INTEGRATION OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES IN THE PROFESSIONAL PERFORMING ARTS

Inclusive Performing Arts Platform SERPANTINE LABORATORY

Since 2019, this ongoing Kaunas city chamber theater initiative has encompassed creative workshops, specialized training programs, professional stage productions, and their dissemination. The SERPANTINE LABORATORY empowers a diverse creative community—professional theater creators and people with disabilities—developing and testing new working methods applicable in the fields of performing arts and social integration. The initiative facilitates the exchange of best practices at both institutional and personal levels while transforming public perceptions of performers with disabilities on stage.

The aim of the project
To increase the accessibility of professional art and culture for people with disabilities, ensure equal opportunities to participate in creative and professional performing arts projects, and develop a sustainable institutional network for the exchange of best practices.

Target Audience

Direct beneficiaries:

• People with visual, hearing, mobility, intellectual, and mental disabilities.

Indirect beneficiaries:

• Professional artists (directors, choreographers, actors);
• International performing arts organizations working with the mixed groups;
• Organizations providing social services to the mixed groups and their staff;
• The general public.

Expected Outcomes

Elimination of barriers for people with disabilities in professional theater arts, fostering their creative empowerment and social inclusion. An inclusive perspective will promote equal opportunities and uphold the right to non-discrimination based on disability-related social, physical, emotional, linguistic, or other individual characteristics.

Project Implementer: Kaunas City Chamber Theatre

Project Duration: 2025–2027
Project Funders: Lithuanian Council for Culture, Kaunas City Municipality, Goethe-Institut Vilnius

History of the project

The performance "Superpowers" inspired Kaunas 2022 to create and implement the project "Creative Empowerment in Integration of Persons with Disabilities into Professional Performing Arts", which includes the performance route "PinoKeys" (directed by Indrė Puišytė Šidlauskienė) in 2021 and the performance "Is It Easy?" (choreographed by Mariia Bakalo and Inna Falkova, Ukraine).

For this project and the accessibility measures implemented, KMKT was awarded the 2022 Initiative of the Year Award by Kaunas City Municipality.

In 2023, the continuation of this project will be part of the Melin Mercouri Prize awarded to Kaunas for Kaunas 2022. 

In 2021, the director of the project Indrė Puišytė Šidlauskienė together with the creative team presented a street performance "Pinokeys Movement".

"Pinokeys Movement is a route of 7 performances in the city, each stop of which is a different interpretation of the Pinocchio theme. "Who is Pinokey to me?" - with this question the creative process of each stop started. "The content of the Pinokeys Movement is exclusive to people who have limited possibilities of stage expression. The role of professional artists here is to help find ways for this content to be heard, seen or felt by the audience.

Using different forms of expression - image, movement, dance, word, music - the artists presented a 7-part performance together with the positive participants, who are overcoming difficult daily challenges. 

The performance "Is it easy?" explores each of us' ability to connect with another person, to reach out for help, to love, to sympathise, each of us' need to feel supported, to have a friend, each of us' right to be angry, to worry, to misunderstand, to be frustrated. The autobiographical stories of the project participants become choreographic etudes of communion, sharing, symbolic rebirth and hope, in which the participants' creativity - poetry, storytelling, singing, movement - is heard.

The movement performance, which highlights the differences and (dis)abilities of each of us, is created by performers with different (dis)abilities, together with professional Lithuanian dancers Ema Senkuviene and Marius Eidrigevičius, and choreographers Inna Falkova and Maria Bakalo from Ukraine. This is a project of Kaunas City Chamber Theatre and Kaunas 2022, which aims to actively involve people with disabilities in the performing arts and to encourage them to create.

The idea of the film was inspired by the fairy tales about the Beast of Kaunas, created thanks to the Kaunas - European Capital of Culture 2022 initiative. Inspired by these tales, Maksimas, who aspires to become a director, is working on scripts where the legendary world of fairy tales and reality collide. His short film, made with the help of a team of professionals, is a new "opened" mystery of the Beast of Kaunas.