August 12, 2025 • 28 mins
Patrick Gunasekera is a creator, performer and producer working across theatre, dance, music and writing. His art is driven by a heartfelt interest in change. The stories he creates often explore how systems of oppression are normalised by everyday people and what agency and power looks like from a marginalised perspective.
This interview profiles Patrick and his approach to his work as well as highlights the show he will premiere in November – a ballet adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s short story The Little Mermaid, from a queer, brown, disabled point of view.
To find out more about the show and to purchase tickets, go to The Blue Room Theatre website.
Support this project's independent fundraiser here.
Search for 'Patrick Gunasekera' on Humanitix to find more of the events he's offering.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:15):
Hello, I'm Simon Cheung and welcome to In Plain Sight,
a program where we highlight people who are making a
difference and impact within the disability sector and their community.
We shine a light on those who otherwise would be
hidden in plain sight. And it's a pleasure to bring
you these programmes on a weekly basis here on Vision
Australia Radio, and I'm with my co-host and producer, Andrew. Hello, Andrew.
S2 (00:38):
How are you?
S1 (00:39):
Simon I'm very good. Um, just recently I went to
see my friend Ben Row place in music at a
pub in Fremantle. Uh, we spoke about that on the
program a few weeks ago. And I must say, if
you ever get a chance to listen to Benny Rose music,
please do so. He's a wonderful person. Not only is
he a great musician, he's a great sports person and
(01:01):
advocate for the blind and other people with disabilities and
well worth checking out his music. Benny Ro music. So, Andrew,
how are you going?
S2 (01:10):
I'm really well.
S1 (01:12):
It's great to see you back in the studio this
week and I'm looking forward to working with you. Ongoingly
and I make mention of Ben because I like to
make mention of people within the creative arts area on
this program, be the musicians, dancers, or other creative types,
because I like to encourage people with a disability to
(01:33):
promote their programs and what they are doing. Which leads
us to this week. What have we got coming up
this week, Andrew?
S2 (01:39):
This week we're revisiting an interview you did in March
of this year with Patrick Gunasekera, and he's a choreographer,
and he has choreographed The Little Mermaid, which is a
reimagining of the classic tale as, among other things, um,
a disabled coming of age story for seven dancers. Now,
(02:01):
this story is distinctly Western Australian, and the show is
pretty courageous and cathartic, reckoning with the the social conditions
that that shape our understandings of of love and the
and the determination of people to rewrite the life stories
chosen for us. So this is coming up later this
year in November at the Blue Room in Northbridge, here
(02:22):
in Perth. And that's on between the fourth and the
22nd of November. So that's something to look forward to.
S1 (02:29):
I believe it's also going to be a live streamed.
So look up this program on the internet and find
out how to get involved with that if you're not
in Perth. So when I initially spoke with Patrick, we
covered many things, but mostly talked about this reimagining of
this classic tale, The Little Mermaid, and how he decided
to flip a lot of the roles around to fit
(02:53):
a more contemporary 21st century, broader look at life not
only from a disability perspective, but from a queer perspective,
from a migrant perspective, and so many other different viewpoints
than the actual original classic tale was told. And it's
(03:14):
a really, uh, interesting interview coming up. We discuss a
lot of different things. Patrick mentions how he has come
to this position to be brave enough and bold enough
to put on his own productions, and to make sure
that every aspect of this particular performance has people with
disabilities in first place, in that it will be audio described.
(03:39):
It has different people with different disabilities acting within it.
And every aspect has been considered for the comfort of
people with a disability to partake and to view and enjoy.
So coming up very shortly, we'll be the interview with
Patrick Gunasekera and I hope you enjoy it. We are
(04:02):
joined by Patrick Gunasekera, and now Patrick does many things
and he's a very talented and interesting person. One of
the things he does is he is a dancer and
he's got a ballet coming up that will talk about
a lot during the show. But I'll get Patrick, just
to give us a brief description of some of the
broad ranging and interesting things that he does and how
(04:23):
he might describe himself.
S3 (04:24):
Well, thank you, Simon. It's really lovely to be here. Um,
supporting this show and yeah, talking with community about what
we're doing. So I, we actually met a few years
ago at the inaugural people with disabilities WA State Conference. Um,
and so I have a background in, in systemic advocacy
as a disabled person, as a cold young person, as
(04:45):
a queer young person as well. But my work in
the arts, I sort of work across theatre, dance, music
and writing as a creator and as a performer. Um,
but when I was starting out in the arts industry
several years ago, I was finding it very difficult as, um,
what we call an underrepresented artists, that's someone with an identity,
(05:07):
lived experience or background that is really marginalised within the
kind of stories that are typically told. And we were
like a lot of my my friends in this sort
of local industry struggled a lot with our getting pathways into, um,
getting our work on stage or getting our stories programmed and, um,
out in the world. So I also since then have
(05:30):
started working more as a producer to, um, produce my
own work and create spaces where other underrepresented artists can
work together to realise our creative visions.
S1 (05:42):
You are. You're now a producer, you're a dancer, you're
a writer, and you also, like you just said, we
met at the conference. You also do public speaking and
give presentations and just being you, you're an activist and
an advocate. Given just what you said to. I like
to start with something a bit light and say that
you have at least 2 or 3 direct links to
(06:04):
people we've spoken to previously, and you wrote a piece
for a book called Growing Up Disabled in Australia.
S3 (06:10):
Yes.
S1 (06:10):
Our very first guest on our first season of this
the show. Eliza Hull. She also wrote a piece for that.
That book?
S3 (06:18):
Yeah.
S1 (06:19):
And, um, another link is that we spoke to Tiffany Ha,
who spoke about a performance. She's part of the performance
that you're.
S3 (06:26):
Yeah, she's one of the composers.
