Michael Northen

AMARYLLIS AND THE PHILLY FESTIVAL: A BIASED REPORT

In October and November of this year, Philadelphia was the site of a month long Disability and the Arts Festival. Officially named “Independence Starts Here,” this festival could well provide a national model for other disability and the arts festivals.

The festival was kicked off in high style at the Philadelphia Kimmel Center. Hosted by Marlee Matlin and Jeanne Kennedy Smith, it served as a venue for disabilities song and dance that had the audience engaged the entire time. Performers included Raul Midon, wheelchair dance performers Light Motion, and Philadelphia’s Melody Gardot. A reception of presenters, performers and participants was held after the show, and no one could have left the building without feeling the buzz of excitement at the evening they had just been part of.

Throughout the next month, disability dance, art, poetry, music, drama and other creative endeavors bloomed throughout and around the city. The amazing number and diversity of events is beautifully chronicled on the Independence Starts Here site by web designer Eliot Spindel.

In shadow of the more glamorous Kimmel Center presentations, one of the true heroes of the festival has to be the Amaryllis Theater. Under artistic director of Mimi Kenney Smith, Amaryllis Theater provided an opportunity in the retooled The Playground at the Adrienne Theater on Samson St. for both local and national artists to display their talents. Of the many acts and artists presented by Amaryllis, two in particular had a special connection with Wordgathering.

The first was the production of "Hand to Hand," a joint venture between poets of Inglis House and Amaryllis, co-directed by Stephen Smith and Josette Todaro Smith. Over fourteen months in the making, this presentation centered around the poetry of Yvette Green, Stuart Sanderson, Gina Minter, Rita McGinley and Robyn Monahan. Each poem focused on an experience of one of these writers, all of whom are in wheelchairs. Through choral and individual reading, background music suggested by some of the poems, and video collages the cast brought these experiences to the audience. The specialized stage entrances at the theater made it possible for the performers to enter the stage smoothly, with no break in the performance. One especially effective piece, done with the help of videographer Matthew Clark, was a clip centered around Stuart Sanderson’s poem, "If My Hands Could," in which musician/therapist Audrey Hausig guided Sanderson through the performance of the poem on guitar as she sang. Rob Stoller’s video interviews with each the performers also added an important texture to the entire presentation. One problem that does remain to solved at the Adrienne is access to the main entrance of the theater for wheelchairs. Trying to get a the narrow metal ramp (which had to be held on two sides) in the chilly November winds provided some unscheduled entertainment in itself.

A second event with special meaning for Wordgathering was a staged reading of Paul Kahn’s The Making of Free Verse. Kahn, a Boston-based poet and playwright, is a frequent contributor to our journal. The informality of the setting allowed audience members to enter into a question and answer session with the author after the play.

Though all readers contributed to bringing Kahn’s drama of a disabled poet to life, one of the more remarkable readings was that of David Simpson who amazed audience members with the rapidity and fluency of his reading in Braille. Simpson made several other appearances during the festival including a piano duet with his brother Daniel (also blind) at Amaryllis and participation in a performance of John Adam’s Transformation of Souls by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia. Dan, for his part, also appeared in a reading Lynn Manning’s In the Absence of Light and with poet Ona Gritz in a joint reading of their own poetry at the Philadelphia Free Library. One could complicate the picture further by saying the Amaryllis Theater Company presented a third reading of a play by a disabled playwright, Mike Ervin’s A Hamster in the Jungle, and that Lynn Manning did a reading of his own play Weights at LaSalle University. But you get the picture – the tendrils of talent intertwined from venue to venue across the city. In the center of it all, Amaryllis was quietly at the hub of the wheel.

It may be a bit too much to hope that such an event as the Disability and the Arts Festival could become an annual feature in Philadelphia. After it all, it took much more than a year to plan. What one can hope for, though, is that other cities took note of their accomplishments here and will spin off with festivals of their own. If they do, they may just want to drop in and pay a visit to the folks at Amaryllis first.