Crip Constellations

Curated by Patrick Gunasekera for the Audible Edge Night School, Crip Constellations is a series of disabled-only workshops and gatherings, to explore how our community creates worlds of possibility, growth and resilience through music practice. Through reflective exercises, guided group discussion, and a music workshop hour with a practicing disabled artist, we will authentically investigate the dilemmas and joys of our work, including:

• What does it mean to create sound and performance in a world which doesn’t listen to or see us?

• How important is care and self-love in our practices, and who are we making music for?

• How do we honour the lineages of historical and contemporary disabled music artists? How has their work and lives honoured us?

• What are the structural, social, cultural and internalised barriers that hold us back from creating work that could liberate us?

• How does the labour and rigour of surviving ableism change our creative work? How do we find creative lives like ours in our community and cultural histories?

• How does the aesthetics of our work create pleasure and communion for bodyminds like ours? What happens when we stop centring non-disabled feelings in our practice?

These workshops are open to anyone with lived experience of disability, and an interest in experimental music/sound and cross-cultural solidarity. Whether you’ve been a music/sound artist for 50 years or 5 minutes, all levels of experience can participate equally in this series.

The four Crip Constellations workshops are:

• Disabled agency in western music history/Composing as quiet resistance with Patrick Gunasekera

• Sounding Bodies with Tiffany Ha

• Holding space - radical collaboration with Tenth Muse Initiative

• Do it for fun / Creating scores for any performer with Frederick Johnston-Horstman