S1 (06:28):
Yeah. And they're just. Now you said you're going to
be working alongside Grace King, who's someone, um, that many
of our listeners would know and, um, a very prominent
person within the blindness community and the arts community. Um,
so there's lots of crossovers. And as you mentioned, you
were part of the inaugural, um, people with Disabilities conference
(06:50):
in 2020. And that's, um, sort of going to be
running again very shortly. So again, there's another interesting link
because we spoke to Vanessa from not that long ago,
who was telling us all about the upcoming conference for
this year.
S3 (07:05):
Yeah, I think how a lot of disabled advocates and
artists work in, in our various communities and fields is,
we think, very collectively. Yes. Um, and that's a very
deep value in our spaces if nobody gets left behind.
And a lot of the way that I've come to
work as a producer and a creator is really, um,
(07:27):
bringing those values and those cultures into arts processes. So
what I mean by arts processes as well is, um,
to go from having an idea for a show, for instance,
to then, um, bringing a team together, developing and rehearsing
that show and putting it on stage. There's a lot
of different kind of steps in between, um, that a
(07:48):
lot of people who work in, say, theater and dance
industries are quite used to the industry norms of how you, um,
go from, from the start to the end of a
project's sort of, um, lifespan. But when you are disabled,
often something that I dealt with quite a lot early
on was, um, there was a lot of access barriers. Um,
(08:10):
I needed to work in ways that were a lot
slower and that just had more, more breaks. Sort of.
Wasn't this, uh, working overtime, burning out sort of type
of work that a lot of artists are quite used to? Um,
in fact, to compare, usually when a professional ballet company
is developing a new work, they might sort of, um,
(08:30):
rehearse and develop that whole work and then stage it
within three months of working full time. Um, create a
whole show from scratch. Um, but this work, we started
rehearsals in October of last year. Um, and even before then,
I was having a lot of conversations with, with each
of the team members about what we were making, how
(08:51):
it was going to, um, feel for them, and the
types of stories that we were telling, which, um, were
all things that we related to. So I wanted to
ensure that everyone was bringing their whole self and had
what they needed to do their best work in this process. Um,
we're taking a break from rehearsals now, and our show
will be in November of this year. That kind of
(09:13):
like 13 month span of creative development, and moving quite
slowly through each phase of the work gives us a
lot of time to rest, to properly think through what
we're making and why. And it's sort of a way
of working that is much more accessible to all of us.
On the process. But several years ago, when I started
embarking on a theater career, I was told quite clearly
(09:36):
by some arts institutions and people in positions of power
that I shouldn't be pursuing a career in theater if
I couldn't, um, work within the very inaccessible rehearsal development schedules.
That was the norm in the industry. And I think this,
this broader question of how we're working is really important. Um,
(09:57):
it's actually a conversation that many people in the arts
industry are having, because the way that our industry is structured,
it's very unsupported, like most people are working for free
and also are kind of in a position of being
forced to do so much extra labor to get their
work out. um, because of not having that external support,
even just as independent sort of freelancing workers. But I
(10:19):
think what's really important to focus on is that this
is something we have always done, that disabled artists have
always existed. We haven't always been given credit for the
kind of work that we do culturally, but we have
had quite a long lineage of influencing the arts. For instance,
if you think about aesthetics, like, um, someone like Vincent
(10:40):
van Gogh, for example, was a painter whose work was
really unpopular while he was alive. He dealt with a
lot of ableism. Um, but after he passed away, there
was actually quite a strong influence that his work had,
because it was a kind of aesthetic that people hadn't
seen before, and they were quite moved in different ways. Similarly, uh,
(11:02):
artists like the dancer choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky or, um, the
composer Ludwig van Beethoven, who used a lot of deeper
kind of notes in his work as someone who was
deaf later in life. That was something that changed the
way that music sounded, and people left the in the
classical music sort of history stopped kind of using light
(11:23):
and fluffy music all of the time and started exploring
these sort of deeper notes that that you could create
with music. And that was because of a deaf aesthetic
that Beethoven had brought to music.
S1 (11:34):
I'd be interested to know, Patrick, thanks for that great
history lesson, by the way. It's a great insight into
to where things have been and where we hope things
will go. I'm curious with someone like yourself within the
arts arena that you work, do you find that you're
always having to be an advocate and you're always having
(11:54):
to be a representative of the communities that you represent
and be a public face? How can you tell us
a little bit about that?
S3 (12:06):
This is a really good question. Um, because there is
a lot of expectation and pressure that comes from outside
of us to to fix the system. A lot of
the time, or to be the representation and to prove that, say,
an arts organization is an inclusive space because they've got
a mobility user, they they look more inclusive if you're there.
(12:29):
But that isn't necessarily a representation of like how you're
actually feeling and how you're being treated somewhere. And I
think a lot of the time, because a lot of
disabled advocates end up sort of being welcomed by arts
organizations because they want to be more inclusive. Um, but
then when it comes to when we have complaints or
(12:51):
when there are concerns and things that need to be changed, um,
we often aren't listened to. We get into this really
difficult position of feeling, okay, things are only going to
change if I stay in this environment, and if I
go through, like all the disrespect that I'm going through
and try and try and try to be listened to,
and I've been through that kind of cycle so many
times that that is often really ended up with going, okay,
(13:14):
I actually can't work in this place anymore because I've
just been so disrespected and and not being treated fairly.
And whenever I've made that decision, it's always been the
right decision for two reasons. One is that I learn
where my boundaries are, and I get to go and
work with people who are going to treat me better,
and I can recognize the things that I, I can
(13:34):
do differently. Um, in terms of going about advocacy in
a way that centers my boundaries. But the second reason
why it's always helpful to show other people where your
boundaries are is that often when I've left spaces, people
will sort of go, oh, actually, we don't look as
diverse anymore. Like what's happened? And they'll have space to
really think about it and often improve things for the
(13:57):
next generation of underrepresented artists who come into that particular space.
