History

Established 1996

October 1996: Awakenings was born as an initiative of the Wimmera Leisure Options Program (now Access for All Abilities), a program of Wimmera Uniting Care. From a three-hour performance involving 40 participants with and without disabilities, this annual event has grown enormously year by year. In 2007, the festival attracted nearly 850 participants and performers with a volunteer base of more than 350 and event attendances of over 11,500. A key Australian event in the disability arts sector, Awakenings is now recognised nationally and internationally.

Visionary since inception:

From Horsham and region, metropolitan and regional Victoria, NSW, Queensland, ACT, Northern Territory, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania, performers, artistic directors and carers flock to this disability arts hub. Awakenings, as a visionary leader, has also attracted visitors from the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Swelling available tourist accommodation to bursting point, the festival attracts all levels of performers from grass roots to professional disability arts performers, mainstream performers, fledgling and semi-professional groups of varying abilities in an atmosphere of acceptance and encouragement.

Missions and Values:

We value:

• Being accepting and inclusive, embracing all levels of experience
• Being a regional event belonging to the Horsham Rural City and the Wimmera
• How the community can learn and grow through their experience of the festival
• Creating a holistic and personal experience for each individual

Patron:

David Helfgott, the world famous pianist, is patron of the Awakenings festival. He will perform as part of the 2005 festival program. David previously performed in a gala charity concert in Horsham to a capacity crowd of more than 800 people in June 2002. His performances celebrate Awakenings and acknowledge the support of past and present festival volunteers.

Festival Awards/Nominations:

2007 Finalist: The Regional Achievement & Community Awards for Victoria Community of the Year Award, population more than 5,000.
2004 Winner: VicHealth Awards: Health Promotion Through Community Participation.
2004 Finalist in Wimmera Development Association Powercor Business Awards (Community Festivals and Events Category).
2002 State Award in the Prime Minister’s Awards for Community Business Partnerships (with ANZ Staff Foundation).
2002 National finalist in the Australian Business Arts Foundation Awards (with ANZ Staff Foundation).
2002 Horsham Rural City Council Australia Day Community Event of the Year for David Helfgott charity concert. (Nomination).
2002 National Australia Bank National Community Link Volunteer Awards (Nomination).
2001 Tattersall’s Award for Enterprise and Achievement (honouring life’s unsung heroes - Awakenings Volunteers Shirley Flack, Tim Batchelor, Christopher (Stoph) Pilmore 2000 Horsham Rural City Council Australia Day Community Event of the Year.
1999 VicHealth Health Promoting Arts Encouragement Award.

Awakenings Ball:

In wheelchairs and on wings .....
An article by Martin Flanagan, The Sunday Age, Sunday 13th November 2005.

Photograph courtesy of Wimmera Mail Times

At the sixth annual Awakenings Ball in Horsham, disabled couples put on their best and did what debutantes the world over do. Martin Flanagan watched as a little magic bloomed.
IT RAINED the day before the ball in Horsham. Big drops filled gutters and puddles. Water reserves in the Wimmera could fall to less than 5 per cent this summer, but the day before the ball the earth smelt fresh and fertile and huge clouds were breaking apart to let through a hot sun, which quickly got to work growing the wheat and canola on the surrounding plain. This year they'll get a harvest. They were calling it a million-dollar rain. There was a special feeling in the town.
Horsham's Awakenings Festival was also on. I came to it three years ago and was taken by what I saw. To get its magic you have to be frank about disability and, from what I've seen in the festival, disabled people are certainly that. This year, I attended a play put on by a group from South Australia. They re-enacted the story of creation, beautiful person after beautiful person appearing joyously on stage like Greek fawns while two groups argued over each beauty as it appeared, saying they wanted it for their group.

The bidding was reaching a pitch when through the curtain came what, at first sight, appeared to be human ugliness — limbs, head, fingers all twisted. The bidding came to a sudden halt and a voice shouted, Shit happens. After which the play continued and the figure in the wheelchair became recognisable to people like myself in the audience as a human being, something which was obvious from the outset to the two disabled men beside me.

More than 600 disabled people were brought from around Australia for the October festival, which lasted 10 days. The theatre they put on tended to be confronting, but there were also plenty of jokes. I saw a blind man with a body that did only part of what it was commanded listen to a blind girl play Scott Joplin on a piano and then, with a big grin, ask her for a blind date. Perhaps, he said, we can go to the pictures.

This year's festival climaxed with a ball, which was held at the Horsham Town Hall for people of all abilities and at which 35 couples were presented in the manner of debutantes to the local community. Outside, as I arrived, the Horsham Pipe Band was giving a full-blast rendition of The Road to Gundagai. At the door, one of the evening's many volunteers, a man with a tough face like an old boxer and the gentlest manner met me and took me in. I was an official guest, one of those to whom the evening's debutantes would be presented.

