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Joan Lipkin, Innovative Playwright/Director and Social Activist
Named 2007 Ethical Humanist by the Ethical Society

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CONTACT:
Diane Kline
Director of Marketing
(314) 863-5811
diane@stlrac.org
Joan Lipkin, Innovative Playwright/Director and Social Activist Named 2007 Ethical Humanist by the Ethical Society
Lipkin’s work speaks for disenfranchised groups including the disabled, gay teenagers, blind children and people with Alzheimer’s
ST. LOUIS (March 27, 2007) – In St. Louis, Joan Lipkin’s name is synonymous with creativity, empathic caring, and, yes, righteous indignation. Even the name of the organization she founded and runs – That Uppity Theatre Company – speaks to her sense of humor and self-effacement. The petite brunette with soft curls framing her face is anything but “uppity.” But she will get up on her high horse to tackle the serious issues of contemporary society and get in the face of an audience to tell the stories of groups that can’t speak for themselves: Dancers with multiple sclerosis who perform gracefully from their wheel chairs. Gays sharing their painful and humorous stories of coming out to families and friends. Blind children expanding their sense of movement by performing hip hop versions of songs from traditional musicals. “People with certain challenges feel very isolated,” Lipkin explains. “When they create art together they become part of a community. And in performing, they speak to a wider audience that can then understand what their lives are about.” Her latest effort is a case in point. Lipkin created The Think Tank Players at the Cardinal Ritter Adult Day Care Center for people with early-onset Alzheimer’s and dementia. By acting out such scenes as the Lewis and Clark Expedition or even a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game, they become more energized and engaged with the real world. “Our performers learn they can be playful, laugh, have fun and find new aspects of their creativity which they may have not explored,” Lipkin says. A group of The Think Tank Players will perform on Friday, April 20 at the Alzheimer’s Volunteer Appreciation Dinner at the Heights. While beloved by the groups she serves and appreciated for her multiple talents by the arts community, she is now being honored further for her efforts. Lipkin is the first producer and director to be given the James F. Honrback Ethical Humanist of the Year Award. During the ceremony at 11 a.m. on Sunday, April 15 at the Ethical Society, 9001 Clayton Road, her work will be applauded by a variety of speakers, including Fran Cohen, co-founder of the DisAbility Project and Jill McGuire, executive director of the Regional Arts Commission (RAC). RAC and McGuire have supported Lipkin’s mission for almost 20 years. “Joan is a powerful force – a true original whose energy and talent has influenced the thinking of many people in this town. Her success demonstrates that the arts are an important arena in which to address social issues in our society and to change attitudes and lives,” McGuire explained. The Ethical Humanist award was established in 1976 to honor individuals or organizations for outstanding work in improving the human condition. Lipkin now joins the ranks of such illustrious regional leaders as Harriett Woods, Frank Susman, Blanche Touhill, Dr. Suzanne Singer and Ann Carter Stith. Lipkin also was honored in October with the 2006 Frederick H. Laat Memorial Award from the Missouri Citizens for the Arts, in recognition for contributions to people of diverse backgrounds, without discrimination of any kind. For more information about Joan Lipkin or her award visit www.uppityco.com or www.ethicalstl.org. About The Regional Arts Commission: Founded in 1985, the Regional Arts Commission (RAC) is a cultural catalyst in the St. Louis area, providing financial, technical, promotional and other support for arts organizations. Directed by a board of fifteen commissioners appointed by the chief executives of St. Louis City and County, RAC is a pivotal force in the continuing development and marketing of the arts in the region. This year, 218 of the area’s arts organizations, consortiums and cultural programs, large and small, received grant awards totaling more than $3.4 million, funded by a portion of the hotel/motel room sales tax. RAC’s four-story facility including the area’s first Cultural Resource Center is located at 6128 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, Mo., 63112 in the exciting new stretch of The Loop neighborhood. Contact the organization by calling (314) 863-5811 or by visiting www.art-stl.com. ###

