Olympics in London, the golden egg for disability arts organisations that never was...

As we were all looking forth to the Olympics coming to town, with the promise of lots of work for all of us! the result I realised last night after going to see Extant's Show "Sheer" made me realise that most companies won't be able to tour this summer as all disabled artists have been booked for the opening ceremonies of both shows.

this means no one can take any booking because they have 30 to 40 days of rehearsals for each of the ceremonies ( we have people participating at both!). Regrettably they wouldn't take me... in spite of having taught the aerial; skills that my pupils will require!...I would have loved to be hanging from the roof of the stadium and have that unique view of the ceremony...but glad my pupils will.

Not only that but having been invited to the very first Cultural Olympiad back in 2007 or 8 (can't remember the exact date) at the South Bank centre in London where the heads of most Arts organisation of the UK were present, I offered Keith Khan to try to train a group of disabled people for this project, as a result he said that they would NOT be able to fund us, but that if we managed to train them by our own means, he'd make sure that our company was taken on officially as part of the organisations that have aided the development of the event...

Now, after having achieved over 4 years to do just that, they are recruiting the artists as self employed artists and making only mention of one company Greae just because it;'s director is directly linked to their funding and to the Olympics itself! Which is very frustrating when one has done so much work to achieve this goals and end up not mentioned or acknowledged at all!

As a result we're all (disability arts organisations) short on work and we cannot develop our work, with the financial crisis devastating also the arts world with the funding cuts and the new system of commissioning that we require to do to get some money of local councils, the future of Cirque Nova is in total jeopardy!

We still fight to getting our work to continue with little grants, as every training session costs us £1000 sterling, as due to crisis our rehearsal space that used to be offered for free, now costs us £350 per day, and then £150 per teacher and we have 4 teachers...well leave little chance to really be able to do much teaching this year.

All art organisation are finding themselves in this conundrum which is so frustrating and we have no international support either for contract, so the golden  egg that seemed to be the Olympics is proving to be great for the self-employed artists that we've taught to do circus skills in the AIR, but for the companies itself, the egg seems more a rotten one buried underground to rot and it will be eaten the way the Filipino like eating duck eggs with a little embryo dead inside!