Saira Barbaric contains multitudes. As an artist, they work in many mediums including dance, collage and film, and as a human, they inhabit many intersecting identities, including Black, trans and disabled.
The Seattle-based artist’s work is just as intersectional, a wide-ranging oeuvre of varied visual art, erotic art, performance art and parties.
Fueled by ideas like accessibility, desirability and community, Barbaric — supported in part by a $50,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where Barbaric was a 2024 Disability Futures Fellow — is now throwing their biggest party yet.
The Mouthwater Festival, billed as “three weeks of Disabled movement genius coming to Seattle,” started Monday and will run through Oct. 13, co-curated by Barbaric; visiting artists Vanessa Hernández Cruz and India Harville; and Seattle’s own Mx. Pucks A’Plenty.
Mouthwater exists on a continuum of disability dance work in this country, increasingly defined on its own terms and not in juxtaposition to its traditional dance counterpart. These artists may be fighting against institutional ableism but they’re not necessarily fighting for a place at the institutional table — instead, they’re building their own communal table, and they’re building it together.
The festival’s marquee events include Mouthwater Cabaret at 12th Avenue Arts featuring disabled movement artists working in styles like contemporary dance, drag and burlesque, and a special edition of the long-running BIPOC burlesque event The Sunday Night Shuga Shaq at Theatre Off Jackson.
Cruz, who is based in Los Angeles, will perform her experimental contemporary dance piece “Soul Seeker” Oct. 10 at On the Boards. The piece was originally commissioned for a Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions project earlier this year, which had a theme of “abundance.”
“I was really trying to dig deep into what that means for me, and how I can honor my body, mind and spirit, especially when navigating the arts where the body is a huge aspect in our work,” Cruz said, of creating the piece. “And oftentimes, those of us who have marginalized bodies aren’t always accepted or seen as valuable, so “Soul Seeker” became almost like a love letter and a promise to myself to always find the magic in life, internally and externally.”
“Grow Green Man” at Olympic Sculpture Park (Oct. 5, with touch tours Oct. 6) is a “performance party” led by Barbaric, featuring dance; DJs; visual art from “Pantheon Anew,” Barbaric’s 2022 show at King Street Station; and more. “It’ll be a circus situation, a nightclub feeling,” Barbaric said. There will be beds and other soft places to sit down, and throughout the night there will be “mini-performance art moments” featuring Barbaric and other artists. “You can watch, you can go make some art in the corner — it’s choose your own adventure.”
All Mouthwater events will be ASL interpreted, all venues have step-free access to bathrooms and performance spaces, and ear plugs, masks, and a variety of seating options will be available.
(For the curious: the name Mouthwater comes from a quote in an ’80s B movie called “The Peanut Butter Solution” that Barbaric and their Mouthwater co-founder fell for: “In the movie, there’s a spell to regrow your hair in which spit is called mouth water,” Barbaric said, “and we just thought it was the most hilarious and absurd, and kind of sensual, euphemism.”)
Becoming a performer
Barbaric, 33, only began performing about nine years ago, soon after they moved to Seattle from Los Angeles in 2015. After studying costume design at The Theater School at DePaul University, Barbaric moved to Los Angeles. But that college experience already had Barbaric chafing against the constraints of executing someone else’s artistic vision, and working in the grind of the film industry didn’t help matters.
After relocating to Seattle, Barbaric discovered Night Crush, a joyful, queer dance night held at the dearly departed venue Re-bar. One night, a go-go dancer tapped them on the shoulder and invited them up on stage.
“I’d never performed before, I’d always seen myself as a behind-the-stage person,” said Barbaric, who walks with a cane. “So go-go dancing was the first thing that led me to being a performer, and then to burlesque and drag, and I kind of had to face my own disabilities as I was using my body for work more and more.”
And facing their disabilities became part of the work. Because of its durational nature, Barbaric said, go-go dancing remains their favorite performance style. “I like the chance to find out what my body wants to do after I’ve been dancing for three hours and I have to keep going,” they said. “I think that’s really interesting creatively, and it’s kind of why [‘Grow Green Man’] is structured the way it is, where I’m moving and putting up work and building the installation as the night goes on — to see how long someone’s body can keep doing something is fascinating to me.”