So I will say, like, I've had a lot of
really difficult experiences with feeling that pressure externally, but also
putting that pressure on myself. And I think where the
focus of my career is today, having learned from that
kind of cycle of anxiety and burnout and stress that
comes from it, is that I thrive in spaces. Often
(14:20):
if I am telling disabled stories, I thrive in spaces
that it's only disabled people in the room where we
can be really unfiltered and we can, um, talk and
kind of learn things about ourselves that no one else
can really understand as well as we can. And to
produce those kinds of environments at first was something that
(14:40):
just made sense to me. It was something that was
difficult at first to kind of get a lot of
support for both from the industry and also from the community.
It was sort of something that was a bit different
and scary to kind of be doing things, um, completely independently.
But I think that because of that, I've found that
there is a way to continue doing advocacy where it's
going directly toward disabled people having a safe space in
(15:02):
the arts. And when I can create those sort of
spaces and see the impact that it has on those
individual artists, then those artists are in a better position
to know their worth, to know their rights, and to
keep going within the industry in a way that is
on their terms. Um, it's starting to shift a bit
the way that we sort of think about advocacy. But
(15:22):
there is definitely still this, this extra pressure. And I
definitely dealt with this a lot in the dance industry because, um,
I was still figuring out a lot of my identity
as a disabled person coming into that space. Um, because
it is such a broad sort of culture, and also
because no disabled person is entirely defined by their disabled identity,
(15:43):
there are a lot of other identities and cultural expressions
that I was wanting to explore through forms like ballet,
for instance, that I didn't really see myself as a
disabled dancer or choreographer, but I was always seen as
a disabled dancer choreographer, and that really affected how I
was treated.
S1 (15:59):
There is that thin line between our disability or our
whatever it might be as part of our major identity
and our recognition, and yet we don't want to be
our full definition.
S2 (16:12):
On Vision Envisioned Australia radio you're listening to In Plain Sight.
Simon's guest this week is choreographer Patrick Gunasekera, and his
reimagining of The Little Mermaid is coming up later this
year in November at the Blue Room Theatre in Northbridge,
here in Perth.
S1 (16:27):
The title is a well known title to most people,
I would think. It's a version of Little Mermaid. Is
that correct?
S3 (16:34):
Yes.
S1 (16:35):
And you told me a little bit about it. It's
transforming the concept of Little Mermaid from losing her fish
tail to, in your case, it's something a little bit
of varied. Can you tell us about that, please?
S3 (16:50):
Yeah, absolutely. So the the concept for this, I'd always
wanted to create something out of the Hans Christian Andersen
short story of The Little Mermaid, because there are a
lot of themes of disability in it, actually. It's sort
of this mermaid. When she goes on land, she becomes
non-verbal when she's walking. It feels like there's knives that
(17:10):
she's walking on. It's sort of made me think about
masking the experience of chronic pain in public. But when
I started to explore ballet as a form that I
really wanted to start using for storytelling, um, this idea
of actually creating a ballet adaptation came to mind. And
when I read through the the short story, um, again,
(17:31):
I started to pick up so many more themes about
the codependency of the mermaid and how she has this
feeling of the prince is like this really important person
who is just going to save her life, and she
would die for him, but he's completely unavailable and she
doesn't realize this. And I think from there, I started
to really think about a lot of the quite difficult experiences,
(17:53):
first experiences of love that is quite common to disabled
people because we don't grow up often being treated with
unconditional love. There's a sort of acceptance and tolerance and
not always being seen and included and sort of.
S1 (18:07):
Different power levels.
S3 (18:08):
Yes. So all of those things, I became really interested
in this character and this story of running away from
home and and the the point at which The Little Mermaid,
who is a character that I'll be playing and it
will be like a queer character will be this point
where he meets the sea witch, who is someone that
(18:29):
he wants to become friends with. He's a fellow outsider,
but the sea witch advises that if he is going
to find love in the human world, he needs to
give away his walker and pass as non-disabled. Um, so
it is this kind of work that's exploring the question
of masking and of upward mobility, which is sort of
(18:50):
trying to make your way up in society. Um, and this,
this young person trying to figure out what is the
right way. What's the right path, who are the right
voices to kind of listen to? And finding his own
voice amidst all of that and how to use it.
But yeah, it is sort of reinterpreted as a story
that is set in Mandra, where I grew up kind
(19:11):
of moving to the city and then the upper sort
of land world is based sort of in the western
suburbs and this more posh area of the city. Yeah.
Where the Prince lives.
S1 (19:22):
I find that fascinating that using the Little Mermaid tail
pun on words there as a metaphor for that masking
and what gets talked about a lot in disability circles
is that if I could and when I can, I
try to hide my disability because it just makes life
a lot easier. It's a really clever thing you've done there. Patrick,
and I really admire that, and it sounds really fascinating.
(19:44):
So as part of your dance team and troupe, you
included a lot of people with other kinds of disabilities
and illnesses and so forth. Can you tell us a
little bit about that, please?
S3 (19:54):
Yeah, absolutely. So in this story there, um, the whole
family that the Little Mermaid actually lives in, there's a
sea queen who is his mother, and the Little Mermaid,
who is his older sibling. They're both mobility aid users
as well. Um, and most of the other team members
are neurodivergent and come from a range of different backgrounds.
(20:14):
We also have, um, a lot of queer characters and Asian,
Australian and First Nations characters who are part of the cast.
Typically a lot of like classical ballet technique. It's all
very controlled and it's very much about sort of, uh,
showing off. And, and I always feel very suspicious as
someone who's always been very sidelined and erased from society.
(20:38):
And so I when I'm taking the, the ballet form,
and this has been something that everyone has been really
enthusiastic as we've been working together, I'm imbuing it with more, um,
more theatre. So more like realistic storytelling. There's no talking
in the work, but it will kind of a lot
of the movements will be derived from everyday movement. And
when it comes to the actual techniques and ballet shapes
(21:00):
that will sort of be using, they will be things
which really are quite new sort of steps, things that
speak more to the complexity of the characters rather than
just trying to make anything look perfect. We want it
to look real and to have the each of the
performers have their own personality and to not just be
cookie cutter, robot sort of dancers on stage. There's a
(21:21):
lot of the performers themselves that will kind of be there.
