// MAKING MACBETH //
About
Making Macbeth is a two-year research-creation project exploring what happens when a mixed–ability ensemble that includes and range of abilities share a creative space. The project brings together theatre artists, researchers, disability advocates, students and community partners to develop and study new approaches to mixed-ability performance-making. Rather than asking disabled neurodivergent artists to adapt to established ways of making theatre, the project explores what can happen when the creative process itself adapts, changes and develops around the people in the room.
Why Macbeth?
The starting point for the project came from collaborating artist Niall McNeil, whose creative practice is informed by a life that includes Down syndrome.
Niall McNeil has a long history of creating experimental theatre and developing unexpected interpretations of familiar stories. His interest in exploring Shakespeare's Macbeth provides the creative foundation for this project.
Rather than beginning with a predetermined adaptation, the ensemble will use the text, themes and narrative of Macbeth as material for experimentation and discovery.
THE RESEARCH
Making Macbeth has two central areas of inquiry:
1. Creating Across Difference
The project explores new performance-making methods for mixed-ability ensembles. We are interested in how artists communicate, make decisions, generate material and share creative agency when different ways of thinking, moving, communicating and creating are present in the same room.
2. Disability, Performance & Spectacle
The project also considers what disability scholar Petra Kuppers describes as a paradox of spectacle: a phenomena that attempts to render disability invisible in everyday society, but then highly visible when placed on stage.
Making Macbeth asks ~ what happens to a creative process when each artist in a mixed-ability ensemble has meaningful agency?
WHY DOES THIS WORK MATTER?
Inclusive performance is not only about who appears on stage. It is also about who makes decisions, whose ideas shape the work, how creative spaces are structured, and what kinds of artistic practices are valued.
Making Macbeth aims to develop practical knowledge that can support artists, researchers, educators and arts organizations interested in more equitable and genuinely collaborative approaches to performance-making.
Funding Acknowledgement: Making Macbeth: Negotiating Agency and Aesthetics in Mixed-Ability Creative Spaces is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through its Insight Development Grants program