care. So we have a Curatorium of Care, which is sort of like, the name just that we started with and it just didn't change.

But we have really consciously slowed down our process and also sought external contributions. So we've got Tian Zhang, and Riana Head-Toussaint on that curatorium, as well as the UTP team to acknowledge that the team makes a lot of the decisions collaboratively. And also to acknowledge these two incredible thinkers, Tian and Riana, who have influenced my thinking in particular, but also the team's thinking. And also are people who are in our orbit and we wanted to bring in formally.

Anthea:

Fantastic. So you are calling this year, the season of care, and I know that often your seasons do have things. Tell me a little bit about that and what inspired it.

Jessica:

Yeah, so last year was the first time we really thought about how we're framing what we're doing as a cohesive narrative because we are working with processes that are self-determined. So the works themselves sometimes feel disparate. So how, what is the through line and essentially also, what is the provocation we're sending ourselves? So last year, the provocation was radical accessibility. And "radical" was there because we wanted to reclaim the word radical, particularly in a Western Sydney context.

And also we wanted to do better. Accessibility is something that is still something that people think about through mobility lens. And there's so much more to it. And it's actually a really exciting space for, innovation and systems change and curatorial thinking and conceptual thinking. So what we wanted to do was start this model whereby each year we have a provocation.

And that provocation is a provocation to our artistic program, but also internally, which is parts that you would not necessarily see, but would as an artist or as someone who works with us, you would feel perhaps. So challenging our processes, like contracts. How are they accessible? Not very, because they're in really intense legalistic jargon. So how do we undo some of that? And that's still a process. So it's about seeding these provocations. It's not about solving them in the one year. Start focusing on them and figuring out where the gaps are and then following them through subsequently, as long as that takes to follow through.

And then this year, the Season of Care really came about in thinking about where we're at as a national and global community in our relationship to care. And the way that we, as a society, brought care into mainstream discussion for a moment. And the way that we have let go of that discussion and the ableism that you can now see in the letting go of that in relation to the pandemic in particular. And also, you know, wanting to reflect on this very recent, historic moment where everything changed for a moment. And what can we take with us? What do we wanna take with us?

Because there are plenty of really positive things that happen during those lockdowns. I mean, there are also a lot of really unpleasant things and really difficult things. But there are some really important things that happened that, yeah, we wanted to just hold onto for a little bit longer, and investigate and be really critical around as well. Because obviously care is something that is not evenly distributed, is also not evenly... The labor of care is not evenly undertaken. There are many things about care that are really difficult and also need to be discussed.

Anthea:

Yeah, that's absolutely true. I know there were some...

Jessica:

And I guess...

Anthea:

Yes, please...

Jessica:

Sorry.

Anthea:

... keep on going.

Jessica:

Oh, there was one thing that one of the artists we're having a residency at the moment with an... incredible artist and an artist, Imogen Yang, said to us, which is, "I have a real problem with this idea of the season of care, the seasonality of it." And I guess what we were referring to in that was there was this moment, this season of care that happened. And so, yeah, I think extending that season and, and also playing on the idea of the season, the theatrical season.

Anthea:

Yeah. Okay. That's really interesting. Yeah. How do you take that forward? Just like how do... you take your learnings from COVID forward?

Jessica:

Mm-hmm.

Anthea:

I know there were some particular artists in their writings that really inspired this season of care. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? And just for our listeners, we'll put this in the show notes so you can find links to these writings as well.

Jessica:

Great. Yeah. One is, Care Works, which is a really beautiful book. It's Care Works: Dreaming Disability Justice. And it's a really important work because it's really intersectional. I'm just, actually right now I'm just looking up the pronunciation because I always get the pronunciation of the writer's name wrong. So it's Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. I'm, I'm so sorry for anyone who identifies as part of that community. I have totally mispronounced that. But it's a really, really important work and it's basically it's a collection of their blog posts.

And so you can kind of read them out of order and get a lot out of them. I find it really useful because it talks about things from a community perspective. They really are engaged with this idea of care in a really active way from many different, from many different positives. And that's, I think that's really useful because it's really common for us to think about care and, and other things, you know, in a really siloed way. And intersectionality can really help us sort of start to think a bit more wholistically about people and about ourselves and about society.

