There’s nothing more we can do

This September once again members of the Storm project descended on the Welsh Gove Eye Care Conference with 2 star studded performances.

As usual we were asked to create two short sketches, one for the beginning of the day and one for the end.  This year our themes were “There’s nothing more we can do” and “What the Social Model of Disability means to me”.

We used a sketch we’d previously written for another conference for the morning sketch “There’s nothing more we can do”.  This short performance demonstrated the positive effect having access to all the services that are available and the negative effect when you don’t know what support is out there.  This highlighted while for some there isn’t a lot more that can be done for other individuals there is a lot more needed to allow them to be confident and independent people.

Our second sketch at the end of the day looked at “What the Social Model of Disability means to me”. For me this was an interesting topic but a hard one to find a creative way of expressing the opinions needed.  We began the sketch by quoting the definition of Disabled and Disability, while also explaining what the Medical Model and Social Model means. We wanted to demonstrate that despite the Social Model being the preferred stance the Medical Model still has a place. Through a comical scene replicating a boxing match with the medical and social model as the fighters, we were able to see where the strength of the Social Model lies. We ended the sketch by the four actors, in this case myself, Jake, Amy and Tafsila explaining what the social model means to us as individuals.

Both sketches were well received and the feedback we got was very positive all round.