So yes, there's there's most of the the cast are disabled.
Most of the crew director and the production manager and
such are disabled artists as well. And it was interesting
before you mentioned denial, uh, as well. And that actually
is quite a big theme in this work. There's a
(21:42):
lot of people who are struggling in different ways to
to be their true self. And the work is really
not dividing people into good or bad people, but rather
looking at the ups and downs of each individual, the
choices that they make, the impacts of that, but also
the broader systems that that kind of put people in
a position where they act in a certain way that
(22:04):
is to the detriment of themselves or others, but also
the ways that they can transform what is within their
control to to change The team have been amazing to
work with. Um, they've just been so generous and excited
for this whole process. And I think, yeah, to be
in a rehearsal room where it feels like a disabled
space as well, it's just wonderful because most rehearsal rooms
(22:27):
are quite strict and and inflexible, and it's been beautiful
to have a space that is entirely our own, like
a queer, brown, disabled environment that is empowering. Everyone's very. Yeah, equal.
S1 (22:38):
Well, that's really interesting and really fabulous. Now we're quickly
running out of time here, Patrick. So we'll have to
start winding up soon. One thing will it look like
a ballet or will it look like theatre that uses
dance as its mode of performance?
S3 (22:53):
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say it will
look like theatre as that uses dance as a mode
of performance, but I've continued to call it a ballet
and kind of provide that lens, because I think that
for ballet to be relevant to today and to be
an artform that's going to continue into the future, it
needs to change and evolve, and it needs to become
(23:14):
less about a gender binary and just the sort of
white stories that are that are really not representative of
the world that we live in. And I think to
see characters who look like me, who look like all
the performers in this work, telling our stories authentically, I
really wanted to create a ballet where that happens. Um,
the metaphor I often use with the dancers is that
(23:35):
ballet technique is sort of like a spider web. There's
sort of a if you have the center of a
spider web, um, which might be the way that you
hold your center line in your body, in your back. Um,
that is kind of the starting point that the spider
sort of builds. It's its web around. But if you
think that there's lots of different kinds of spider webs,
there's messy ones that are in a crack. There's big ones,
(23:56):
small ones, ones with holes, and they're all spider webs.
That's kind of what ballet is, that you can take
any elements of ballet and it will still be ballet.
It will just kind of be interpreted differently. And when
you do that, it speaks to the depth and diversity
of the world that we actually live in and how
everybody has a different lineage, a different practice. With dance
and what movement means to us. So for me is
(24:18):
as a marginalized person has often been told what to
do with my body and and not been given my
own choices and bodily autonomy. I create dance where the
dancers have that bodily autonomy, and where it's like a
way for marginalized artists to reclaim our bodies. Um, that's
very different to how typical ballet is sort of about
shaping you and changing you into being a very rigid
(24:38):
idea of what dance is meant to be. So it
is different because I believe it needs to be.
S1 (24:44):
Where else can people find out about you and your work,
and how can people, um, learn about what you're doing?
S3 (24:50):
Usually people can just Google my name and sort of
find where I'm sort of active through. Through that, we
are relying on the support of the community to fund
some really important parts of this work, including, um, the
aesthetic access that we'll be doing with, uh, our blind
cultural consultant, Grace King, will be developing that with our
(25:10):
stage designers and with With myself to create a world
of this show that is inclusive for blind and vision
impaired audiences.
S1 (25:18):
So the performance will be somewhat audio described.
S3 (25:22):
Yeah, it'll be it'll be live streamed and it will
also have audio description, but the audio description will be
as well as haptic to as if you're attending the
work in person. The audio description, it's going to be
developed in a way that's like not just describing action,
but actually really drilling into the important messages in the
work and ensuring that the nuances and the world of
(25:44):
the story is really accurately and considerately portrayed within that form.
S1 (25:50):
I find that really interesting, the way that audio description
and in a similar circumstance, way that Islam is used
as well to become part of the performance. So an
accurate audio describer also needs to have some in this
case has to have great knowledge of the performance and
what you're what you're trying to portray, and also therefore
have some kind of idea of how to interpret the
(26:13):
performance and then describe it in a creative manner. Yes.
S3 (26:17):
Yeah, absolutely. So that's why Grace will be working with us,
particularly to ensure that that process is in line with
blind culture. And it's it's not just a bunch of
sighted people coming in and doing it how we think
it should be done. She'll be kind of working with
us through that whole process.
S1 (26:31):
Well, thank you, Patrick Goonesekera, for joining us here on
In Plain Sight on Vision Australia Radio. And it's been
a pleasure to see you in the studio and speak
with you, and that it's so delightful to find out
about these great pieces of art and in this case,
dance and theatre, and to to hear about all these
inclusive methodologies making the world easier and more inclusive for everybody,
(26:53):
not just people with a disability. So thanks for joining us.
S3 (26:56):
No, thank you so much. It was so great to
talk with a fellow community member about these things. I
really appreciated this conversation.
S2 (27:06):
And that was the chat that Simon and Abby had
with Patrick Gunasekara earlier this year. Patrick teaches Teachers disabled
only dance classes at the King Street Arts Centre here
in Perth and coming up on the 17th of August,
Patrick is teaching disabled cultural safety training for dance and
physical theatre teachers at the Blue Room in Northbridge here
(27:26):
in Perth. For more information about other events with Patrick,
search for Patrick Gunasekara. And that's spelt g u n
e r on humanity. Performances of The Little Mermaid are
from the 4th to the 22nd of November at the
Blue Room here in Northbridge. That concludes in Plain Sight
(27:48):
for this week. Join us at the same time next
week on Vision Australia Radio, VA radio, digital and online at.