Anthea:

Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah, I think that's really true. We do sometimes really think about care in terms of what is really visually available.

Jessica:

Mm-hmm.

Anthea:

And actually there are so many different kinds of care. How much has your own experience of chronic illness and dyslexia related to this?

Jessica:

Yeah, it definitely has. I think that, you know, anyone who has experience of disability or, you know, any other kind of, part of your identity that has been historically marginalised, knows that these things feed into the way that we see the world. And I definitely feel like it gives me a sense of being able to see things in multiple ways and knowing that there are multiple experiences.

So particularly I find because my, kind of, you know, my place within the disability community is that my disabilities are invisible. There's a real sense of code switching that I do. And there's a sense of, sort of walking in two different worlds without people realising. And that has informed the way that I think about the world in general, but really informs the way I think about my position of power and my responsibility in that position. When I think about responsibility, I think about what are the things that are important to me for us to talk about, and this is definitely one of them.

Anthea:

I know you talked about finding the role of Artistic Director something that you wanted to challenge and you were thinking about, but I have to say, as an artist who works in the same city as you, it's really exciting to have another artistic director who identifies as someone who's got chronic illness. And as someone who's worked in this industry in multiple countries and for multiple decades, it's an absolute rarity. So that is remarkable and it's really sad how much of a rarity that is.

Jessica:

Yeah, and it's interesting because my disability is invisible. I had lots of really beautiful discussions, particularly with, Riana, about the responsibility to be really candid about that.
About, about that experience, um, because it is so rare and that, you know, in just disclosing, there is, that is a political act.

Anthea:

Absolutely it is. Yes, it absolutely is. Well, thank you for doing that.

Jessica:

(laughs) It's a pleasure.

It actually took, took some time. Like, I don't... When I say that I don't, there's no shade to anyone who feels that they can't.

Because it is, it comes with stigma and it comes with difficult conversations that I wouldn't normally have to have because of the invisibility of the nature of my disabilities. But yeah, as an act of solidarity for those who have more visible disabilities, I felt like, and I still feel like it's a really important thing to do.

Anthea:

Yes, I agree. And I also have that experience of finding it really hard to, um, feel like it was time and that I could come out and talk about this. Also, being aware that possibly my career was partly built on a foundation of being able to pass as someone who didn't have disability. And then of course, the feelings of, "Well, am I disabled enough then?" Which is problematic on a whole 'nother level, so...

Jessica:

Totally. Yeah.

Anthea:

... totally relate. So tell me about what the company is actually doing with this year. What are the programs you're running?

Jessica:

Yeah. One of the things we've been really conscious of this year is that last year was a year of hyper-productivity for the sector in general and also for us as an organization. So, Anthea, we worked together on that ballet, Nancy Genesis's beautiful show. And had other works that were very sort of large scale Blak Box, with Daniel Browning, at Barangaroo. Really large scale, very intensive. And we were talking with artists as we always do, about what do we need for this year? And the resounding response was, we need time to sit and we need time to develop. We need time to slow down. As, as Riana would say, we need to invest in crip time, which is to slow things down. And to be really conscious of how we're using our energy.

So the focus this year is on those developmental aspects of our program. So we have some ongoing programs that are really important to us. One of them is for the Circular Movement of Knowledge curated by Veronica Barac-Gomez. And she's one of the UTP producers. And that project is really about in inviting artists to, come into conversation with other artists who are out of reach. And that might be because of geographical boundaries or, you know, previously, you know, like not finding an opportunity or a time or a moment to have those conversations.

So that's a really important ongoing program for us. We have another really important ongoing program called 15 Cigarettes, which is the health impact of loneliness. So 15 cigarettes a day, smoking 15 cigarettes a day is equal to the impact, health impact, on the body, of loneliness. And so there's a program that Eddie Abd, who's another of our UTP producers, is leading and that is around having conversations. It's a very CACD model. Process-based, having conversations and letting those conversations evolve into a project that is a long-term project, many, many years in.