THE DISABILITY PROJECT PARTNERS WITH THE ALZHEIMER’S ASSOCIATION

When it came to determining who to ask to develop a theater class for people with early dementia, our skills and experience made us an obvious choice. The DisAbility Project has worked with people with a variety of cognitive abilities for over ten years. So we were delighted to step in when approached by Debra Bryer, Early Stage Coordinator from the Alzheimer’s Association in St. Louis and Cheryl Woodruff, Coordinator for Caregiver Support Services at Cardinal Ritter Senior Services.The Alzheimer’s Association was founded in 1980 and is the world leader in Alzheimer research and support. The association offers frontline support to individuals affected by Alzheimer’s with services that include 24/7 information and referral hotlines, safety services, and education and support groups. The St. Louis chapter serves more than 65,000 families in the 38-county service area of St. Louis metro, eastern Missouri and western Illinois.Cardinal Ritter Senior Services (CRSS) provides services to improve the quality of life for senior adults by promoting and providing social, health, and housing programs and services in St. Louis City and County, as well as in St. Charles, Jefferson, Franklin and Warren Counties.The mission of CRSS is to be a leader in providing an integrated continuum of quality social services, housing, residential care and health care services for the senior adult and is accomplished in a nurturing environment that recognizes every person’s dignity and provides security, advocacy, and independence.The classes are meeting twice a month to work with Artistic Director, Joan Lipkin, Uppity Assistant Director, Sarah Shimchick, Interns, Jo Firestone from Wesleyan University, Jessica Gibson and Kate Koch from the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. Sessions feature icebreakers, theatre games, singing, dancing, and conversation. Participants are also creating a short performance piece to premiere at the Alzheimer’s Association Volunteer Recognition Event. In addition to being fun and fostering community, our classes—among the first of their kind in the country—stimulate cognition in participants. Photographer Marian Brickner has documented the experience for a traveling exhibit.

Theatrical group fosters public awareness on disabilities

<click here for story and video on KMOV.com>

Theater project has ability to promote laughter, understanding
by Kati Stovall

Close your eyes and enter the room. You hear a director yell out to the cast, “Move stage left, move forward, 5, 6, 7, 8 … !”

You swear that you are at a rehearsal for “A Chorus Line” at the Repertory Theater, but when you open your eyes, the scene is different than what you imagined. The ensemble is the DisAbilty Project, which encompasses both disabled and able-bodied actors. The project exudes raw talent, creates a theatrical vision through word and movement and changes your perspective on life forever.... <more>

Should We ‘Dis’ Qualify Bodies? Creating Across Identity Categories in Disability and  Performance

By Lorraine Kee
Of The Post-Dispatch
Sunday, Sept. 3, 2000

Joan Lipkin, the director of the DisAbility Project gives a massage to Ana Jennings before a rehearsal at Washington University's Occupational Therapy building, at 4444 Forest Park Avenue. (Jamie Rector)

The DisAbility Project also works with nondisabled actors, but its main goal is to let able-bodied people know that people with disabilities really aren't that much different.

Somewhere along the journey from obscurity to simmering celebrity -- after director Joan Lipkin's mind first lit on the idea for the DisAbility Project four years ago, but well before the theatre company landed for the first time on an honest-to-goodness stage this spring -- the Sharing Circle evolved....<more>

Troupe commands the stage with a repertoire to shift public perception

By Lorraine Kee
Of the Post-Dispatch

Joan Lipkin, the director of the Disability Project goes over some last minute direction before their final  performance before haitus.  (Jamie Rector/P-D)

The show won't go on for at least an hour.

But members of the DisAbility Project have arrived early, at the urging of director Joan Lipkin, for a performance at the 8th annual International Post-Polio and Independent Living Conference at the Marriott Pavilion hotel. Tonight they will perform in front of their biggest house yet -- about 200 people. In the audience will be polio survivors, health professionals, support group leaders, family and friends....<more>

People with disabilities don't want to be defined by them

Andrew Lackey races through his house with friends Stephanie Sleeper (center) and Beth Heger at a party celebrating Lackey's graduation from Horton Watkins High in Ladue. (Jamie Rector/P-D)

By Lorraine Kee
Of The Post-Dispatch

"We're not only going to act and say things, we're going to do things with our bodies." -- Katie Rodriguez, in rehearsal for the DisAbility Project.