You can also listen on demand by searching for In
Plain Sight by Vision Australia Radio. Wherever you get your podcasts,
or ask your smart device to play in Plain sight
(28:08):
by Vision Australia Radio. Thanks for listening.
S4 (28:11):
Thank you.
Hello, I'm Simon Cheung and welcome to In Plain Sight,
a program where we highlight people who are making a
difference and impact within the disability sector and their community.
We shine a light on those who otherwise would be
hidden in plain sight. And it's a pleasure to bring
you these programmes on a weekly basis here on Vision
Australia Radio, and I'm with my co-host and producer, Andrew. Hello, Andrew.
S2 (00:38):
How are you?
S1 (00:39):
Simon I'm very good. Um, just recently I went to
see my friend Ben Row place in music at a
pub in Fremantle. Uh, we spoke about that on the
program a few weeks ago. And I must say, if
you ever get a chance to listen to Benny Rose music,
please do so. He's a wonderful person. Not only is
he a great musician, he's a great sports person and
(01:01):
advocate for the blind and other people with disabilities and
well worth checking out his music. Benny Ro music. So, Andrew,
how are you going?
S2 (01:10):
I'm really well.
S1 (01:12):
It's great to see you back in the studio this
week and I'm looking forward to working with you. Ongoingly
and I make mention of Ben because I like to
make mention of people within the creative arts area on
this program, be the musicians, dancers, or other creative types,
because I like to encourage people with a disability to
(01:33):
promote their programs and what they are doing. Which leads
us to this week. What have we got coming up
this week, Andrew?
S2 (01:39):
This week we're revisiting an interview you did in March
of this year with Patrick Gunasekera, and he's a choreographer,
and he has choreographed The Little Mermaid, which is a
reimagining of the classic tale as, among other things, um,
a disabled coming of age story for seven dancers. Now,
(02:01):
this story is distinctly Western Australian, and the show is
pretty courageous and cathartic, reckoning with the the social conditions
that that shape our understandings of of love and the
and the determination of people to rewrite the life stories
chosen for us. So this is coming up later this
year in November at the Blue Room in Northbridge, here
(02:22):
in Perth. And that's on between the fourth and the
22nd of November. So that's something to look forward to.
S1 (02:29):
I believe it's also going to be a live streamed.
So look up this program on the internet and find
out how to get involved with that if you're not
in Perth. So when I initially spoke with Patrick, we
covered many things, but mostly talked about this reimagining of
this classic tale, The Little Mermaid, and how he decided
to flip a lot of the roles around to fit
(02:53):
a more contemporary 21st century, broader look at life not
only from a disability perspective, but from a queer perspective,
from a migrant perspective, and so many other different viewpoints
than the actual original classic tale was told. And it's
(03:14):
a really, uh, interesting interview coming up. We discuss a
lot of different things. Patrick mentions how he has come
to this position to be brave enough and bold enough
to put on his own productions, and to make sure
that every aspect of this particular performance has people with
disabilities in first place, in that it will be audio described.
(03:39):
It has different people with different disabilities acting within it.
And every aspect has been considered for the comfort of
people with a disability to partake and to view and enjoy.
So coming up very shortly, we'll be the interview with
Patrick Gunasekera and I hope you enjoy it. We are
(04:02):
joined by Patrick Gunasekera, and now Patrick does many things
and he's a very talented and interesting person. One of
the things he does is he is a dancer and
he's got a ballet coming up that will talk about
a lot during the show. But I'll get Patrick, just
to give us a brief description of some of the
broad ranging and interesting things that he does and how
(04:23):
he might describe himself.
S3 (04:24):
Well, thank you, Simon. It's really lovely to be here. Um,
supporting this show and yeah, talking with community about what
we're doing. So I, we actually met a few years
ago at the inaugural people with disabilities WA State Conference. Um,
and so I have a background in, in systemic advocacy
as a disabled person, as a cold young person, as
(04:45):
a queer young person as well. But my work in
the arts, I sort of work across theatre, dance, music
and writing as a creator and as a performer. Um,
but when I was starting out in the arts industry
several years ago, I was finding it very difficult as, um,
what we call an underrepresented artists, that's someone with an identity,
(05:07):
lived experience or background that is really marginalised within the
kind of stories that are typically told. And we were
like a lot of my my friends in this sort
of local industry struggled a lot with our getting pathways into, um,
getting our work on stage or getting our stories programmed and, um,
out in the world. So I also since then have
(05:30):
started working more as a producer to, um, produce my
own work and create spaces where other underrepresented artists can
work together to realise our creative visions.
S1 (05:42):
You are. You're now a producer, you're a dancer, you're
a writer, and you also, like you just said, we
met at the conference. You also do public speaking and
give presentations and just being you, you're an activist and
an advocate. Given just what you said to. I like
to start with something a bit light and say that
you have at least 2 or 3 direct links to
(06:04):
people we've spoken to previously, and you wrote a piece
for a book called Growing Up Disabled in Australia.
S3 (06:10):
Yes.
S1 (06:10):
Our very first guest on our first season of this
the show. Eliza Hull. She also wrote a piece for that.
That book?
S3 (06:18):
Yeah.
S1 (06:19):
And, um, another link is that we spoke to Tiffany Ha,
who spoke about a performance. She's part of the performance
that you're.
S3 (06:26):
Yeah, she's one of the composers.
S1 (06:28):
Yeah. And they're just. Now you said you're going to
be working alongside Grace King, who's someone, um, that many
of our listeners would know and, um, a very prominent
person within the blindness community and the arts community. Um,
so there's lots of crossovers. And as you mentioned, you
were part of the inaugural, um, people with Disabilities conference
(06:50):
in 2020. And that's, um, sort of going to be
running again very shortly. So again, there's another interesting link
because we spoke to Vanessa from not that long ago,
who was telling us all about the upcoming conference for
this year.
