Realwheels Theatre's Wheel Voices: Tune In! marks festive farewell for artistic director Rena Cohen
The virtual variety show wraps up a decade of work—with an acting academy set to open in fall
Some of the stars of this year’s Wheel Voices: Tune In!
Rena Cohen
Realwheels Theatre presents Wheel Voices: Tune In! on Wednesday, May 5 and Friday, May 14, 2021 at 7:00pm PT.
AS SEND-OFFS go, Wheel Voices: Tune In! is an aptly celebratory one for Realwheels Theatre artistic director Rena Cohen.
The variety show streaming online this week will mark her final production as artistic director with the company that she’s led for 11 years. Featuring 14 community actors, the event mixes original scenes, rap, spoken word, choral pieces, and plenty of other music, mixed with real stories about living with a disability. And though it’s virtual instead of live, thanks to pandemic restrictions, it’s a festive finale to a decade of hard work toward inclusion and integration of disability, both on- and off-stage.
Wheel Voices—with theatre pro Shawn Macdonald helping to facilitate and Caitriona Murphy taking on musical direction—is a perfect example of not just the broad inclusivity of Realwheels, but the nonpatronizing, brutally honest, and often bitingly humorous tone of the works it presents.
“It’s edgy, with moments of hilarity,” Cohen says of Wheel Voices over the phone, describing one original number called “Cell Block Tango”: “It’s a parody of a song in the Chicago musical, a revenge fantasy against people who commit ‘able-ist’ acts—transgressions like taking a disabled parking spot.”
Empowering and radically inclusive work has been an earmark of Cohen’s work over more than a decade. Cohen first joined Realwheels as managing director in partnership with founding artistic director James Sanders, before taking on the responsibilities of both positions. Major accomplishments over her years at the helm include staging thought-provoking plays like Act of Faith, producing shows like Creeps and Super Voices, and launching a playwright-in-residence program.
But perhaps her proudest moment is yet to come: the Realwheels Acting Academy, a unique and totally free professional training program that’s set to launch this September. Years in the making, it is specifically tailored to anybody that self-identifies with the disability or deaf community, including people with hidden disabilities and the neurodiverse. It’ll be the only English-language program of its kind in the country.
The idea came from seeing the disconnect from the fact last-Census findings that 22 percent of Vancouverites identify as living with a disability, but nowhere near that portion of representation is seen on stage. Additionally, Cohen started seeing some demand for trained actors with disabilities.
“So it started a few years ago with us exploring what actor training would look like for a person with a disability,” Cohen remembers. “I would get calls from artistic directors through the years looking for actors with disabilities, but unsure what the accommodation would require.”
The solution is what she calls bite-sized curricula, easily customized to the individual student according to their needs. Plans are for in-person programs to take place at the BMO Centre and the Post.
That good news is a boost, set as it is against a larger pandemic landscape that has exacerbated isolation for some people with disabilities. But as the latest installment of Wheel Voices shows, connection through theatre has helped weather the storm.
“We care for the community and the social connections all year long,” explains Cohen, who says the group joined together virtually every Wednesday night through lockdown and eventually jumped to online rehearsals for Wheel Voices.
Looking back, it’s those connections that may stick with Cohen most as she leaves the helm of the organization.
“I feel really proud of the community engaged work. It’s really expanded over 10 years,” she says, looking back. “I feel like I’m leaving it in a really stable position. And the acting academy is a real game changer.”
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