State of Play - creator's notes
In 2014, I acquired a disability. Following an extremely drunken night in Berlin, I wandered across a highway and directly into the path of the only car on the road. It struck me. I flew up with the impact, my body completing a mildly impressive cartwheel through the night air before dropping into bitumen and unconsciousness. I have been told this story so many times that I can see the event play out like a film, my brain filling in the gaps from what would have actually been: confusion, then pain, then darkness.
This accident broke my body and injured my brain: severely, I was told. Doctors took care to emphasise how close I came to death, how lucky I was, and I repeated their words to myself like a mantra. My world was one thing, then there was violence, and then it was something different: tiny and unfamiliar. I woke up in a body that suddenly felt so alien, and I had to fight to regain some semblance of control over myself. Most of the time I had the energy levels of an overfed housecat. Most of the time I had panic attacks in crowds and exploded in anger over the smallest thing. The early days of my acquired brain injury were defined by rage, something undefinable that saturated my life, a symptom of something unnamable.
10 years on, I’m no longer angry. Okay, that’s a lie: I am angry, but not for myself. I’ve learned to channel my feelings into my work: as a playwright, performer, and now as an access consultant. Before my accident, my work had the privilege of being almost patently ‘non-political’. Today, it’s almost entirely political, because my existence is classed as such: by society, by politicians, by horrible policy and a constant defunding of the structures that might help either of my communities. I only wish it hadn’t taken me becoming disabled to take action.
Political doesn’t necessarily mean ‘angry’, and this is the proposition at the centre of State of Play, my upcoming performance work: how does queer-disabled joy exist in a performance context? Happiness flies in the face of any three-act structure. It’s inherently devoid of tension. But there are so many expressions of marginalised trauma that it feels important to proudly say yes, we’re allowed to be happy: without any curious incident to highlight how our disabilities make us “special” (urgh), and without conforming to the heteronormative idea of art-making.
Moving between a performance lecture interrogating classical representations of queerness and disability, poetic monologues that allow these characters to take the stage themselves, and an open creative forum honouring marginalised joy, State of Play takes audiences on a journey to dispel the fear of a fallible mind and body. Anything can happen at any time: a blood vessel may burst in your brain while you sleep, or a car might hit you while you cross the road. Even so, we have to keep living.