S3 (07:05):
Yeah, I think how a lot of disabled advocates and
artists work in, in our various communities and fields is,
we think, very collectively. Yes. Um, and that's a very
deep value in our spaces if nobody gets left behind.
And a lot of the way that I've come to
work as a producer and a creator is really, um,
(07:27):
bringing those values and those cultures into arts processes. So
what I mean by arts processes as well is, um,
to go from having an idea for a show, for instance,
to then, um, bringing a team together, developing and rehearsing
that show and putting it on stage. There's a lot
of different kind of steps in between, um, that a
(07:48):
lot of people who work in, say, theater and dance
industries are quite used to the industry norms of how you, um,
go from, from the start to the end of a
project's sort of, um, lifespan. But when you are disabled,
often something that I dealt with quite a lot early
on was, um, there was a lot of access barriers. Um,
(08:10):
I needed to work in ways that were a lot
slower and that just had more, more breaks. Sort of.
Wasn't this, uh, working overtime, burning out sort of type
of work that a lot of artists are quite used to? Um,
in fact, to compare, usually when a professional ballet company
is developing a new work, they might sort of, um,
(08:30):
rehearse and develop that whole work and then stage it
within three months of working full time. Um, create a
whole show from scratch. Um, but this work, we started
rehearsals in October of last year. Um, and even before then,
I was having a lot of conversations with, with each
of the team members about what we were making, how
(08:51):
it was going to, um, feel for them, and the
types of stories that we were telling, which, um, were
all things that we related to. So I wanted to
ensure that everyone was bringing their whole self and had
what they needed to do their best work in this process. Um,
we're taking a break from rehearsals now, and our show
will be in November of this year. That kind of
(09:13):
like 13 month span of creative development, and moving quite
slowly through each phase of the work gives us a
lot of time to rest, to properly think through what
we're making and why. And it's sort of a way
of working that is much more accessible to all of us.
On the process. But several years ago, when I started
embarking on a theater career, I was told quite clearly
(09:36):
by some arts institutions and people in positions of power
that I shouldn't be pursuing a career in theater if
I couldn't, um, work within the very inaccessible rehearsal development schedules.
That was the norm in the industry. And I think this,
this broader question of how we're working is really important. Um,
(09:57):
it's actually a conversation that many people in the arts
industry are having, because the way that our industry is structured,
it's very unsupported, like most people are working for free
and also are kind of in a position of being
forced to do so much extra labor to get their
work out. um, because of not having that external support,
even just as independent sort of freelancing workers. But I
(10:19):
think what's really important to focus on is that this
is something we have always done, that disabled artists have
always existed. We haven't always been given credit for the
kind of work that we do culturally, but we have
had quite a long lineage of influencing the arts. For instance,
if you think about aesthetics, like, um, someone like Vincent
(10:40):
van Gogh, for example, was a painter whose work was
really unpopular while he was alive. He dealt with a
lot of ableism. Um, but after he passed away, there
was actually quite a strong influence that his work had,
because it was a kind of aesthetic that people hadn't
seen before, and they were quite moved in different ways. Similarly, uh,
(11:02):
artists like the dancer choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky or, um, the
composer Ludwig van Beethoven, who used a lot of deeper
kind of notes in his work as someone who was
deaf later in life. That was something that changed the
way that music sounded, and people left the in the
classical music sort of history stopped kind of using light
(11:23):
and fluffy music all of the time and started exploring
these sort of deeper notes that that you could create
with music. And that was because of a deaf aesthetic
that Beethoven had brought to music.
S1 (11:34):
I'd be interested to know, Patrick, thanks for that great
history lesson, by the way. It's a great insight into
to where things have been and where we hope things
will go. I'm curious with someone like yourself within the
arts arena that you work, do you find that you're
always having to be an advocate and you're always having
(11:54):
to be a representative of the communities that you represent
and be a public face? How can you tell us
a little bit about that?
S3 (12:06):
This is a really good question. Um, because there is
a lot of expectation and pressure that comes from outside
of us to to fix the system. A lot of
the time, or to be the representation and to prove that, say,
an arts organization is an inclusive space because they've got
a mobility user, they they look more inclusive if you're there.
(12:29):
But that isn't necessarily a representation of like how you're
actually feeling and how you're being treated somewhere. And I
think a lot of the time, because a lot of
disabled advocates end up sort of being welcomed by arts
organizations because they want to be more inclusive. Um, but
then when it comes to when we have complaints or
(12:51):
when there are concerns and things that need to be changed, um,
we often aren't listened to. We get into this really
difficult position of feeling, okay, things are only going to
change if I stay in this environment, and if I
go through, like all the disrespect that I'm going through
and try and try and try to be listened to,
and I've been through that kind of cycle so many
times that that is often really ended up with going, okay,
(13:14):
I actually can't work in this place anymore because I've
just been so disrespected and and not being treated fairly.
And whenever I've made that decision, it's always been the
right decision for two reasons. One is that I learn
where my boundaries are, and I get to go and
work with people who are going to treat me better,
and I can recognize the things that I, I can
(13:34):
do differently. Um, in terms of going about advocacy in
a way that centers my boundaries. But the second reason
why it's always helpful to show other people where your
boundaries are is that often when I've left spaces, people
will sort of go, oh, actually, we don't look as
diverse anymore. Like what's happened? And they'll have space to
really think about it and often improve things for the
(13:57):
next generation of underrepresented artists who come into that particular space.
So I will say, like, I've had a lot of
really difficult experiences with feeling that pressure externally, but also
putting that pressure on myself. And I think where the
focus of my career is today, having learned from that
kind of cycle of anxiety and burnout and stress that
comes from it, is that I thrive in spaces. Often
(14:20):
if I am telling disabled stories, I thrive in spaces
that it's only disabled people in the room where we
can be really unfiltered and we can, um, talk and
kind of learn things about ourselves that no one else
can really understand as well as we can. And to
produce those kinds of environments at first was something that
(14:40):
just made sense to me. It was something that was
difficult at first to kind of get a lot of
support for both from the industry and also from the community.
