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I’d like to welcome without further ado Caroline Bowditch, who’s going to talk about
The Mosquito Effect.
Hello, thank you for tearing yourselves away from the Mayor.
Sorry, I haven’t been there yet. I will.
Late last year I had the pleasure of going to see Annie Lennox
perform at the Roundhouse in Camden and it was a fundraiser for
the Anita Roddick, well connected to Anita Roddick.
It was, it was basically a *** fundraiser and I, I had the joy
of going, but it was all based around Anita Roddick, who was the founder of the Bodyshop’s work.
And there were various quotes of hers throughout the evening
that were shared with us in celebration of her life.
And one particular quote that has stuck with me and this was
the instigator for, for this presentation, was that she said
“if you think you’re too small to have an impact try going to bed
with a mosquito in the room.” It made me reflect on my role as dance agent for change
with Scottish Dance Theatre and it made me begin to do a bit of a direct comparison.
So – we’re out of order... Okay, so here’s me and a mosquito.
So what do we know about mosquitoes?
Well, mosquitoes are small, they’re persistent, they have an
annoying buzz, they’re quite targeted, they have an ability to
travel long distances, they’re attracted to stagnant places, and
surprisingly their favourite colour is blue. I didn’t know this.
Did you know that about mosquitoes? No.
Don’t have blue tents, that’s my advice to you, if you learn
nothing else in the next eighteen minutes take away that with you. So, me.
Small, can’t, I keep trying to deny that but it just doesn’t work. I forget on a regular basis.
Persistent – very, annoying buzz – some would say, targeted –
definitely, ability to travel long distances – yes. So we’re still quite similar.
Differences here become that I’m not attracted to stagnant
places, but I am attracted to places that are transforming. And my favourite colour is red.
So let me tell you a bit about my role at Scottish Dance Theatre.
I am known as their dance agent for change and it was joyous
for me to be involved with the Creative Case Symposium yesterday and hear Tony talk about
agents for change. I’ve been with the company for four years and my role has six very clear aims.
Sorry, I just have to go back. My first aim is to challenge the idea of what is a dancer and
who can dance. I’m also there to increase the number of disabled people
dancing in Scotland, to increase the confidence of people
delivering dance in Scotland, to explore the possibility of breaking new artistic ground with
inclusion at the forefront, and this was most evident last year when I performed in and also
co-choreographed a piece called NQR, which some of you may have seen.
NQR was not a piece about disability. I co-choreographed it with a very dear friend of mine,
a fellow Australian disabled choreographer Marc Brew, and Janet Smith, the artistic director of
Scottish Dance Theatre. NQR stands for not quite right, and it’s a medical acronym that
was used in patient’s records up until 1988 when patients all of
a sudden got access to their records to describe some sort of difference that
they couldn’t diagnose. I became fascinated with this idea of we’re all a bit NQR really,
we just contain it until we can’t anymore. So that was the basis of our exploration for NQR.
NQR toured the whole of the UK and had a very successful run
and I’ll come back to talk about some more of that. My role is also about offering an
integrated creative learning experience, so I’m part of the education team as well at
Scottish Dance Theatre, and I teach dance as part of my role.
And the last point is about mapping the path for the future of inclusive dance in Scotland.
So initially my post was two years. That’s quite a lot to achieve in two years.
Conveniently for me it got extended, and I’ll tell you that story in a sec. Thanks Martin for intervening.
So, it was a two year post, it was funded through the
equalities scheme of Scottish Arts Council, as it was known then.
Not long before my post was due to end we had an unsolicited call from Scottish Arts Council
offering us another two years’ of funding, but this time the money was going to come from the
dance pot, not from the equalities pot, so we’ve had a complete shift, which I think is really
important to acknowledge. A lot of that had come, I think, because for the first eighteen
months of my post I’d been tracked by Jo Verrett, who had done an impact report of everything
that I was doing, so she was tracking the impact that I was having and what we were finding
was there was a significant impact. My role is nine months a year, which means that for me as still
a practicing artist I still get to flounce off and be a dancer,
performer, choreographer, whatever I want to, which is really important for me as an artist actually.
