As UK/ID moves into its third year, it sharpens its focus on arts and disability to tie in with Asian Para Games, coming to Jakarta later in 2018.
To reinforce this agenda, the British Council is keen to cooperate with a wide range of partners including government, NGOs, arts sector, media, and corporates – in Indonesia and internationally.
The preparation started back in September 2017, when British Council hosted a roundtable discussion about arts and disability, raising awareness of the opportunity presented by the Asian Para Games 2018. The participants included arts organizations, disabled artists from around the globe, disability NGOs, representatives of the Ministry of Youth & Sport and the Ministry of Education & Culture.
Fast forward to early February, and the process has been moving on with the arrival of the DaDaFest and Epic Arts, generating discussions and fresh ideas that can be applied in the arts plans for Asian Para Games 2018.
One of our Jakarta visitors was Ruth Gould, Artistic Director of DaDaFest, a Liverpool-based innovative disability arts organisation, active in promoting high quality disability and deaf arts from the lived experience of deaf and disabled people. They also provide opportunities for disabled people to access the arts via training and a young people’s programme that’s led by young disabled people themselves.
The whole-hearted DaDaFest vision is to inspire, develop, celebrate talent and excellence in disability and deaf arts.
DaDaFest is initiated by a company named DaDa which is short for Disability and Deaf Arts. They have delivered disability arts projects since it was first founded as Arts Integrated Merseyside (AIM) in 1984. DaDaFest started as an annual festival in 2001, then continued as a biennial event from 2010 and remained truly ambitious and international in scale, bringing about social change by placing disabled artists in the spotlight.
