Consulting
At Circle O, we work with organizations and foundations offering analysis, strategy, and implementation of custom-built Disability Arts programming and intersectional access practices.
Our goals go far beyond the 101 (aka ‘access as a list you need to check off’) approach. Instead, we engage with collaborators who wish to deeply integrate the art & process of access as a foundational and transformational model.
We listen, revere, and center the specific needs of members of (y)our communities, finding tangible & interdependent ways to build trust, opportunity, and cultural abundance.
Strategic Visioning
Justice and Equity Plans
If you’re asking yourself questions like these, our justice and equity planning can can help you answer them:
How do we imagine equitable environments?
What can justice can look like in our organization or practice?
How do we work through conflicts happening internally?
How do I support people on my team that identify as Disabled?
Disability Arts Programming
This kind of support is for you if you’re:
Just starting to build out disability dance portfolio
Dreaming of Disabled dance programming in your organization
Seeing more Disabled folks coming into your space and questioning how to welcome them in
Needing connections to access providers to support your events
Educational Strategy & Curriculum Design
Stuck on a lesson plan and need to get out of a rut?
Do you know what to teach but not how to teach it?
Need support in organizing your materials for your lessons?
Want to learn how to use backwards planning to get to your learning objectives?
Have you exhausted your options to keep students with different learning styles engaged with your curriculum?
Community Engagement Strategy
Community engagement strategy is a lot like choreographic people and centers the questions: “What are you doing?” and “Who are you doing it for?”
Have a project and want to involve more people in your community?
Curious about how to center the voices of those in the community you’re in to inform your practice/project?
Interested in having Disabled/other multiply marginalized individuals at your event?
Wondering how to build relations for a long time rather than a short time?
Access Dramaturgy
As defined by Alison Kopit, access dramaturgy is “an alternative to logistics-based access coordination, wherein access itself is a source of creative material in ongoing conversation with the art, baked into the art itself.” We’ll help you think about how you’re using access forms inside of your choreographic process.
Want to integrate access into your artistic practice and don’t know how?
Interested in hiring audio describers or ASL interpreters for your engagement?
Want to experience access centered artistry and don’t know where to go?
Do you desire the Disabled experience to provide feedback for your artistic practice?
Our Consulting Containers
Our pricing is sliding scale, with an hourly rate ranging from $150-300. Engagements are adaptable based on your needs and budget, and are generally offered in one of two ways:
Custom Scoped Projects
Our minimum level of engagement is $10,000.
Consulting Hours
Packages of multiple one-hour strategy calls.
Select clients
Examples of our work
CURRENT PROJECTS
Access. Movement. Play (A.M.P.) Residency at Movement Research
With the support of The Mellon Foundation, Circle O helped co-found and is co-directing the Access. Movement. Play. Residency that enables Disabled artists to exist and co-create in a variety of ways across a variety of spaces.
This residency provides funding, free studio time, a showing opportunity and professional documentation to multiply marginalized Disabled dance artists. Inviting artists to dive into a process-based approach both individually and collectively, this program has been able to support the work of over 18+ Disabled artists/cultural workers and facilitate community spaces that were defined by one of the artists as “deeply generous and rare.”
How We Move
Circle O is working with Embraced Body to help create and facilitate How We Move, a dance intensive for and by Disabled dancers and centering multiply marginalized (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, etc) dancers within our communities.
This six month hybrid program combines virtual gatherings with a 10-day in-person intensive in New York City, providing space and opportunity for multiply marginalized Disabled artists to move together, collaborate, and build cross-disability community.
Together, we’ll cultivate opportunities on our collective terms and build power towards a transformation of the colonial, eugenicist, and ableist lineages still present in our field.
Interdisciplinary Disability Education and Access (IDEA) pilot program with Dance/NYC
With the understanding that any integration of disabled cultural workers into the dance field will necessitate a shift in perspective and practice for non-disabled accomplices, we founded an educational series created by disabled Dance educators but geared towards our non-disabled colleagues.
Co-created by Circle O’s Kayla Hamilton, this educational series consists of 14 two-hour sessions, each taught by two Disabled facilitators on topics ranging from: terminologies/definitions, Disability Justice, political education, access as artistry, and disability arts history.
Participants also receive studio time with access workers in order to practice and integrate some of their learnings, go on a field trip to visit Disabled practitioners to experience the integration of access in real time, and receive funding to integrate their learnings and collaborate with Disabled arts & access practitioners for their upcoming projects.
In addition to architecting the program, Circle O remains involved in an administrative capacity, attending all sessions.
PAST PROJECTS
The Whitney Accessibility Advisory Committee
Circle O’s Kayla Hamilton was invited to join The Whitney Accessibility Advisory Committee. The committee assists the Education Department in improving its efforts to increase ease of navigation in the Whitney’s built and digital environments. They provide feedback on the quality of mobile guide assets, wall label legibility, interpretation and access programs strategies, and the Whitney access policy, and best practices regarding implementation of their suggestions. This feedback is solicited by Whitney Education staff and MIXdesign, a think tank and design consultancy dedicated to working with public spaces, like museums, to make their spaces accessible.
UCLA Dancing Disability Lab
Kayla Hamilton joined the UCLA Dancing Disability Lab as an Artist/Educational consultant in 2023. The Lab was designed to offer experienced and emerging disabled dance artists from across the world an immersive engagement in disability studies scholarship alongside movement exploration and choreographic inquiry. Participants share ideas and experiences that invite one another to consider how we represent, look at, transform, and challenge ideas about the body, and personhood. At the center of this uniquely designed process is the notion that aesthetic production (dance) can serve as a change agent for the continued progress of Disability Justice.
Let’s Talk NOW
In this 60 minute on-demand consultation we can chat about a variety of topics such as:
Accessibility in the arts
Teaching practices & pedagogy
Audio Description
Disability culture & Disability Justice
Building communities
Imagining programming & strategies
Dance & choreography
Upon booking, you’ll be asked a few questions so that we can be best prepared for our conversation.