Disability Arts Online

I stumbled onto Disability Arts Online website today and found it pretty interesting. From their site:

dao exists to showcase disability and deaf arts, profile artists and to offer informative critical evaluation, serving the development of disability arts.

dao is fuelled by disabled and deaf artists, performers, writers and musicians working across art forms with a passion for saying something relevent about disability and impairment. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes reflective, sometimes angry, often questionning and insightful, disability arts is a relatively new art form which has a unique perspective on the arts afforded by disabled people.

dao originated in 2002 as a section on Council England's website, given over to profiling disability arts events, organisations and artists. Over the last four years, with funding from Arts Council England dao has built up a vast body of discussion, reviews, interviews, profiles, blogs and resources including a chronology of the history of disability arts in the UK.

dao also performs a role as a tool for students, with many links to bodies within higher and further education. On an informal basis, dao frequently provides information and advice to students who are either on disability studies courses or researching disability arts.

I particularly enjoyed reading the blogs by Signdance Collective and their trip to India as well as learning about the band Heavy Load. Heavy Load is a punk band in which three of the members have a learning disability. They have also had a documentary made about the struggle for success also called Heavy Load. To see more about the documentary, click here.