What Inclusive Arts Really Changes: A 2-year research journey into a Korea-Canada collaborative performance
- Soohye JANG
- Feb 10
- 5 min read
This article summarizes Soohye Jang's doctoral dissertation, <Multidimensional Impact of Inclusive Arts: Creative Process, Audience Experience, and Organizational Change>
In 2020, researcher Moon Young-min posed a question that haunted Korea's disability arts community:
“Those who participating in disability arts as artists, facilitators, or audience members were all experiencing change—big and small, welcoming it or with concern. So where should we row our ships to? Or rather, should we keep rowing at all?” - Youngmin Moon, 2020 “Disability Arts, Row When Tide Comes #5”, Theatre In Magazine No.157, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture
She was writing for webzine <Theater In>, reflecting on Korea's disability arts boom—quadrupled budgets since 2017, new policies, international exchanges. Progress, yes. But momentum without direction can be dangerous.
Two years into my doctoral research, that question became mine too.
The Missing Chapter
Arts impact research has gotten good at measuring outcomes. We count audiences, track social benefits, and document policy changes. We know art does something.
But we've been looking in the wrong place.
We treat the creative process as infrastructure—necessary scaffolding that disappears once the "real" product (the performance, the exhibition, the impact) appears. Process is means; outcome is end.
What if that's backwards? What if the most profound transformations happen before the audience arrives? What if the rehearsal room, not the stage, is where inclusive arts does its most radical work?
When Methods Collide
<Camera Lucida> began in 2023, as many international collaborations do, with optimism, goodwill, and a three-day workshop that crashed spectacularly.
The Korean creative team (Project YYIN) brought their choreographic methods. Canada's National Access Arts Centre (NaAC) brought artists whose practices emerged from decades of North American disability arts activism—artist-led, expression-centered, deeply individualized by their own context.
The collision wasn't technical. It was paradigmatic.
After three days, the word everyone used was "exhausted."
Here's what didn't happen: abandoning the project, blaming cultural differences, or powering through with the original plan.
Here's what did happen: The team named it "productive failure" and rebuilt everything from scratch.
They dropped choreography-as-teaching. They created workbooks and design probes. They stopped trying to bring artists into their universe and instead asked: How do we enter the world of artists?
Artist A, who has an autism, doesn't see autism as limitation—it's superpower. Spinning isn't stimming to manage; it's core artistic expression.
Artist B communicates with less verbal expression than anyone else but has kinesthetic memory so precise that they can recreate choreography after seeing it once.
Artist C's playful energy masks extraordinary focus.
Artist D finds deep, renewable joy in repetition—the same pop song, the same movement, generates the same happiness every time.
The goal transformed: Not "teach our choreography" but "decode embodied languages and build new vocabularies together."
This wasn't accommodation. It was aesthetic revelation.
The Silence After Applause
The performance sold out after two weeks the ticket reservation site opened. Ninety percent of the audience stayed for the post-show talk—unheard of in Korean theatre.
But social media stayed strangely quiet.
During Q&A, one audience member cut through the praise:
"I think 'failure' is a non-disabled person's word. Isn't using it disrespectful to the dancers you worked with?"
The creative team explained: Failing the old method was the point. That failure forced co-creation of new artistic language.
But you could feel the room wrestling with something they couldn't quite name.
So I waited.
Six to nine months later, we conducted delayed audience surveys and focus groups—based on Brown & Ratzkin's "Impact Echo" concept, which recognizes that meaning-making continues long after curtain call.
What emerged were three profound shifts:
Ethical self-interrogation. Audiences questioned their own gaze. Was my applause for artistic excellence or charitable pity? Am I complicit in ableist assumptions about what "good" performance looks like?
Aesthetic recalibration. Multiple audience members called Artist A's spinning sequence a "masterpiece"—not despite its departure from conventional dance vocabulary, but because of it. They discovered new criteria for excellence: authenticity, joy, each artist's unique physicality.
Expanded spectatorship. The performance made audiences ask: Who gets to define what art is? What's my role in creating more inclusive ecosystems?
I call this Critical Impact—when art doesn't just move you emotionally or teach you facts, but fundamentally challenges how you see, think, and define value itself.
The Labor You Don't See
While audiences and artists transformed, something else was happening backstage.
Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF) spent years building what organizational theory calls structural capacity: accessibility budgets, consultant contracts, formal policies. They succeeded.
But relational capacity—trust, care, emotional scaffolding—remained dangerously dependent on individual commitment.
Arts managers spoke two languages: the "language of care and relationship" with artists, and the "language of power and legitimacy" with funders and institutions. They mediated constant collisions between "productivity" (theatre's efficiency-driven timelines) and "Crip Time" (disability community's resistance to normative temporality).
This invisible labor sustains inclusive arts but It was also burning people out.
A New Model
Most impact research follows a straight line: Input → Activity → Output → Outcome → Impact.
Inclusive arts doesn't work that way.
Impact doesn't flow linearly from process to product to audience. It's recursive and spillover-based: values forged in the rehearsal room ripple outward to audiences and organizations, which feed back into how future processes unfold.
Five impact clusters emerged:
🔧 Technical Impact — Methodological innovation (productive failure, arts-based research)🤝 Social Impact — Empathy, shared vulnerability, recognition
💭 Critical Impact — Redefinition of excellence and spectatorship
🏛️ Structural Impact — Policy institutionalization, resource allocation
💚 Relational Impact — Ethics of care embedded in practice
Each operates on different timescales. Technical impact happens fast (weeks). Critical impact takes months. Structural change takes years. But they're interdependent—you can't sustain structural change without relational capacity; critical impact deepens when audiences see technical innovation.
This is the missing chapter: Process isn't preparation for impact. Process is impact.
Where Should We Row To Then?
Researcher Moon Young-min's question still echoes.
Korea's disability arts sector has momentum. But momentum without reflection risks reproducing the same hierarchies we claim to challenge—"inclusion" as charity, disabled artists pressured to perform "as well as" non-disabled artists, access treated as compliance rather than creativity.
Three provocations for the field:
Stop measuring only outcomes. Evaluation frameworks designed for opera and ballet miss what inclusive arts actually does. We need process-oriented metrics: Did power dynamics shift in the rehearsal room? Did the methodology evolve? Did artists lead aesthetic choices?
Compensate invisible labor. Relational capacity can't run on passion alone. If care work is essential to inclusive arts, it must be resourced, recognized, and protected from burnout.
Reframe failure. Not as deficit, but as discovery. Not as problem, but as method. The breakdown of conventional approaches isn't bug—it's feature.
An Invitation
This research began with a personal question: Why do we really need art?
Two years later, I have an answer—but it's not the one I expected.
We don't need art to produce outcomes. We need art because the process of making it together, especially when we fail and rebuild, teaches us how to see differently, relate differently, value differently.
Inclusive arts isn't a genre. It's a question we keep asking: Who gets to make art? Who defines excellence? Whose time, whose body, whose language shapes what we create?
The full dissertation explores these questions through detailed case analysis, audience research methodology, and organizational ethnography.
But the conversation doesn't end there.
Soohye Jang (장수혜) completed her PhD in Arts & Cultural Management at Hongik University. Her research focuses on inclusive arts, international collaboration, and process-oriented impact evaluation.
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