Some "walkies" see the chairs on wheels or the awkward crutches or the cumbersome braces. They get  impatient when the conversation comes out haltingly or hard to understand. Or they notice the limp or the way the muscles have curled hands into clenched fists, and that's all they see....<more>

Disability Theatre Project Allows Davidson Students to Instigate Social Change

March 22, 2001
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
by Alexandra Obregon '00
Sixteen Davidson students will initiate a community-wide dialogue about disability on Friday, March 30, in a grassroots theatre performance entitled "The DisAbility Project: Exploring Disability Issues Through Theatre" under the direction of visiting artist Joan Lipkin and Davidson faculty members Ann Fox and Sharon Green. <more>

(This abstract focuses on The Disability Project through its construction as community-based theatre)

by: Joan Lipkin, That Uppity Theatre Company
Ann Fox, Davidson College

“No performance by itself can alter the routines of everyday life, but community-based theatre can provide ‘what if’ images of potential community, sparking the kind of imaginative work that must precede substantial changes in customary habits.” --Bruce McConachie

Recent discussions about the nature of community-based performance, while suggesting the elusive meaning of “community,” have nonetheless underscored the efficacy of grassroots theatre in challenging traditional perceptions while promoting movement toward egalitarianism.  Progress may be based in creating temporary imaginative communites of the kind Sonja Kuftinec describes relative to her work with adolescents in Bosnia, or fraught with the ambiguities and limitations that Bruce McConachie encountered in his work with a grassroots theatre project...<more>

[This abstract focuses on The Disability Project through its construction as feminist theatre]

Joan Lipkin, That Uppity Theatre Company
Ann Fox, Davidson College

The Disability Project is a series of weekly workshops that engage conversation, writing, sound and movement, and theatrical exercises, to explore developing material around the culture of disability.  Founded and directed by Joan Lipkin, artistic director of That Uppity Theatre Company, the Project has been underway since 1996, and is collaborating toward creating a large-scale, multi-disciplinary piece to be produced for the entire St. Louis community in the fall of 2000. ...<more>

The Disability Project: Toward an Aesthetic of Access
(Shortened Running Title:  The Disability Project)

Joan Lipkin, That Uppity Theatre Company
Ann Fox, Davidson College
 
"The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of.  Because people are not such wonderful people. They're one hundred times one thousand.  You're one times one!  They walk all over the earth. You just stay here.  They're common as weeds, but--you--well, you're Blue Roses!"--Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

"One of the things I love about the group is that I get to reimagine the world the way I want it to be."--Joan Lipkin

            Until The Disability Project commenced in the fall of 1997, the most well-known intersection of St. Louis, disability, and theatre was the wan face of Tennessee Williams' heroine Laura Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie (1945).  Although her difference was prized by Williams as something precious and magical, the play finally suggests that the polio-stricken Laura remains behind the closed doors of her family's cage-like tenement for the rest of her life. ...<more>

Res(Crip)ting Feminist Theater Through Disability Theater:
Selections From The DisAbility Project

Ann M. Fox, Davidson College
Joan Lipkin, That Uppity Theater Company

MAN: Was I too healthy?  Was that it?  Did some secret-society deity decide I should be given a handicap to even up the race?

WOMAN: Well, that is an interesting conjecture.
-Myrna Lamb, “But What Have You Done For Me Lately?”

One of the pieces in Myrna Lamb’s 1969 classic, early feminist and episodic play Scyklon Z, “But What Have You Done for Me Lately?,” features a man who is impregnated in order that he might experience the dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy in an anti-choice culture. Here, disability by turns metaphorizes the female body within a patriarchal society as “handicapped” (as the above quote suggests), and looms as the potential punishment for women denied reproductive choice: ...<more>

WTP Conference Presentation, Summer 2001
Panel:  “Embodied Environments 1:  Migrating Subjects”

Five Minute Prequel

As audience members enter into the conference room, some graduate students meet them, greeting them, welcoming them. As audience members go to their seats, they are invited to sit down, relax, close their eyes. A graduate student is positioned at the head of the room, audio describing what is going on.  She describes how people are coming in, what they are doing... <more>