At 8.30, the official guests were led in and walked along a red carpet as their names were announced to the crowded hall. Then we stood with our backs to the stage as the debutantes were preceded by a piper, a handsome young man in a kilt who imbued the evening with the dignity traditionally demanded by his music
After an initial parade, the debutantes re-entered in pairs. Each couple's name was read out as they walked the red carpet alone; or pushed walking frames with the determination otherwise required for the marathon; or, in one case, was carried in a wheelchair that was almost horizontal because the woman's body wouldn't bend that way, although it was bent in all sorts of others. The woman was Aboriginal and wearing a tiara. Does it matter that it was plastic?

Many of the debs had the condition I know as Down syndrome. Four or five times the men were scolded by the women for getting their part of the ceremony wrong. In each case, the man remembered to bow to the official party and the audience but not to his partner. A number of times I feared the partners would clash heads in bowing to one another, a number of times I thought women might fall in the curtsy. Standing behind them, I saw the way one woman's calf muscles wobbled as she lowered herself upon it, arms spread, such was the feat of balance required of her, while behind us on the stage a man on a piano filled the hall as surely as if he were filling a bath with warm, gentle songs like The Good Old Summertime.

The dancing instructors, Jan Morris and Simon McKinnon, were also local volunteers. Jan taught Simon, a young man in his 20s, to dance. When her husband died 18 months ago, she went back into herself. Her former pupil approached her and said, "You've got to keep dancing, girl," so now they work together. I watched his eyes, constantly attentive to the young couples, guiding them which way to turn and when to do so.

After supper a band called Claymore played, blasting the place with Celtic rock. I watched a young man with autism dance, which for him was running up and down in front of the stage. He reminded me of the Bulldogs' Brad Johnson, that sort of run, on the front of his feet, leaning forward. The young man had a strong build and sweat running down his back. His sister, a striking young woman in her 20s, was his partner in the debutante parade. She's a volunteer, too. She couples a degree at Deakin University with running a local siblings program for kids with disabled family members. Her other brother has Down syndrome. Their mother, Liz Blake, organised the first five Awakenings Balls. This was the sixth and the 10th Awakenings Festival.

The rock band soon had a fan, a Down syndrome woman leaning confidently against the stage. A minute later she appeared beside the singer and strode towards a microphone. The band being highly wired, she was gently led away while the night continued on its newly confident way.

In the course of the evening, I got to know Tom Leembruggen, a young man with a country way, a dazzling smile, cerebral palsy and an intellectual disability. Several times Tom told me confidently that he was going to be a millionaire and gave me a thumbs up. Later I learned he had backed Makybe Diva earlier in the day for $1.50 each way in the Cox Plate. The previous night, I had sat between his parents and watched Tom in a play. He was an insect zapper who attempted to entice people dressed as bugs into his electric cage. The reason it worked as theatre was because interactions between intellectually disabled actors can't be staged.

Tom's mother, Denise, is the director of the festival. I had gone to Horsham having read Mark Latham's analysis of Australian politics and society. Latham argues that community as a political principle is dead or dying. Latham is wrong in that his analysis doesn't explain Horsham, or places like it. Where he may be right is that his analysis is based on the affluent outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, where national elections are won and our future could be said to lie.

Denise Leembruggen has a shoestring budget of $100,000 and relies on 340 local volunteers. I am told there are several groups doing equally exceptional work in the town. "It took us time and a lot of hard work to win community support," she says. "But if you believe you're doing the right thing and persevere, you gain support along the way." She also thinks the fact that Horsham is so far from Melbourne means people think independently of the city. They have to. How many people in Melbourne know or care about the Wimmera? How many know or care about their water supply?

Late in the night, I interviewed some young people with cerebral palsy from a group in Northcote. They all said the same thing — the night was a chance to behave normally. Eight of them had come, including the young woman who had made her slow way up the red carpet on the walking frame. Her companion, a small man with the same condition, had a special light in his eyes as they turned. I saw the enormous courtesy with which he waited then jiggled his walking frame around behind hers when they turned to bow to the audience. It was as if he thought he was with the belle of the ball and maybe he was.

Her name was Samar Abbouchi and she was wearing a beautiful dress described to me as hot pink but the colour looked much cooler than that to me, much deeper, much stronger. She was going to wear light pink but her cousin turned up with this more serious number. She said the night was just about being yourself. I was talking to Samar when Tom Leembruggen left for the night with his father. Since we were now acquainted, I called out to Tom. He turned and, in passing, gave me a last thumbs up and a smile that was weary but still there for all the world to see.

The next morning, before I left Horsham, Tim Mintern, the man in whose home I was billeted, took me to see something he had made with earth-moving equipment from storm water flowing from a nearby estate. The council calls it a wetland; he calls it a swamp. It's dug at different levels so the water is always moving. Nardoo flourishes at its edges and a red gum has struck and reaches like a twig with large crimson leaves into the sky. A wetland he built on the other side of town has a whole new bird population. I left Horsham having seen flowers bloom where some would say there was no hope of seeing them.