It was sort of something that was a bit different
and scary to kind of be doing things, um, completely independently.
But I think that because of that, I've found that
there is a way to continue doing advocacy where it's
going directly toward disabled people having a safe space in
(15:02):
the arts. And when I can create those sort of
spaces and see the impact that it has on those
individual artists, then those artists are in a better position
to know their worth, to know their rights, and to
keep going within the industry in a way that is
on their terms. Um, it's starting to shift a bit
the way that we sort of think about advocacy. But
(15:22):
there is definitely still this, this extra pressure. And I
definitely dealt with this a lot in the dance industry because, um,
I was still figuring out a lot of my identity
as a disabled person coming into that space. Um, because
it is such a broad sort of culture, and also
because no disabled person is entirely defined by their disabled identity,
(15:43):
there are a lot of other identities and cultural expressions
that I was wanting to explore through forms like ballet,
for instance, that I didn't really see myself as a
disabled dancer or choreographer, but I was always seen as
a disabled dancer choreographer, and that really affected how I
was treated.
S1 (15:59):
There is that thin line between our disability or our
whatever it might be as part of our major identity
and our recognition, and yet we don't want to be
our full definition.
S2 (16:12):
On Vision Envisioned Australia radio you're listening to In Plain Sight.
Simon's guest this week is choreographer Patrick Gunasekera, and his
reimagining of The Little Mermaid is coming up later this
year in November at the Blue Room Theatre in Northbridge,
here in Perth.
S1 (16:27):
The title is a well known title to most people,
I would think. It's a version of Little Mermaid. Is
that correct?
S3 (16:34):
Yes.
S1 (16:35):
And you told me a little bit about it. It's
transforming the concept of Little Mermaid from losing her fish
tail to, in your case, it's something a little bit
of varied. Can you tell us about that, please?
S3 (16:50):
Yeah, absolutely. So the the concept for this, I'd always
wanted to create something out of the Hans Christian Andersen
short story of The Little Mermaid, because there are a
lot of themes of disability in it, actually. It's sort
of this mermaid. When she goes on land, she becomes
non-verbal when she's walking. It feels like there's knives that
(17:10):
she's walking on. It's sort of made me think about
masking the experience of chronic pain in public. But when
I started to explore ballet as a form that I
really wanted to start using for storytelling, um, this idea
of actually creating a ballet adaptation came to mind. And
when I read through the the short story, um, again,
(17:31):
I started to pick up so many more themes about
the codependency of the mermaid and how she has this
feeling of the prince is like this really important person
who is just going to save her life, and she
would die for him, but he's completely unavailable and she
doesn't realize this. And I think from there, I started
to really think about a lot of the quite difficult experiences,
(17:53):
first experiences of love that is quite common to disabled
people because we don't grow up often being treated with
unconditional love. There's a sort of acceptance and tolerance and
not always being seen and included and sort of.
S1 (18:07):
Different power levels.
S3 (18:08):
Yes. So all of those things, I became really interested
in this character and this story of running away from
home and and the the point at which The Little Mermaid,
who is a character that I'll be playing and it
will be like a queer character will be this point
where he meets the sea witch, who is someone that
(18:29):
he wants to become friends with. He's a fellow outsider,
but the sea witch advises that if he is going
to find love in the human world, he needs to
give away his walker and pass as non-disabled. Um, so
it is this kind of work that's exploring the question
of masking and of upward mobility, which is sort of
(18:50):
trying to make your way up in society. Um, and this,
this young person trying to figure out what is the
right way. What's the right path, who are the right
voices to kind of listen to? And finding his own
voice amidst all of that and how to use it.
But yeah, it is sort of reinterpreted as a story
that is set in Mandra, where I grew up kind
(19:11):
of moving to the city and then the upper sort
of land world is based sort of in the western
suburbs and this more posh area of the city. Yeah.
Where the Prince lives.
S1 (19:22):
I find that fascinating that using the Little Mermaid tail
pun on words there as a metaphor for that masking
and what gets talked about a lot in disability circles
is that if I could and when I can, I
try to hide my disability because it just makes life
a lot easier. It's a really clever thing you've done there. Patrick,
and I really admire that, and it sounds really fascinating.
(19:44):
So as part of your dance team and troupe, you
included a lot of people with other kinds of disabilities
and illnesses and so forth. Can you tell us a
little bit about that, please?
S3 (19:54):
Yeah, absolutely. So in this story there, um, the whole
family that the Little Mermaid actually lives in, there's a
sea queen who is his mother, and the Little Mermaid,
who is his older sibling. They're both mobility aid users
as well. Um, and most of the other team members
are neurodivergent and come from a range of different backgrounds.
(20:14):
We also have, um, a lot of queer characters and Asian,
Australian and First Nations characters who are part of the cast.
Typically a lot of like classical ballet technique. It's all
very controlled and it's very much about sort of, uh,
showing off. And, and I always feel very suspicious as
someone who's always been very sidelined and erased from society.
(20:38):
And so I when I'm taking the, the ballet form,
and this has been something that everyone has been really
enthusiastic as we've been working together, I'm imbuing it with more, um,
more theatre. So more like realistic storytelling. There's no talking
in the work, but it will kind of a lot
of the movements will be derived from everyday movement. And
when it comes to the actual techniques and ballet shapes
(21:00):
that will sort of be using, they will be things
which really are quite new sort of steps, things that
speak more to the complexity of the characters rather than
just trying to make anything look perfect. We want it
to look real and to have the each of the
performers have their own personality and to not just be
cookie cutter, robot sort of dancers on stage. There's a
(21:21):
lot of the performers themselves that will kind of be there.