One part of Barbaric’s work in the disability dance revolution is pureeing our ideas of high and low art, bringing club dance to more traditional dance spaces, splashing everything with hedonism and asking us to consider why we venerate some artists (like dancers) and denigrate others (like strippers).
When they co-founded Scumtrust Productions, a nonbinary queer porn project, Barbaric confronted issues of accessibility and desirability, and the politics around them, and faced their own boundaries and limits. “I realized there was this whole section I was missing, in my work and in my political understanding of the world, around my own disabilities,” they said. This realization, they said, led them to further explore principles of disability justice (more on that later).
Dance and disability work
When the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990, the rights of disabled Americans’ physical access to public spaces were enshrined in policy, but institutional access was another matter.
While the documented roots of dance and disability work go back to the 1960s, the years around the ADA’s passing saw an explosion in new mixed-ability, or “physically-integrated,” companies. Those include AXIS Dance Company in the Bay Area (’87), Karen Peterson Dancers in Miami (’90), Full Radius Dance in Atlanta (’90) and Infinity Dance Theater in New York (’95). These companies and more are still making vibrant work featuring both disabled and able-bodied artists today. But newer companies, such as Kinetic Light, a project-based ensemble founded in 2016, are led by disabled artists, creating work by and for the disabled community.
That shift, away from traditionally made work that includes disabled artists, and toward work made by disabled artists on their own terms, is one of the greatest changes in disability and dance in recent years, said Victoria Marks, a professor of choreography and chair of the disability studies minor at UCLA.
Marks first choreographed for disabled artists in 1992, working with mixed-ability company Candoco in London. “It spoke to my resistance to the virtuosic beauty of dance, that kind of reinforced a set of ideas about gender and bodies that I didn’t feel were positively instructive for life,” she said, and she’s been considering our ever-evolving cultural understanding of excellence and aesthetics ever since.
“Even the notion of aesthetics in art is tied to ableism,” she said.
Guiding these changes in disability and dance are the principles of disability justice as articulated by San Francisco-based performance group Sins Invalid. These include an insistence on leadership by the most impacted, and commitments to collective access and liberation. The principles, Marks said, “became like guideposts for a new generation of culture makers who identified as being multiply marginalized through race, gender, disability or ability.”
In 2019, Marks (who does not identify as disabled and now focuses on her role as an advocate and ally within disability spaces) launched the Dancing Disability Lab along with dancer/choreographer and Kinetic Light co-director Alice Sheppard, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a disability scholar and justice activist. The annual gathering at UCLA engages disabled dance artists in both scholarship and choreographic exploration and, critically, connects them with each other. (The Lab, it’s worth noting, is where many of the Mouthwater curators first connected with one another.)
“I remember breaking down,” said Cruz, of her experience at the 2019 Lab. Despite many early roadblocks to training, Cruz, who uses mobility aids, first began studying dance in high school and went on to pursue a BA in dance. At the Lab, she said, “I didn’t realize how much I was going back to this armor I had on, trying to survive these institutions that are very much ableist in a lot of ways, and then I also recognized that I had privilege of being in a dance school, because a vast majority of disabled artists don’t have that privilege to even get into an audition room.”
Disabled arts and artists may be rapidly evolving, but institutions can be a slower story. Cruz is heartened that some bigger institutions, including the Mellon Foundation, are proving they’re ready to “get down and dirty and make the arts more accessible.” And while mixed-ability companies are great, she said, they’re not always hiring, so giving disabled artists more paths to making their own work is critical to their continued, sustainable success.
That’s why they’re building their own table. Part of the joy of Mouthwater is that it brings artists from around the country — Harville is based in Arizona, Cruz in L.A. — together, here in Seattle, where Barbaric said, “I kept having to leave town to find opportunities.”
The Mouthwater Festival aims to gather disabled artists Barbaric has been connecting with around the country, and artists in Seattle they haven’t gotten to know yet, together in community, to support each other’s work and introduce them all to new audiences.
And so, Seattle: Are you ready to party?
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