“It’s the way I make meaning. It’s the way I make me.”
Terry Galloway
Is art only for the able-bodied, the beautiful, or even the talented? Or is it an intrinsically human activity, central to our understanding of ourselves, others and the conditions in which we live? How do our individual narrative threads weave into a community of meaning?
Shakespearean characters who soliloquy in a dirt-floor barn, a paranoid agoraphobic, a smartass gumshoe, a bitter, disheveled, maniacal rat -- all these are characters inhabited, and created by, Terry Galloway. She’s mean, she’s deaf, she’s queer, and everywhere she goes she creates a ruckus, bringing along as many co-conspirators as she can muster. She encourages them to find the characters within themselves, and to be characters.
Terry lost her hearing over the course of her childhood and early adulthood, and by the time she was in her twenties her hearing loss was profound. She did not learn to sign. She learned to read lips. She fought to perfect the clarity of her speech when she could no longer hear her own voice. And despite advice from mostly well-meaning high school counselors and others, she pursued her dream of being a performer. If there was no stage she would make a stage, and provoke the laughter that she could not hear, and earn the applause that she could at least see. Most of all, she invited the participation of others. No, she demanded the participation of others, of everyone she could reach, able and disabled, queer and straight, or just plain weird and alienated.
As a college student, she found an eccentric professor, a doer, who took the little deaf girl and a bunch of other college students to a barn, where they performed Shakespeare with sweaty, delirious enthusiasm. This was Winedale, a formative experience in Terry’s career. She went on to become a founding member of Esther’s Follies in Austin, Texas. When she met Donna Nudd, the love of her life, and found herself in Tallahassee, some of her cohorts from Austin tagged along, and it was in Tallahassee that the Mickee Faust Club was born, a mixed-ability company that has performed original cabaret material for more than 20 years. She continued her involvement in Austin, leading a group of performers with disabilities in a company called Actual Lives. These companies are all still in the business of entertaining and enlightening live audiences, and The Mickee Faust Club, in branching off to include radio and video production, has set its sights on “World Media Domination.”
Terry describes art as a survival mechanism, a way of shaking the feelings of dependency that disability inevitably creates. In theater, as in all collaborative arts, everyone is dependent on others to make the magic happen, and style must submit to story. Through Terry’s story, we explore the intersections of art, disability, identity, and community. On May 3rd, 2010, Terry underwent a procedure that bypassed her ear and installed a device known as a cochlear implant. Since the device was turned on a month later, Terry has been gradually learning to hear again. This dramatic transformation is central to our story, and the mechanism through which we explore our questions.
Through archival footage, images and interviews with friends, family and collaborators we will explore Terry’s early career and her stints at Shakespeare at Winedale, Esther’s Follies and Actual Lives in Austin Texas, and The Mickee Faust Club of Tallahassee. Scholars of disability and performance discuss the significance of Terry’s work as an individual and as an organizer of her own unique brand of community theater. We will hear from dedicated performers, who go beyond offering the clichéd “we found a voice” and explore the complex questions of performance, identity, and disability. Brief interviews with the surgeon and audiologist will describe the procedure and the process that is restoring Terry’s hearing. And we will be there when she reunites with her former collaborators in Texas at a Shakespeare at Winedale reunion.
A documentary about Terry could not be a standard, talking heads discussion of her life. Rewired will include plenty of performance footage from the past, and from the present, as we present an animated interpretation of an excerpt from Terry’s acclaimed memoir, Mean Little deaf Queer, titled “The Performance of Drowning.” Furthermore, some of Terry’ collaborators in performance will be asked to perform their interpretation of their friend, rather than just talk about her. Terry has been interviewed three times so far, and as her hearing is returning gradually, the same way it left, we are documenting the changes. She immediately began learning to play the guitar, yet another example of how she understands the world through performance.
We are shooting in HD video format, with animations created in After Effects. Archival stills representing three decades of performances and rehearsals will be scanned and animated, including photos and footage of many of our interview subjects interacting, and performing, with Terry. We will have footage of Terry directing her creative communities both before and after her surgery.
Funky, irreverent, irascible, and brutally honest, Terry and her collaborators limp, roll, and shout their stories in a space where imperfect bodies demand the right to dance on stage, the blind wear codpieces and engage in swordfights, and a deaf rat sings. Although our subject has been instigating such activities her entire life, both she and the audience will hear the laughter that ensues for the first time, together.