It's been going for one year and it will go for many more. So those are two really big projects that we've got going this year that are... not shiny. And there are no jazz hands, but they are really, really important to us about this idea of slowing down and investing time in the beginnings of things. And then we have this project this week called... it's part of the season of care and it's a residency, a group residency. And we've invited artists who we've previously either had some contact with or would like to have contact with more into the future.

And those artists have been invited in to come together in whatever way makes sense to them. So we've had some sessions already yesterday. We had a really incredible session with Auntie Julie, who is a Darug Elder, and she invited us onto her country and we spent the entire day with her, just chatting. And that was just so incredibly special. So the artists, you know, they come with their really strong practices that have an intersection with care. So we've got Aimée Falzon who, is thinking about care from the perspective of a mother and the difficulty in that space.

We've got Deborah Keenahan. And Deborah's a really incredible artist who I've known for a long time now who works in the space of disability. Some of your listeners may know her work. She just recently had a really excellent show at Casula Powerhouse called Othering. So Deborah has life experience of [inaudible 00:19:17] and makes a lot of work around problematising, the very problematic stereotypes from her perspective of her experience.

She's just a really, really smart and funny and, yeah, excellent person. So being really exciting to have her in the room. Also Tania Khouri. So she's a Lebanese American artist who's just moved to Australia and we're really excited to have her in the space. She really thinks about care, from the perspective of ritual. Ju Bavyka, they think about it through a sort of labor politics lens and rest of resilience, exhaustion. You know, looking at, I guess the flip side of what happens if you don't receive care.

Anthea:

Mm-hmm.

Jessica:

And then Imogen Yang, incredible thinker, works a lot in the disability space, is collaborating with Alex Craig. And they're thinking about a movement practice that can be shared. Alex has experience of being legally blind. And so, thinking about how to share the practice of movement, orally.

Anthea:

That's fantastic. In terms of the residencies, are the artists working together or are they working individually? And are they working to...

Jessica:

They're working... Yeah. I mean this is a chance for them to come together. So Naomi Segal and Paula are both, are also part of, Paula Do Prado, are also part of the residency, and everyone is really coming from practices. So Naomi works as part of PAI, which is a really collaborative, artist-run initiative. Paula, her practice is around weaving and, you know, conversation.

So there's this kind of opening up of practice. And the idea for this week is that a lot of the artists don't already know each other. And so they get a chance to spend expansive time around each other, and that things might evolve from there.

Anthea:

That sounds amazing. Look, we don't have much more time, so I'm just gonna ask you one final question.

Jessica:

Yeah.

Anthea:

I'd like to know what changes generally would you like to see in the arts and performing arts industries?

Jessica:

That's such a big question.

Anthea:

I know.

Jessica:

(laughs) I would just love people to engage with ideas of asking themselves that question.

Anthea:

Mm-hmm.

Jessica:

You know, I feel like we don't ask that question enough. I feel like we exist in a sector where there is this constant need to produce outputs and we don't give ourselves the time to go, "Actually what, what can we change? What can we do better?" Because there's so much that we can do better. I think the very beginning of, you know, lots of people are thinking about impact. I would love for people to think about who's been doing that work of impact for a really long time. What can we learn from those practices?

A lot of those practices from my perspective, come out of Western Sydney and particularly the community cultural development space. I would love for people to reflect on that, the processes that have come out of that, because they are slow. They are artists and community-led and they don't know what the outcome's going to be when they write the grant application. So it's a really big shift. I think also thinking about access in a really expansive way.

So how can we look beyond the ramp to the back door? You know, ramp to the back door is not good enough. We need to have higher expectations of ourselves and of each other. And those expectations, we need to remind each other of them in the sector. I'm not saying we need to call each other out, but we need to gently say, "Hang on a second. I can't work with you. I can't work with your venue because your venue is not accessible to my community. The people in my community need different kinds of access." And when I say my community, we should be saying that should be all of our communities.

Anthea:

Mm-hmm.