So yes, there's there's most of the the cast are disabled.
Most of the crew director and the production manager and
such are disabled artists as well. And it was interesting
before you mentioned denial, uh, as well. And that actually
is quite a big theme in this work. There's a
(21:42):
lot of people who are struggling in different ways to
to be their true self. And the work is really
not dividing people into good or bad people, but rather
looking at the ups and downs of each individual, the
choices that they make, the impacts of that, but also
the broader systems that that kind of put people in
a position where they act in a certain way that
(22:04):
is to the detriment of themselves or others, but also
the ways that they can transform what is within their
control to to change The team have been amazing to
work with. Um, they've just been so generous and excited
for this whole process. And I think, yeah, to be
in a rehearsal room where it feels like a disabled
space as well, it's just wonderful because most rehearsal rooms
(22:27):
are quite strict and and inflexible, and it's been beautiful
to have a space that is entirely our own, like
a queer, brown, disabled environment that is empowering. Everyone's very. Yeah, equal.
S1 (22:38):
Well, that's really interesting and really fabulous. Now we're quickly
running out of time here, Patrick. So we'll have to
start winding up soon. One thing will it look like
a ballet or will it look like theatre that uses
dance as its mode of performance?
S3 (22:53):
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say it will
look like theatre as that uses dance as a mode
of performance, but I've continued to call it a ballet
and kind of provide that lens, because I think that
for ballet to be relevant to today and to be
an artform that's going to continue into the future, it
needs to change and evolve, and it needs to become
(23:14):
less about a gender binary and just the sort of
white stories that are that are really not representative of
the world that we live in. And I think to
see characters who look like me, who look like all
the performers in this work, telling our stories authentically, I
really wanted to create a ballet where that happens. Um,
the metaphor I often use with the dancers is that
(23:35):
ballet technique is sort of like a spider web. There's
sort of a if you have the center of a
spider web, um, which might be the way that you
hold your center line in your body, in your back. Um,
that is kind of the starting point that the spider
sort of builds. It's its web around. But if you
think that there's lots of different kinds of spider webs,
there's messy ones that are in a crack. There's big ones,
(23:56):
small ones, ones with holes, and they're all spider webs.
That's kind of what ballet is, that you can take
any elements of ballet and it will still be ballet.
It will just kind of be interpreted differently. And when
you do that, it speaks to the depth and diversity
of the world that we actually live in and how
everybody has a different lineage, a different practice. With dance
and what movement means to us. So for me is
(24:18):
as a marginalized person has often been told what to
do with my body and and not been given my
own choices and bodily autonomy. I create dance where the
dancers have that bodily autonomy, and where it's like a
way for marginalized artists to reclaim our bodies. Um, that's
very different to how typical ballet is sort of about
shaping you and changing you into being a very rigid
(24:38):
idea of what dance is meant to be. So it
is different because I believe it needs to be.
S1 (24:44):
Where else can people find out about you and your work,
and how can people, um, learn about what you're doing?
S3 (24:50):
Usually people can just Google my name and sort of
find where I'm sort of active through. Through that, we
are relying on the support of the community to fund
some really important parts of this work, including, um, the
aesthetic access that we'll be doing with, uh, our blind
cultural consultant, Grace King, will be developing that with our
(25:10):
stage designers and with With myself to create a world
of this show that is inclusive for blind and vision
impaired audiences.
S1 (25:18):
So the performance will be somewhat audio described.
S3 (25:22):
Yeah, it'll be it'll be live streamed and it will
also have audio description, but the audio description will be
as well as haptic to as if you're attending the
work in person. The audio description, it's going to be
developed in a way that's like not just describing action,
but actually really drilling into the important messages in the
work and ensuring that the nuances and the world of
(25:44):
the story is really accurately and considerately portrayed within that form.
S1 (25:50):
I find that really interesting, the way that audio description
and in a similar circumstance, way that Islam is used
as well to become part of the performance. So an
accurate audio describer also needs to have some in this
case has to have great knowledge of the performance and
what you're what you're trying to portray, and also therefore
have some kind of idea of how to interpret the
(26:13):
performance and then describe it in a creative manner. Yes.
S3 (26:17):
Yeah, absolutely. So that's why Grace will be working with us,
particularly to ensure that that process is in line with
blind culture. And it's it's not just a bunch of
sighted people coming in and doing it how we think
it should be done. She'll be kind of working with
us through that whole process.
S1 (26:31):
Well, thank you, Patrick Goonesekera, for joining us here on
In Plain Sight on Vision Australia Radio. And it's been
a pleasure to see you in the studio and speak
with you, and that it's so delightful to find out
about these great pieces of art and in this case,
dance and theatre, and to to hear about all these
inclusive methodologies making the world easier and more inclusive for everybody,
(26:53):
not just people with a disability. So thanks for joining us.
S3 (26:56):
No, thank you so much. It was so great to
talk with a fellow community member about these things. I
really appreciated this conversation.
S2 (27:06):
And that was the chat that Simon and Abby had
with Patrick Gunasekara earlier this year. Patrick teaches Teachers disabled
only dance classes at the King Street Arts Centre here
in Perth and coming up on the 17th of August,
Patrick is teaching disabled cultural safety training for dance and
physical theatre teachers at the Blue Room in Northbridge here
(27:26):
in Perth. For more information about other events with Patrick,
search for Patrick Gunasekara. And that's spelt g u n
e r on humanity. Performances of The Little Mermaid are
from the 4th to the 22nd of November at the
Blue Room here in Northbridge. That concludes in Plain Sight
(27:48):
for this week. Join us at the same time next
week on Vision Australia Radio, VA radio, digital and online at.
You can also listen on demand by searching for In
Plain Sight by Vision Australia Radio. Wherever you get your podcasts,
or ask your smart device to play in Plain sight
(28:08):
by Vision Australia Radio. Thanks for listening.
S4 (28:11):
Thank you.
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