Hello, my name is Angela Alves. I speak from a white, female, disabled perspective. Elena Basteri asked me to write a statement for this website. Elena is one of the four women who comprise the central team, and an additional five people have supported the project as “members of the broader team”. I am one of those people and have been responsible for the “focus on inclusivity and accessibility”. My task was and is to provide support in an advisory capacity and to help shape the working process with regard to issues of accessibility.
I would like to take this opportunity to take a look back and reflect on the position in question:
What does it mean to have a person on the team who engages with the project with a particular focus on inclusivity and accessibility? What kinds of tasks and responsibilities are accrued for all parties? To what extent is an inclusion process possible within the framework of the existing working structures, and what conditions are necessary for ensuring successful inclusivity work?
It is, of course, impossible for me to answer all of these questions in any great detail here, but I will at least attempt to outline a response that might prove useful in one way or another.
The “Tanzvermittlungszentrum” is a workshop of the future that is committed to reorienting a sphere of work that is still in its infancy.
The steering group’s first objective is to ascertain what dance education and outreach is and can be, how dance education and outreach is perceived in Berlin, where and how it takes place, and, above all, what work still needs to be done in this area.
Over the past 15 months, a comprehensive survey and targeted interviews with experts were prepared, conducted, and evaluated; a number of both public and semi-public events were held; discourse was produced, analysed, documented, and compiled in a representative manner for a number of different target audiences in a series of labs, workshops, and panels. All of this took place during a global pandemic, with a newly assembled team, and under precarious working conditions.
Collaborating with the “steering group for a Tanzvermittlungszentrum” was one of my first experiences beyond the context of a more sheltered working environment – as I had come to know it through my work as a disabled artist involved in collaborative projects with “Making a Difference” or the Sophiensaele – and through which I was ushered into the normative enterprise of dance. When I began my collaboration with the Sophiensaele in 2019, an inclusive transformation process had already been in motion there for a number of years – one that focussed on inclusivity, was critical of hierarchies of power, and conscious of discrimination. This aspect is crucial when it comes to comprehending the significance of having a disabled choreographer occupy the role of “inclusion expert” within the dance education project.
When the collaborative work with the steering group for a future Berliner Tanzvermittlungszentrum commenced, the team had only recently been assembled. I was the only disabled person in an otherwise non-disabled team.
We were interested in both planning our activities (surveys, interviews and events) in an accessible way and fostering an accessible mode of working within the team itself.
The key word here is accessibility.
Accessibility occurs when there is no longer a need for inclusivity, because no one is excluded any longer.
Those who wish to achieve inclusivity essentially need only do three things:
- 1create access for people who have previously been excluded,
- be curious and listen, demonstrate a willingness to be critically challenged,
- create space for re-organisation.
It is, however, certainly not the case that I learned how to achieve this within a perfectly functioning, inclusive working environment and am now able to simply transfer this knowledge into other spaces. Inclusivity is a collective process. And the Sophiensaele is also still in the midst of its own transformation process. The structures that exist there are just as rigid and riddled with ignorance as they are anywhere else. But this institution acknowledges its ignorance and is extending an offer to the dance community to allow its own structures to be transformed with the help of the very people from whom they can also learn about the weaknesses of these same structures: if you really want to know where the barriers lie, your best bet is to consult the people who come up against them.
But unfortunately, this game of question and answer played in the name of inclusivity is incredibly complicated. The communicative space alone is in many ways sensitive and prone to interference, because it constantly finds itself under the strain of scarcity. There is a lack of practical, emotional, and psychological resources on all sides. There is a lack of time, sensitivity, and communication skills. In these communicative spaces, people who are perpetually teetering on the verge of burn-out are forced to interact with those who have learned to adapt as best they can to ableist, classist, and racist structures in a bid to ensure their own survival.
There is a term in psychology known as ‘adaptive preference’, which more or less means that what a person considers to be their own free choice is actually the result of their having adapted to repressive frameworks. I wonder if the inclusion processes of the future will involve exposing adaptive preferences and translating these by way of successful communication into the social choreography of a collective response to systematic and internalised discrimination. Could such tense communicative contexts be construed as a shared coping strategy – one in which inclusivity is melded with care and sustainability into a post-capitalist transformative practice?
On the one hand, working spaces that are aware of transformation actively seek out people from a variety of marginalised groups because they recognise that these people’s adaptive preferences constitute a form of knowledge and can provide transformative impetus to propel us towards our goal of an inclusive society. On the other hand, these spaces understand that inclusivity is not a charity event, but should rather be considered an instrument of resistance against the immensely repressive structures of exploitation that the cultural sector never tires of reproducing – despite the impending threat of collapse.
It is therefore crucial that those who call for inclusivity do in fact want it. Inclusivity will only be possible if there is a collective desire to foster a future culture of the many, in which everyone is equal. Moreover, this desire also requires an understanding of inclusivity that is not rooted in a sense of charity, but rather based upon the will to collectively resist the current repressive general conditions of freelance cultural activities.
Four mothers and freelance cultural workers, who are simultaneously involved in a number of other projects, have as if by chance gifted the city of Berlin with a vision and have encountered all manner of barriers in the process. They accumulated countless hours of overtime, worked on Saturdays and Sundays, flouted their emotional, psychological, and physical limits, retired from the project due to burn-out and then came back again, rubbed each other the wrong way, opened each other up, and carried one another. And on top of all of this, they were confronted with a critical public and had an “inclusion expert” patiently mirror to them time and again the reasons why the working conditions of this project were neither accessible nor sustainable. When a project is stretched so close to its breaking point, it can be extremely difficult for a team to not only implement inclusivity as a mere service provided by one single person, but additionally to endure that person slowing down the process and claiming that this is now sustainable and good for everyone.
Since then, I have gained more experience working with non-disabled teams and a clearer perspective in terms of what inclusivity work can be and can accomplish. In hindsight, I see my role as a “disabled inclusion expert” within teams like these as a cautious heralding and initiation of a transformation process.
Even in our first discussions, we talked about the collective dimension of accessibility and reached a collective understanding of inclusivity not as a service that could be fulfilled by my position alone, but instead could only work as a collective process. This must be supported by all members of the team and even then is still doomed to fail because there is not enough time and expectations are too high.
This common basis for thought constitutes one of my fundamental preconditions before I can even begin working within a team. Everything that happens from that point on will depend on the extent to which the team manages to establish a transformative consciousness, and the extent to which it can also decide in practical terms during the course of the working process to agree on a common, inclusive practice within the existing structures.
It felt like a balancing act, what Janne, Gabriele, Nora, and Elena got involved in – and one for which they had next to no resources at their disposal. It is for this reason that I am so deeply grateful to these incredible women, because I am certain that the ideas for a transformative practice of inclusivity that they developed collectively will help shape the concept of a “Tanzvermittlungszentrum” of the future.