Canol y Byd

This new practice as research public performance was a work created with the researcher and participants. One learning disabled person, Arlene James, worked for nine months to create her first piece of theatre that looked at memory and experience. The work foregrounded rural welsh experiences of community alongside personal memories. Challenging aspects of learning disability revealed shifting perceptions of memory and time and private and public life. In this work the nature of memory was revealed as fragmented and not the seamless linear project we tend to create in autobiography. Specific aspects of rural welsh culture were integrated into this personal theatre work that opened up a private world to the public and invited audience to see the person with a learning disability as first and foremost a citizen of her location and culture and secondly presented an embodied glimpse into memory as both social and interpreted by the individual through personal processes.