Variety Show For Maltese Adults With Disabilities Wows With Impressive Creative Programme
A local group that provides artistic training and music, dance and theatre opportunities for adults with intellectual disabilities just held its first in-person event in years – and it was a major success.
The Opening Doors’ Association’s Variety Show 2022 was a vibrant, celebratory event held at the newly-opened Theatre Next Door in Magħtab. With ODA’s chair Jo Butterworth, vice-chair Sara Polidano and artistic director Ilona Baldacchino ensuring the show is a big one, the community had a chance to finally get together following years of pandemic-related restrictions.
And the excitement could be felt in the air.
The programme was “the result of creative processes led by the Opening Doors artistic team and fuelled by the cast’s creativity and self-expression”.
And the different routines showcased different skills, empowering the actors and dancers to access their own creativity.
In the piece “Eurovision Wonderland”, individual performers took to the stage emulating Maltese Eurovision contestants. The resonance of each performer with the singer they were emulating was evident in the way they carried themselves.
In the musical pieces, “An Arabian Night” and “Keep the Beat” the performers held a cohesive rhythmic structure whilst playing with their own rhythmic impulses.
The pieces “Ode to a Traffic Cone”, “The Baby Domino” and “The Clowns who forgot to Play” each offered an engaging concept that added a dimension of intrigue when watching them.
The performances show the organisation’s wholesome growth in the way it integrated trainees and artistic team members, especially in pieces like “Ode to a Traffic Cone”, “The Baby Domino” and “The Clowns who Forgot to Play”.
This allowed for an “empowered disability culture whereby non-disabled adults and adults with an intellectual disability perform alongside each other as colleagues”.
The extent of this growth was manifest in the organisation’s production of Is-Siġra tat-Tin directed by Toni Attard and performed at Spazzju Kreattiv the following weekend. Here the artists engaged with the dreams and wishes of the performers with an intellectual disabilities weaving them into the rich intercultural folklore of the fig tree.
They created a powerful testimony of the desire of people with intellectual disabilities to live full lives – loved, respected as autonomous and capable adults, and treated with dignity. Visually it was superbly crafted with a mesmerising set and particularly powerful story-telling moment using shadow puppetry.
Both the Variety Show 2022 and Is-Siġra tat-Tin are wholesome testimony to the growth of this organisation that offers opportunities for adults with intellectual disabilities to be engaged in all levels of self-expression, creative process and professionally developed performances.
Photos by Camille Fenech
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