Dr. Dave Calvert is an academic, practitioner and researcher who has been engaged with inclusive and accessible performance-making for over 30 years. Working mostly with learning disabled artists, he has delivered inclusive arts projects around the UK and, as Director of Theatre Education (1998-2003) at Bradford-based Mind the Gap, established the first degree-length training programme in theatre-making for practitioners with learning disabilities. He is currently the Chair of Huddersfield-based theatre company Dark Horse.
In 2005, he joined the University of Huddersfield and began researching learning disabled performance internationally. He has published articles and book chapters on the work of integrated English punk band Heavy Load, Australia’s Back to Back theatre, Scottish singer Susan Boyle, the British film Marvellous by Peter Bowker, and the theatre companies Mind the Gap (UK), Per.Art (Serbia) and Theater HORA (Switzerland).
He was awarded a PhD by the University of Warwick in 2017 and is currently an independent scholar and member of the Performance and Disability working group at the International Federation of Theatre Research.
Follow this link to read Dave’s chapter ‘Convivial theatre: care and debility in collaborations between non-disabled and learning disabled theatre makers’ from the book Performing Care (2020) edited by James Thompson and Amanda Stuart Fisher, published by Manchester University Press.
