My wheelchair is more agile than most. In motion, it’s designed to respond to shifts of my weight—a little like the shifts someone might make to maintain balance when standing on, for example, public transit. I rarely sit in priority seats on trains and buses because I feel safer being able to hold onto a pole and adjust to their movement. Personal logic aside, there are only a few spots, and many people need them more than I do.

Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s great when people offer me a priority space. With everyone so lost in their screens, I appreciate the folks who bother to look up and see who they’re commuting with. For me, what gets troubling is when the offer of a priority space becomes an insistence that I take it.

“Sit here,” they say. 

“No, thanks,” I say. “I’m good.”

“No. Here.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

“But it’s meant for you. Take it.”

When I don’t do as I’m asked, people get confused. Often, they point to the access symbol: that internationally-recognized wheelie stick figure on its blue background. Look, see? This is your place. Again, I want to be clear: I’d rather live in this world, where that sign is so widely recognized, than in some other world where it’s not. But that kind of “You go here” behaviour encapsulates some of the biggest reasons why we need so much more work by artists who identify with disability.

First, consider the number of accessible spots available to folks who want and need them. Relatively speaking, they are few and far between. More art means greater visibility, means more space, means better access, means more art. We must work until companies aren’t curating and programming work by artists with disabilities because of specific diversity and inclusion initiatives, but because that work fits a season. Because it brings in audiences. Because it’s just plain good.

Second, that blue-and-white symbol comes from a time when “disability” cut an exceptionally specific silhouette. I wasn’t around in 1968 when Susanne Koefoed designed it, but my present-day experience (including the fact that I’m the new co-artistic director of a 20-year-old company called Realwheels Theatre) tells me disability has equalled wheelchairs and other mobility aids for quite some time. 

So, we don’t just need more art. We need it to come from the full scope and breadth of lived disability experience. If non-disabled folks can point to specific spaces as defined by that stick-figure symbol, where is the room for madness, for neurodiversity, for chronic pain, for illness? Where is the intersection of my identity as a wheelchair-user with my identity as a husband, and a Newfoundlander, and a teacher, and a dancer, and a person working to understand his relationship to masculinity? 

Disability intersects with virtually infinite other identities, yet the stories reflected in existing work still offer quite a narrow lens, largely because much of the “disability art” that’s gained any wider recognition was (and is still) made by “established” artists working from outside—at best adjacent to—lived experience of disability. Often with the best intentions, such creators boil the fullness of that experience down to symbolic characters meant to teach typically-bodied and neurotypical protagonists about the nature of challenge and loss. That practice will only stop with a critical mass of work to press against it.

To those of us who have been part of these conversations for years, now decades, nothing I’ve said so far is new. So let me offer one last reason why there’s so much work to be done. It probably isn’t new either, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

Most new artists with disabilities that I work with want typically-bodied audiences to understand what their worlds are like. There’s a desire to explain themselves. Of course there will always be room for that work, because each lived experience of disability is different, and capturing that truth alone is critical. But I worry sometimes, for my own artistic practice and for theirs, because I see the beginning of a belief that maybe the few priority seats really are the only spaces we’re meant to occupy. Maybe these are the only stories we have to tell—the only ones people want to hear from us.

We need new work so we can get those stories out and then realize we have more to say. We explain if we choose to. And then we explore for ourselves.

Realwheels Theatre’s “Zombies, Mannequins, and Talking Heads”—a reading of three new in-development scripts from disabled artists—runs from May 9 to 11 at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre. Get tickets here.