Awakenings Overview: Darron Davies

"The Awakenings Festival is an exciting celebration of ability held every October in Horsham, Victoria, Australia. It commenced in 1996 as an initiative of Wimmera Uniting Care and is committed to improving access to the arts for people of all abilities. It attracts performers from around Australia and Internationally and is Australia's only regional arts disability festival." Awakenings website

Having attended the Awakenings Festival since its inception, in the role of an observer, a helper backstage and a director/actor within theatre groups, I have endlessly been amazed by the impact of the festival.

While my bias is towards Drama I have also found myself in canoes, four-wheel drives, and small yachts – things that I would rarely have done if not given the opportunity.

Darron Davies and part of The Troupadoors on way to the Awakenings Festival.

The Awakenings Festival is a powerful event that expresses itself in a variety of ways: theatre group members who carry drink bottles ever week into the theatre group I tutor, catching my eye on occasions and pointing to the bottle. A gesture telling me: ‘we have been in this thing together. I enjoyed it. I can’t wait to go again.’

On other occasions it is the one member who has literally worn out his Awakenings t- shirt as he wants to wear it everyday, demanding that his Mum washes it every evening.

Awakenings is the person who points at his t-shirt, gets his voice around the difficult word, and stretches his arms out mimicking flying, followed by a big smile.

It is the theatre group member who, experiencing an eating disorder, understands the gravity of the situation when told, "If you don’t eat properly you’ll get sick and then you won’t be able to attend next year’s festival." Awakenings is the countdown, the sleeps, the restless and expectant nights spoken of by parents. It is the journey, the meeting with friends, and the developing of friends- the sharing of experiences.

It is the recognition of skill, the building of confidence and the desire to go further the following year. It is the routine and that strange moment – it must be strange because people with a disability don’t experience it all that often: "I have been recognized, not because I am disabled, but because I can entertain." What an extraordinary feeling to be valued because of your skill! To have people remember last year’s performance, who remember the lines of your performance last night and who speak to you. People who see you as a role- model and step back in awe at times because of what you have achieved.

Awakenings is a time of opportunity. I would never have imagined that in the ten years of attending the festival that I would have found myself improvising, singing in a choir, playing my own compositions in a rock group, and being invited to perform in a production with three actors in wheelchairs.

Awakenings has been a great period of growth for me – and this is rarely something spoken of. Over the years I have seen many people in support roles gain a deeper appreciation of disability. More importantly these people have grown in their recognition that the Festival has a deeply spiritual quality. Once the fear and the strangeness of being involved in a very different culture passes these people start seeing people with disability as friends. Nothing more. Nothing less. Everything normalizes and it simply becomes a process of connecting with others – whether it is in a canoe, backstage, in the audience, or with an audience. Disability isn’t the issue. The issue is moving beyond disability to see the depth of people – the shared humanity – the fact that disability is often in the heads of others and is projected onto others.

The Awakenings Festival creates a beautiful loop in which joy builds off joy. The audience backstage moves on stage and takes their joy into the audience. The audience moves on stage and so the loop continues.

The formative nature of the festival is one of its richest aspects and boy have I seen this misunderstood as well as grasped over the years. Those with an agenda in disability arts simply ‘don’t get’ it. Their agenda gets in the way, tells them how one should always impose value onto the experience of people with a disability. Those who ‘get it’ see the richness of providing people with an opportunity. You start with their strengths, however small they are. You let those people – with the deepest humanity – experience drama. You let them speak to their peers, their contemporaries. You let them get feedback. You let them engage. You let the spirit enter- and in doing so plant a seed that so often results in incredible growth. And as mentioned before this is a growth not confined solely to those with a disability.

This spirit strikes members of the community, parents, it strikes support workers, it touches politicians, arts administrators. Its path lasts long after the event, raising itself again in the dedicated support workers hunting submissions, driving for hours to get to the festival, or the actors simply wearing their hats and t-shirts into the ground, making year round references to the festival in gestures as varied as a mimed aeroplane or the struggle to get the tongue around the festival’s name. It is the tongue that eventually gets its way around the word, freer, each year’s spirit manifesting itself even deeper into that person’s life.

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