Jessica:

All of our communities have people in them where there's mobility issues, there's  cognitive stuff. There's maybe inability to leave the house. So I think we just need to do a little bit more thinking. We need to ask ourself that question that you asked me - like regularly, and have that conversation as a sector more rigorously.

Anthea:

Thank you so much for joining us today, Jessica.

Jessica:

Thank you for chatting. It was lovely.

Anthea:

So Hannah, it's lovely to be talking to you again this month. Tell me what are you seeing and not seeing coming up?

Hanna:

Well, Canberra singer-songwriter Ruth O'Brien will be having the launch of her new EP Songs for Abby, a set of acoustic love songs written to and about Ruth's cats. Ruth is calling cat lovers far and wide to come and be part of this love-filled evening to launch her newest tunes into the world. Expect lots of laughs, stories, pictures, and of course good music. It's on at 7:30 PM Saturday the 13th of May at the Street Theater in Canberra. And tickets are available at the Street Theater website, www.thestreet.org.au.

The street does have wheelchair access and a certain number of wheelchair designated seats. If you'd like access to those seats, however, it's best to book in advance. Companion cards are accepted at the street and they use the hearing assistance, listen-everywhere, wifi-based assisted hearing system for patrons who require it. Now, I won't be able to be there, but I'm sure it will be whimsical, deeply loving and full of celebration for these more than human companions. And I'll certainly be keeping my ear out for the songs as they make their way into the digital world.

Anthea:

That sounds delightful.

Hanna:

I think it's so lovely, uh, to have a kind of less anthropocentric take on love songs, you know? Love isn't just for humans. Now, what I will be catching this month is Touretteshero's new work, Burnt Out in Biscuit Land, which is touring England from late April to early July. Described as a show by disabled people about our right to exist. Touretteshero, aka Jess Tom, has blended film, live performance, and conversation into a funny, surreal, moving show, exploring resistance and joy in the face of crisis.

The centerpiece of this experience is a film that follows three Neurodiverse inhabitants of a apocalyptic bunker who are doing their best to survive. But the work also involves introduction by Jess, a discussion and dancing. And additionally Unlimited has supported a series of micro-commissions where each tour location features a work of a local disabled artist that's been made in response to Touretteshero's piece. All performances will be live-streamed. So you can either experience the show at the venue or like me, who's not in England, you can experience it online.

You're also able to switch your ticket to an online version if, at the last minute, you're too ill to attend. All performances will be relaxed. All performances will be captured in English. All performances will have audio description built in. All performances will be at wheelchair accessible venues, and all performances will have COVID-related access provisions in place. There's also, however, a truly excellent visual story guide available as a PDF download. This outlines, in a clear visual format, what to expect, the structure of the event, detailed access notes, content notices and themes. Details of the tour dates and locations can be found at www.theoldcourts.com.

Anthea:

That sounds wonderful. I don't know Touretteshero.

Hanna:

Touretteshero is a bit of a crip superstar. And the other thing coming up that I'm especially excited about is Pony. Do you think you could tell us a little bit about that one, Anthea?

Anthea:

Absolutely. Pony is a new one-woman show by Eloise Snape that is going to be on at Griffin Theatre from the 12th of May to the 17th of June with a captioned performance on the 30th of May. And I'm directing it. The show is about pregnancy, coming of age, anxiety and growing up. Now, as many of us in Sydney know, Griffin Theatre is not particularly accessible. But the good news is that Griffin have managed to not only buy the Stables, but purchase the building next door. So this is the last year that they're gonna be working in the theatre as it stands currently.

From next year, they're closing their doors as they start a rebuild to make a fully accessible building. And I'm pretty thrilled about that. And for those of you not able to make it into the Griffin space, the good news is that Australian Theatre Live is going to be doing a digital recording of the show. So once I know when that will be available, I'll make sure you all know. Hey Hannah, thanks so much for joining me.

Hanna:

Thanks. I'm very excited for all of these things coming up.

Anthea:

Thanks for joining us on Sideshow today. To take us out, I have Want Me Too by Hazel C.

Outro Music:

(singing)