Philadelphia will be host to INDEPENDENCE STARTS HERE: A FESTIVAL OF DISABILITY ARTS AND CULTURE on October 18-November 20. This Festival celebrates classic and contemporary art influenced or informed by the experience of disability and features artists with and without disabilities. The Festival features performances of theater, music and dance; readings of poetry, plays and other literary arts; historical, cultural, and visual art exhibits; lectures; workshops; film series and other art projects. The festival also celebrates the work of leaders in the disability and cultural communities to increase accessibility in Greater Philadelphia and highlights organizations who offer accessibility on a regular basis and those who are working to create accessibility for the first time. More than forty arts organizations throughout the city will participate in the Festival, some holding events create specially for the Festival and others enhancing their ongoing activities with Festival-related events.

Tickets to Festival events and a complete calendar of daily activities is available at www.independencestartshere.org.

“This Festival is a little different from many other festivals; it began as a grassroots, Philadelphia based effort between the cultural and disability communities to learn from each other and to find solutions to problems related to accessibility and inclusion of artists and audiences with disabilities together,” explained Mimi Smith, whose company VSA arts of Pennsylvania is co-coordinating the event with Art Reach, Inc. “We’re not just producing a festival that will bring the disability community into the City for a few weeks and then forget them again. We’re working to create a community where full inclusion in the arts is permanent and where everyone benefits from that.”

INDEPENDENCE STARTS HERE kicks off on October 18 with an opening celebration introduced by Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith, founder of VSA arts, an international organization that promotes equality in the arts for adults and children with disabilities, and hosted by Academy Awardwinning actress Marlee Matlin. The evening will feature performances by Seattle’s critically-acclaimed integrated dance company Light Motion with Charlene Curtiss and Joanne Petroff; jazz singer/songwriter Melody Gardot who was this year’s winner of VSA Arts’ International Young Soloist Competition, and blind jazz musician Raul Midon.

Bookending the Festival will be a mural dedication on November 2o of a mural designed by Don Gensler and painted with the help of people with disabilities. The mural, at Broad and Race Streets, celebrates people with disabilities and strives to counter stereotypical images.

Throughout the month there will be concerts by Deaf musicians, exhibits of art created by people with disabilities, readings of plays by playwrights with disabilities, poetry readings of works by blind poets, lectures by Deaf writers, plays and a new ballet about characters with disabilities. Every medium is explored and exploited to showcase the myriad of creative abilities of artists with disabilities. Highlights of the Festival include:

• A performance by Beethoven’s Nightmare, the only deaf rock and roll band at The Independence Seaport Museum on October 19 and again on October 20 at North Star Bar.
• All About Art from Moss Rehabilitation Hospital’s permanent art collection at the Philadelphia Foundation’s Community Art Gallery consisting of original artwork by professional artists with disabilities working in many different artistic mediums.
• The Creative Spirit: A Symposium for Artists with Visual Disabilities at the James A. Michener Art Museum on October 23. Featuring collage artist Robert Jackson who will give a presentation on “Collages and Assemblages: Having Fun”, the symposium will be facilitated by Dr. Richard Goldberg artists/panelists Ashby Saunders, Vince Ceglia, Will Ursprung, John Searts, Robert Fluhr and Barry Snyder discussing their work and the challenges and accomplishments they have experienced as artists working with various visual impairments.
• Deaf Cirque, a family event featuring deaf mimes, magicians and clowns and emceed by Simon Carmel, winner of the 1998 World Deaf Magicians Fest
• Author lectures at the Free Library of Philadelphia featuring Margalit Fox reading from her new book Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind (October 23) and Deaf author Mark Drolsbaugh, author of Deaf Again who will share his experiences about what it is like to be deaf. Introduced by acclaimed Philadelphia writer Lorene Carey, the program will be voiced for hearing audiences.
• A self-guided tour at the Philadelphia Museum of Art of works by artists in the museum’s permanent collections who have or had disabilities, including Edgar Degas, Horace Pippin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent Van Gogh, among others.
• Freedom to Create, the first city-wide artist exhibition at Liberty Resources’ new Independence Arts Studio with over 100 works of art created by 45 established and emerging artists from the Philadelphia region. Throughout the three weeks of the exhibition (October 25-November 16) Independence Arts Studio will also host artist demonstrations around creating custom-made accessible easels and adaptable brush holders (October 26), theater mask making in leather and paper mache (October 31); the ancient art of papermaking (November 7); and printmaking (November 9).
• Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel presented by Amaryllis Theatre Company on November 1- 18 featuring blind actress Pamela Sabaugh in the title role. This is the first time this play about a blind character has been performed by a blind actress.
• The world premiere of the new ballet Helen Keller, performed and created by Rebecca Davis Dance Company on November 2 and 3. This new ballet depicts the inspirational life of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan.
• Art Ability, a juried exhibition sponsored by Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital featuring hundreds of pieces of art by more than 100 national and international artists with physical and cognitive disabilities.
• A play reading series presented by Amaryllis Theatre Company and Straw Flower Productions of three plays by the country’s top disabled playwrights: Los Angeles playwright Lynn Manning’s In The Absence of Light about a woman, blind from a brain tumor who might have her eyesight restored by a new laser surgery procedure and her blind-from-birth fiancée who is terrified that their love may not survive (November 4); Award-winning playwright and disability rights activist Mike Ervin’s Hamster in the Jungle, a comedy about ridiculous measures taken under impossible circumstances (November 5); and Boston playwright Paul Kahn’s The Making of Free Verse, a social and romantic comedy that shows what happens when a reclusive writer with a disability trusts his life story and his heart to a beautiful, young documentary filmmaker (November 11).
• A series of films by South African filmmaker Shelley Barry, including the multi awardwinning Whole—A Trinity of Being at Inglis House (November 9) and the film Shameless: The Art of Disability by Philadelphia native Bonnie Sherr Klein at Bryn Mawr Film Institute (November 10)
• The Zoo Story by Edward Albee performed by Deaf West Theatre Company actors Tyrone Giordano and Troy Kotsur entirely in American Sign Language and voiced English on November 9 and 10 at the Annenberg Center
• eVokability: The Walking Project on November 15, 16 and 17, exploring ideas and images surrounding the notion of walking. Taking a critical look at a society that prizes mobility, the performers wear costumes embedded with sensors that track the shape and force of physical gestures and use the dynamics to generate live media projections that amplify their movements.
• JazzArtSigns, presented by Art Reach, Inc on November 19, featuring acclaimed vocalist Lisa Thorson’s groundbreaking multi-media multi-sensory and interactive improvised jazz performance.

INDEPENDENCE STARTS HERE is supported by Presenting Sponsors Liberty Resources, Inc. (Philadelphia’s Center for Independent Living for People with Disabilities) and VSA arts. Other sponsors include The Philadelphia Foundation, Independence Foundation, the Inglis Foundation, the Samuel S. Fels Fund, the Ethel Louise Armstrong Foundation, Glaxo Smith Kline, the Maxwell Strawbridge Foundation, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. City Paper is the exclusive print media sponsor. WXPN is the radio sponsor.

For further information, please call 215-564-2431 or visit the website at www.independencestartshere.org.