Belinda Locke

I am a theatre director, performer and emerging leader currently based in Melbourne who identifies as experiencing disability due to a long-term diagnosis of fibromyalgia (chronic pain and fatigue).

I believe in an arts community where everyone’s voice can be heard. Where arts organisations engage with artists and audiences that represent the full diversity of the communities we live in. Where artists with disability enter through the front door, instead of the back. This is the vision that I advocate for in all of my work as an artist and as an emerging leader.

As much as I create performances to have my own voice heard, I work to enable the voices of others by establishing, curating and producing festivals and events – such as in 2015 when I was the Founding Festival Director of Undercover Artist Festival, a new national festival for Australian and New Zealand artists experiencing deafness or disability hosted at Queensland Theatre Company (http://undercoverartistfest.com/about/).

While I have been successful in providing platforms for other artists experiencing disability to develop and showcase their work, I am keen to open up my own practice more in 2017 and beyond to collaborate with other artists in the disability sector. My performance practice has previously involved the creation of several solo performance works, and the adaptation and direction of Angela Carter’s magical realist short story The Tiger’s Bride as part of my PhD study into the use of magical realism to liberate marginalised voices (video footage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TPDBOc4KrQ).

I would like to participate in the Three Day Residency with Jenny Sealy as I have great respect for her work and the ethos of Graeae, which I was introduced to through my engagement in Australia Council’s Sync Leadership Program (2014). I am excited by the potential to learn more about Graeae’s ‘aesthetics of access’ in the context of Sarah Kane’s play 4:48 Psychosis, particularly due to my lived experience with depression.