I think if I’d been offered a full-time job I would have kind of gone [squeals].
And coming in as a freelancer it was really important to know
that I was still going to have that creative outlet for me.
As I already said, I’ve got a cross-organisational remit, so my
remit is about performing, it’s about making, it’s about working with the creative team, so it’s
across education. And then it’s also around the operational and management side of it.
So I’m also working with our marketing team.
I’m working to embed at every level within the organisation inclusivity.
My role sits across them all. So it has a greater impact.
Scottish Dance Theatre also is based within Dundee Rep Theatre
and so my role has not just been a fit at SDT, but has also had a ripple within the Rep.
It’s a bit like we have dropped, SDT has dropped quite a heavy
rock into, into the kind of pond of, of the Rep theatre and, and the effects are,
are now being felt as well. And I also have a leadership role, and we talked yesterday
again a lot about leadership, which I thought was fascinating.
But the leadership role, as you saw from the aims, was never written in.
But it’s what’s come. And again it’s this thing about I feel a bit like I’m an
incidental or an accidental leader. I never set out to be a leader, it just happened to me because
I’m gobby, and I’m confident, and I’m assertive and I will tell it like it is.
And I think I’ve spent the last three and a half years having
really challenging conversations with people across Scotland.
There is also this interesting thing that’s happening around
roe modelling, and that’s been reinforced to me time and time
again, is about the importance of role models for young disabled people especially,
to see this as a possibility. To see dance as a possibility. For the first year I spent so much time
and energy just trying to get disabled people to think that they belonged in the world
of dance, because they’d been so excluded from it for so long
that to just kind of go it’s okay, come on, it’s fine, it’s
going to be great, yes, and I’ll tell you some more about that in a sec.
So. Let me give you some vital statistics, which might help in our
kind of conversation, thinking about the impact that an agent
for change could have within an organisation. When I was being an independent artist
before I came to SDT, on average I was having contact with about, in the three years
before I joined SDT, I had probably performed in front of about fifteen hundred people over four years.
Yes. I’m just going to give you some basics.
In the last three and a half years SDT has put me in front of eleven thousand plus people.
We have a tiny little duet that I made which some of you may have seen called the long and the short of it.
It’s three and a half minutes of joy and it’s one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in my life.
And four and a half thousand people have watched it on YouTube. I’m sure that half of
that is my mother... [laughter]...because you can look at where they come from
and there’s a whole lot of Australians watching me, and I’m sure
it’s my mum going “I’ll just watch her this one last time”. I’ve met just over three thousand
people in workshops, spoken to about twelve thou, twelve hundred people in conference
presentations, and done lots of training sessions. My total contacts are over twenty thousand.
For me as a disabled person that’s a lot of people to have contact with.
I think the important thing to remember at SDT is that we,
Scottish Dance Theatre don’t want to be an inclusive company,
they’re never going to be an inclusive company, that’s not their ambition.
Their ambition was, and still is, to investigate things that are of interest and reflect our society of today.
And Janet Smith is completely committed to doing that, and she does it.
If she says she’s going to do it she absolutely will run with it, and she’s succeeding at that.
I don’t know if any of you saw a recent BBC programme that I
was in called Dance, the most incredible thing about contemporary dance.
It was one of my proudest moments. Not because I finally got onto the BBC, but because it was me
in amongst Alistair Spalding, all these big name people, and I was there talking about dance,
and we acknowledged again yesterday that often we get wheeled in – Jonzi D and I have been
on so many panels together it’s not funny – but we get wheeled in to talk about diversity.
I wasn’t talking about diversity I was talking about dance.
And that was such a significant achievement for me, but also the sector, I think. To just kind of go
it’s not a separate thing anymore. Inclusive dance doesn’t sit over there anymore it’s here, it’s
in amongst what we do, and that’s exactly where it should be.
It’s not an add-on, it’s not an afterthought, it’s ingrained in us if we take it on.
So what’s the perfect environment for an agent for change?
You need to have a willing host and fertile ground.
