Syrus Marcus Ware is a scholar, activist, visual artist and educator who has joined the School of the Arts as a new tenure track assistant professor, and will also be teaching in the Gender and Social Justice program. A former Vanier Scholar, he holds a PhD in environmental studies from York University, where his dissertation focused on disability arts, prison abolition and portraiture.
A founding member of Black Lives Matter Canada, his scholarship largely looks at Black activist culture, disability justice in all its forms in a variety of media and formats, and the way art can inspire the “irresistible revolution” (to use a phrase from Toni Cade Bambara).
What are you up to these days?
I’m just finishing up my first year at McMaster. I’m teaching a course that I got to design called “Cripping Performance: Deaf, Mad and Disabled Performance in Canada,” which is running for the first time this summer.
Tell me more about your new course
I’ve been trying to think through how to crip Canadian theatre for the past couple of years – I’ve done several large-scale projects, including one with the National Arts Centre called The Cycle, which explored how to change the shape of Canadian theatre to make it one that all disabled, Deaf and Mad people could engage with as practitioners.
With this course, I’ve had the opportunity to introduce students to the rich history of disability performance in Canada, and also the way artists are “cripping” their style, their way of working, their process, their timeline in order to make it work for them. I’ve also given student opportunities to think through how they might want to structure their own productions as they go forward in ways that are more open and engaging for disabled, Deaf and Mad collaborators.
There isn’t enough out there about the history of disability arts in Canada, particularly from an intersectional approach. I’m looking at race and gender and class as well as disability in this course.
We’re learning from some incredible artists: Courage Bacchus and Tamyka Bullen, who are both Black, Deaf, ASL poets, actors and performers; Mad artists like Jenna Reid, who is a textile artist; Rosina Kazi, who’s an electronic musician; and Raven Davis, who’s a multimedia Indigenous artist.
Being able to introduce students to these artists and their way of working has been great.
What does cripping an artistic practice look like?
Imagine creating the kind of environment where artists, or dramaturgs, or lighting directors, or anyone who’s engaged in a performance, was able to bring their full self to their work – which would mean they would get to have embodied experiences. We can change the format of a work to crip it and make it work in a variety of different ways.
For instance, theatre often has very condensed timelines, very intensive processes – what would it look like to expand the timelines so that it wasn’t so intense for everybody? What if we expanded it in a way that worked for, for example, neurodivergent people who may need a bit more time built in, and maybe not to be in an eight-hour meeting but have things in shorter chunks.
What would it mean to say that the actors’ health comes first? What would it mean if, even up to opening night, we could potentially change the timeline to make sure that everybody was able to participate fully?
What would it mean to take away that preciousness of “the show must go on”? What if the show didn’t go on? What if the show adapted, or changed, or moved because we put people first?
There are also ways of bringing a disability narrative into the content – so cripping your storyline, making sure there are disabled characters, Deaf characters, Mad characters, writing these people into your scripts.
It doesn’t have to be the entire storyline written about disability, but you can write disabled, Deaf and Mad characters into your script, and therefore create work for disabled, Deaf and Mad actors who could be hired for these roles.
There are lots of ways we can crip our approach to performance that are people-centred – they’re about expanding our idea of what a timeline, a way of working and a storyline is in order to make it work for more people.
How has your year at McMaster been?
It’s been incredible. I Iove being part of SOTA and the SOTA team. The students at McMaster are so incredible – I’ve had students who have had such a challenging year, and they’ve really risen to the challenge. I’ve been so proud of all the work that’s been created this year, and all of the ways the students have engaged with each other and with the course content.
What’s been your inspiration as your artistic practice has developed?
As an artist, I’ve been creating work that was tied to this idea of creating an irresistible revolution – a possible change in our social world. Part of that has been trying to improve the working conditions for us as artists and engagers – I’ve been very interested as a disabled artist, as a Mad artist to think through how disability and racialization was playing out in the art community in Canada.
In 2014, I was working at the AGO, where there was a photo prize called the Aimia AGO Photo Prize. They had three finalists for the prize giving speeches, including a Black disabled artist named Latoya Ruby Frazier.
She gave a speech that talked about how it was important for us as racialized artists, as disabled artists, as artists on the margins, to take these institutions back – to make sure that our voices were shown and included in these places that were supposed to be a public trust.
I was so inspired by that, and it was as I was beginning to do my doctoral research, so I thought: what would it look like to create a reflection on disability in the arts, in this moment, in Canada, and particularly to look at the artists themselves – what they were doing, what their experiences were like.
Part of my research is also focused on abolition, and this idea of futurity and building future worlds – building worlds that work better for more of us. That grows out of my activism. As an organizer, I’ve been very involved in abolition and struggles for decades, so that inspired a lot of my research as well.
What’s next?
I’m the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada, and through that work it’s been amazing to support Black liberatory struggles from coast to coast to coast and thinking about the presence of Black people on Turtle Island and Inuit Nunangut – what change could look like to make a Black-affirming place for people to live in and be celebrated.
I’ll be creating some projects for the Toronto Biennial in March 2022 – I’ve just written a new play that is a follow-up to Antarctica, a play I created in 2019, which will be premiering then.