ACCESSIBLE & INTERSECTIONAL CLUB SPACES IN "AUSTRALIA" & BEYOND???

lil bit of disability justice down under 4 the girls

OK so I just got back from two weeks in so-called Australia and it was kind of an unexpectedly completely  ⋆｡˚ જ⁀➴ magical time ⋆｡˚ . This year I’ve been quiiite overwhelmed with work, travel, transition, pleasure-seeking and deeep grief and so when months ago I got an email asking if i’d like to come do a show in “Australia” I was kind of like cool, yeah, and then totally disengaged from the reality of it until I was buying valium for the flight the day before I was due to leave. 

Australia is not somewhere I thought I’d ever go mainly because I am kinda shit scared of flying and like, haven’t even been to India yet you know what I mean, but unlike many of my peers I was not uninterested in visiting the place. Last I heard, my estranged biological father, the Egyptian, lives on a farm with his new family somewhere on that land mass?? so it was always present in some mysterious and spooky way in my subconscious lol. 

Also, while I do understand that they are not the same place, I had always hoped to visit “New Zealand” / Aotearoa  simply because Haka is just one of the best, coolest, most beautiful dances I’ve ever seen and I been kinda problematically obsessed for many many years. Anyway, maybe next time, but for now, when I say this trip FILLED ME RIGHT UP… I will share a little more, later, about my travels, but for this newsletter I’m writing about the person and project that brought me out all that way, and the talk we did about our work. 

Meet Riana Head-Toussaint (aka DJ Aquenta), an afro-carribean crip lawyer, curator and multidisciplinary artist working across choreography, performance, video, sound and participatory installation. Riana is also mother to Crip Rave Theory, an intersectionally accessible club space centering disabled people, but like, actually! Both Riana and the party are based between Sydney and Melbourne / Naarm, and so that’s… where I went. 

just @ cabbage tree bay nbd

Riana had heard about my work with misery and invited me to co-headline Crip Rave Theory’s biggest party yet, alongside Bae Bae, and it was so cool and I learnt so much from her not just about how to throw an actually accessible event but also how to reinvent or remember what it means to host someone - to hold via calling in the ancient practice of hosting that is foundational in so many of our cultures. Her care extended beyond project, beyond show, allowing me to feel safe enough to be in communion with my own ancestors through her, on that foreign land. As you can probably tell, Riana and I got on. We even drove the 13 hours it takes between Naarm and Sydney together, laughing and crying (I cried, she drove). IDK man, Riana’s just really cool and you all gotta follow and support her work if you know what’s good.

Being called to this trip and getting to live within one of these epic Crip Rave Theory creations on precious, beautiful Aboriginal land felt aligned, both in terms of this particular moment in savage settler colonialism and the continual fight towards indigenous sovereignty, and also regarding my own journey with disability justice frameworks and the steady integration of them into my life and work. It was not without its complications, and as I came to find out, the festival that this iteration of Crip Rave Theory was programmed by - RISING - has big ties to Zionist blood money, which apparently much of the art scene in Melbourne does? I have lots of thoughts and feelings on this (!) and much grappling was done by all, but this post is about the work of Crip Rave Theory, and imagined rave alternatives, because we deserve that!!

Despite working and learning in radical mental health community for a long time, it’s only in recent years and months that I've understood more about the social disability model, and accessibility riders, and language stuff, and how to be more expansive about what accessibility means. I went for a walk in Naarm with my crip artist friend TextaQueen who said they’re currently planning a workshop project which will support people in building ethics into their riders, i.e. transparency around funding sources as an access issue. It’s really fucking exciting and rich stuff and I feel lucky to now value these learnings as central to whatever it is I'm trying to do, and welcome more self-accountability around what it actually means to honour access, while also respecting our own limits and boundaries. Riana and I got into this more in the talk we did. 

Being at Crip Rave Theory felt like an accessibility wonderland, which is to say the care and attention to detail radiated through the curation and execution of the night. The multi floor venue was fully wheelchair accessible, there was food for all, haptic vests, ear plugs, eye masks, a social room with activities and stim toys and my favourite, a non-social room, where it’s dark and everyone has to stfu. There were also literally 1000 beanbags which is like gold for an event organiser… idk how she did it. Once at the party, I felt an uncanny familiarity with the warmth of the space - it resonated so deeply with the work of misery and it was moving to think that we had been building these lil weirdo 4 weirdo spaces on opposite ends of the earth. At one point in the night Riana whizzed over to me like, “look how many chair users are here! I haven’t ever seen this many wheelchair users in one place outside of hospital!” and I’ve been sitting with that one. 

Below is the transcript of a talk Riana and I did a few days before Crip Rave Theory, moderated by Sosefina Fuamoli, a Samoan music journalist and broadcaster. We talked about the highs and lows of advocating for access, the role of intuition in curation and self care in community work. And other stuff probably. Enjoy!

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