Amber DiPietra's blog

I was going to add this to the agenda, but I wasn't sure about how that worked since I cannot attend the Sunday meeting. I thought it could live here for now and I will re-post it again later when there is a meeting I can go to.

In June, the Bay Area will be treated to year 27 of Superfest, the longest-running disability film festival in the world. This year, films
from 60 international entries were narrowed down to a select few.

Last weekend, I attended the Dance Under Construction conference hosted by UCB’s Theater, Dance and Disability Studies Departments. Academics and artists from all over the country came to discuss how integrated dance and new explorations with differently abled bodies are reshaping the core aesthetics of performance arts and creating a fresh movement vocabulary. The Bay Area is at the heart of this, with AXIS Dance Company residing in Oakland and Dandelion Dance Theater in San Francisco.

Each year, since 1986, the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in conjunction with the San Francisco Arts Commission holds a juried
exhibition of visual art made by blind or low vision artists. Gestural, kinesthetic and tactile process unfolds through sculpture, paintings and even photography.

Meanwhile, the Bay Area, home to the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement in the 1970’s, today remains one of the most accessible
cities for the disabled in terms of transit, policy and programming. The Bancroft maintains an impressive written and oral archive of the movement while UCB and SF State offer departments that figure prominently in the burgeoning academic discipline that is disability studies.

So, I suppose my question is—how does all this energy and innovation translate into the poetry community? In conventional literature,
disability is shackled to outmoded tropes (the saccharine triumph stories and the throwbacks to telethon pity). It goes without saying that Read more