From left: Marc Brew, Joel Simon and Carole McFadden
By Isabel Ovalle
Marc, Joel and Rachel are three creative people. Their areas of expertise are dance and choreography, animation and painting. From a very young age they decided to take up the challenge and not be teachers or secretaries, or choose any other apparently easy career. But on the road to achieve success they had to cope with life-changing tragedies that left them with disabilities.
These and other British artists have taken part in the Arts and Disability Festival organized in the frame of the Qatar UK Year of Culture. The festival closed its curtains yesterday in Katara Cultural Village and gave attendees an opportunity to interact with artists in a talk moderated by Carole McFadden, from the British Council.
Choreographer Marc Brew is renowned for his tender, precise, material that exemplifies the beauty of the moments shared between people. Marc creates dance that is engaging, entertaining and thought provoking.
At age 20 he was in a car accident that left him in a wheelchair. “I started exploring my own creative process and I had the fortune of being in an integrated dance company,” explained the artist. The key to move forward in his life and career was to “look outside the box and reconsider what’s normal and what’s not.”
Despite his disability, Brew stated: “There are no challenges besides physically having access to studio space. Also, people are not very open to this type of art, but perceptions are changing, especially in the UK.”
The artist added that people treated him differently after the accident. “They looked down on me because I was in the wheelchair. I had to become more outgoing to compensate and took up the role to be out there and do things,” he explained.
Now he has extensive experience as a dancer and choreographer with a disability, working with disabled and non-disabled dancers, challenging performer’s expectations and inspiring both the company and the audience.
On his part, Joel Simon, originally from Belgium where he drew lots of cartoons in his youth, suffered a shooting accident in 1997 in which he lost the use of his left leg at age 21. The artist learned to walk again, aided by a prosthesis, and carried on making films for a living.
Before the accident, inspired by Hergé, Franquin and other illustrious Belgian artists, Simon studied fine arts at the Royal Academy in Liege and later design in Manchester, England, where he discovered the joys of stop-motion animation. This experience turned into a passion for animation, as he spent the first two years after college working on Ciderpunks, a low-budget 10 minute mockumentary which won awards at animation festivals around the world.
“I spent the first part of my life dreaming about being an artist. And even though I also wanted to study and teach English, in the end I chose to pursue a career in animation because I was into cartoons and photographs,” he said.
Simon’s main passion was always to create characters. To this end he has worked for several years in the UK and he has brought to Doha’s Arts and Disability Festival his latest film, Macropolis. This movie tells the story of two toys, a dog with only one leg and a cat with only one eye, who escape from the factory.
Shot using a mix of stop-motion animation and time-lapse photography on the streets of Belfast, the film has had a good response. “Kids don’t think a lot about disability when they see the movie,” clarified the director, while adding that the young audience does relate to the characters without noticing that they’re different.
He stated that the frustrations in his life and work are not a product of his disability, but of other problems or issues he has faced. However, he admits that most of his films tell the story of characters that are trying to fit in.
“I was very frustrated at first but, at this point in my life, I feel a lot of frustrations but they don’t have to do with my disability,” he emphasized.
Rachel Gadsden is a multi-award winning artist who has a BA and MA in fine art and was recently awarded two major international commissions to create broad-reaching artistic exhibitions, performances and film for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Gadsden spent the first twenty years of her life living in the Middle East; acquiring a formative cultural experience which continues to inhabit and enrich all of her work.
She has participated in the Festival leading workshops for over 100 youths with disability. “I want young people to know they can achieve anything, but I found they’re very discouraged to the point of saying to me that there is no hope for them,” said Gadsden.
Regardless of this statement, the artist considered that “it’s the beginning of a change about how disability is approached in the Middle East. This isn’t the end of it.”The Peninsula
