D4D: Electric Bodies - 'Making Merry' poetry and interview content

D4D (Disability and Community: Dis/engagement, Dis/enfranchisement, Dis/parity and Dissent) was a four year AHRC Connected Communities project investigating issues around disability and community.

Electric Bodies was one of the eight project strands. It explored the relationship between the disabled artist and the disability arts community through a series of extensive life history interviews edited into transcription poetry cycles.

'Making Merry' is a cycle of transcription poems written by Allan Sutherland. They are based on interviews conducted by Sutherland with the writer, performer and athlete Robin Surgeoner.

The poems cover Surgeoner's childhood in Reading and Hong Kong and his connection with the water that started with being given hydro exercises and led eventually to Paralympic gold. He discusses his musical career from joining Dan Dare's Dog at university through to his development of Angryfish as a stage persona, a band and a training organisation. Surgeoner describes his poetry, songwriting, The Why Festival, and the evolution of his show 'All the Things We Could Have Been'.

This item contains the following files:

The poems (PDF)

Recording of Allan Sutherland reading the poems (MP3)

Transcript of the interviews (2 x PDF)

Audio of the interviews (2 x MP3)