tiksi seminar day! a crip-positive experience
Yesterday, 20.10.2025, I woke up to a frosty autumn morning with excitement in my chest (despite the fact that I snoozed for too long and I had no time to drink coffee before heading out). I was lucky to be spending the whole day at a seminar on creative accessibility in performing arts!
There is a chance this is read by someone unfamiliar to the topic, so I’ll first open the terms “creative accessibility” and crip-positivity a bit:
If something is accessible, it means that there are no obstructions accessing this something. In performing arts, accessibility regarding, for example, audiences, often means a hired sign language interpreter near the stage and/or audio description of the performance that an audience member can listen to during the show via headphones. This can provide access, but if these, or any other implementations of accessibility, are not thought as being part of the artistic process, the result can be compared to an audiobook read by a skilled narrator versus using a text to speech program. To quote myself (hehe),
As art is not merely functional, neither should artistic accessibility be (Craig, 2025).
Creative, or artistic, accessibility, then, is making the performance and its artistic language accessible by various means, by various people. It is also about questioning the norms, and asking who is excluded and why. All this regards to both on the stage and off the stage. Who do we see represented, and by whom? To whom are they performing? Excluding disabled people, as it is with any minority, from creating and experiencing art, creates an art field that does not reach its full potential.
Crip-positive is a term I defined in my master’s thesis (to be plugged later) as such:
Crip-positive approach to something, then, would mean allowing for the variety of human experience to be present without expecting it to fit into the “norm”, whatever that might be within the cultural context of the present time and place (Craig, 2025).
The artistical potential of accessibility was explored in the 3 year TIKSI project, spearheaded by DuvTeatern. Within TIKSI, multiple meetings, workshops and two fully realised performances were created, one of them being ‘Livsfarligt på allvar!’, as seen here in my portfolio and here on DuvTeaterns website. 'Livsfarligt’ employed accessibility consultants for easy to follow language, audio description and sign language, all of which were languages used on stage. For my work as the costume designer, I co-hosted workshops that investigated the sound of costume, and I studied ways how the visuality of costume can enhance accessibility. I documented these aspects in my thesis ‘Costume Design and "Who Gets to Get it’, which you can read here! There is also lots of discussion on crip theory, which is wildy interesting and eye opening theory. If you are interested in the topic, feel free to give it a read, or check the bibliography for the absolutely great works cited. I owe so much to Robert McRuer’s work.
The guest speaker at the seminar, Michèle Taylor, was a delight to listen to and to be around with. Taylor works as the director of change for Ramps on the Moon in the UK and works as a disability equality trainer, as well as a consultant. She is vocal about not wanting to be granted access to an ableist system, but for the barriers that create the inaccessible and ableist system to be removed entirely. Many of her words have resonated with me deeply, and I am clearly not alone, for TIKSI was inspired by Taylor’s and her colleagues’ work in Ramps on the Moon.
The seminar, held around the 3rd year mark of the TIKSI project, felt like those series finales where the show reminiscences the road so far, with the main characters enjoying each other’s company, looking to the horizon for tomorrow. New and familiar faces gathering to learn, to appreciate work done and to face the future with optimism for better, but also determination to make it better. Truly, a crip-positive day.
I believe nurturing accessibility through a Crip-positive lens would benefit us all, no matter if you are disabled
or not yet disabled (Craig, 2025).
Links mentioned above, listed here again for convenience:
Craig, M (2025): Costume Design and Who Gets to Get it: Adopting a Crip-positive approach to costuming. Available here
duvteatern.com (n.d): Accessibility as artistic strategy and inspiration (TIKSI). Available here
duvteatern.com(n.d): Livsfarligt på allvar!– a hard-to-interpret murder mystery. Available here
mericostume.com (2024): Livsfarligt på allvar! Available here
Ramps on the Moon(n.d): Ramps on the Moon. Available here
