A More Equitable Experience, Part 3

A More Equitable Experience, Part 3

by Elena Loi

While reflecting back on my internship, the one thing that stood out to me most was the play “Waiting for the Bus” that Celia invited me to. It was an extremely eye-opening theater play that explored patience, hope, and the human condition about those with developmental and/or intellectual disabilities while also explaining the history of the disability rights movement. I learned about a lot of things that I had no idea had happened like the Capitol Crawl and it showcased a lot of hard topics such as the history of eugenics against disabled people, their general hatred for being called “special ed”, and how being placed in schools meant to care for them can lead to abusive environments and them getting essentially abandoned by their families. It was a very hard play to watch, but it felt very necessary to see. 

The play was told through the perspective of someone with an intellectual disability who waits for the bus at a bus stop because they want to leave the institutional facility that their family had placed them in; and between each bus stop scene is an event that was important for the disability rights movement. One of the scenes that stood out to me most was when the main character believed that they would get to leave the facility and how they were confident that they could learn to support themselves by getting a job at the grocery store while living with their sister, only to learn from the facility that they were deemed to be “not ready for society yet” and that his guardian (his sister) wasn’t able to take care of him because she was going to get married and was expecting a baby soon. I think that the play really hit home the feeling of being trapped in a bubble with no power of your own as you watch the people you love live lives without you and really pushes for the idea that what is most important for disabled people is independence and the ability to do things by themselves. 

In the audio description training for museums that I’m finalizing this week, I hope to integrate making spaces for people to draw their own conclusions. Through my recent completion of the Art Spark audio description training modules, I learned a lot about the importance of brevity, word choice, and even tone when doing audio description and this continues to relate back to my own knowledge as an Informatics major where we primarily study how people take in information and share it with those around them. Bias is in everything, especially in our tone and word choice, and it makes a lot of sense why audio describers typically watch something first before scripting up what they plan to say because it can be hard to decide word choice on the fly during live stage plays.

See Elana’s final presentation based on her internship with Art Spark Texas on our YouTube Channel.

Elana Loi Presentation

Download the transcript to go along with the presentation.

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