For me it was a joy, because I came into Scottish Dance Theatre who have got a track record
and a reputation. They’ve already got an audience that Janet just happened to put me in front of.
They didn’t necessarily know that they were coming to see an inclusive performance.
I literally appeared out of a box. Ta-da! Bet you weren’t expecting me!
No, most of them weren’t, but actually what our audience
research showed was that it was a positive experience for them.
You need a champion, you need someone that’s going to run with it within your organisation.
And that for me was Janet Smith, and she is tireless in her efforts.
Conveniently I went to them with a breadth of skills, so I
could do for them everything from being a dancer-performer
through to doing a training session in disability equality
through to doing project management through to teaching, so to
have someone that’s got a breadth of skills but isn’t just a
kind of one trick pony is quite helpful to have.
So someone who’s a bit more multi-dimensional, and we all know
that we’re, more and more we’re needing to become portfolio
artists, so that’s what we have to do anyway.
For me there’s a recognition that I’m needed.
Scottish Dance Theatre acknowledge that they need me, they
needed to do this, and they needed someone that was going to
hold their hand to go through the process, and I was more than willing to do that. And the title.
My title comes with change in it, which suggests that if you’re going to interact with me
something is going to happen. We’re not just going to have a stagnant conversation
because I come with an expectation that you want to meet me and that you’re willing
to have a shift in your thinking, a cultural shift is what I’m after.
What were my repellents?
Trying to be all things to all people. My role is multi-dimensional, but I’ve had many times in the
last four and a half, three and a half years where I’ve just thought I’m not doing any good for
anyone because I’m just literally hopping, I’m not digging into anything especially.
So that’s been challenging, but it’s been acknowledged and we’ve dealt with it and we’ve
moved on and just broken it into chunks. The lack of a network. Luke Powell, bless him,
there have been some significant people, Luke Powell has been one of them, Jo Verrett’s
been a massive supporter of mine. There was a woman, a fantastic
woman called Mairi Taylor, who was an access officer with Federation of Scottish Theatres, and
we just clung to each other because it was like we knew that we
were doing similar things but somehow it just feels easier knowing that you’re not alone.
You’re not the only one doing it. That other people are in this and trying to get the same, in
the same direction as you. The joy of gatekeepers.
I want to tell you a tiny story about the gatekeepers that I encountered within the first six
months of my role. There is a rehab centre in, just outside of Dundee that I
thought that’s a great place to start, I want to dance with
people with physical disabilities, where else should I go but to a rehab centre?
So me and my little cocky Australian-ness ring up and go hi, my name’s Caroline Bowditch,
I’m ringing up from Scottish Dance, I’m just wondering if I could come and run a dance workshop with
some of the people that use your service. You do realise that we work with people with physical disabilities?
They couldn’t see me at this point, so had no idea. I’ll have the manager ring you back.
Yes, right, nothing. I didn’t hear a thing.
Two weeks later hi, it’s Caroline Bowditch ringing from Scottish Dance Theatre.
It took me four phone calls to get a meeting with the manager
and I bet you can imagine the faces on the receptionist when I rocked through the door.
Hi, I’m Caroline Bowditch, I’m from Scottish Dance Theatre and
I’m here to run a dance workshop. It was just like...
[laughter] Sometimes humiliation is quite a good tool.
We love the status quo.
We really love status quo. And there has been, there is still a genuine reluctance and
resistance to change, and that’s just going to take time.
And for me there has been a pressure of time, knowing that this
is not, this is not an infinite post, it finishes in March next
year, so I’m on the downward spiral of trying to get everything in before I finish.
I want to leave you with another cosmetic giant woman, who also
has a quote about a bug, which I wish for you to take away as a thought.
Aerodynamically bumble bees shouldn’t be able to fly, but they don’t know that
so they keep flying anyway. I love the thought about if young disabled kids were taught
that they could dance, that they could do anything, then they
would grow up thinking that they can rather than that they
can’t, and that this is a world for them and this is where they
belong, and they belong in the middle with us.
This is where they belong.
Thank you very much.