Camp ASL ❤️ 

The story of ASL ❤️and Lucidity

A few years ago, a group of Deaf and hearing festival-goers and staff met on the dance floors and campgrounds of the Lucidity transformational music and arts festival. This meeting led to a collaboration during that festival that gave birth to a new vision of what access and radical inclusion means at festivals and beyond.

Fast forward a few years later to 2020. This same group is meeting again to create a new theme camp at Lucidity called Camp ASL ❤️. This camp shares the name with its sister organization, ASL ❤️. This theme camp has support from Lucidity, placement within Lucidity’s grounds, and close collaboration with Lucidity’s ADA team.

Access Philosophy at Lucidity

Here at Lucidity, we are putting in practice that our roles as participant or staff are simply an essential part of the experience for everyone, and we can choose to participate in the ways that we can be of highest service to ourselves and to others.

There are a few important concepts that define this model of access.

1. We facilitate experiences by sharing, translating, or expressing information between modalities (visual, aural, tactile) and between people.

2. Everyone present is within this experience simultaneously and space is created for equal access for people with their varying skills, capabilities, and disabilities.

3. Experiences are facilitated in a way that everyone present can connect to and understand in its fullness.

As a participant, as a helping hand, as a teacher, or as a new friend. Just like the musician serves the whole by crafting, bringing, and playing their music, we come to Lucidity and have our own service to consider.

Experience Facilitators & Disabled Participant

We have created space for learning and serving; We are all there to experience as a participant and as facilitators.

As an experience facilitator or disabled participant we are serving the whole when, for example:

• We show up and hold space in the visual domain for others to join, learn and play.

• We show up and listen and appreciate rhythm, music and movement and share this appreciation with others

• We show up and express spoken word and music through your body with dance and sign language

• We show up and create access and space for other disabled folk

The Old Way vs the New Way

For example, in the past access to music experiences has meant seeing an interpreter up on stage interpreting the spoken word content of the music. Sometimes the interpreter might move their arms around in beat with the music. The interpreter’s “job” is to interpret the spoken word.

In our new philosophy, it may be that an experience facilitator would choose interpretive dance as the best way to express the feeling in a specific piece of music. In other words, they would see it as an interactive experience molded to fit the stimuli be it music, or meaning, feeling or connection. Or maybe, it they would just opt for a moment shared together and a story about a life experience.

Or maybe the facilitator would be walking with a group of people down a path at Lucidity and starting conversations with people with the goal of bringing in everyone into shared experience of access together. They would explore the Lucid Lands together with the opportunity for sharing new perspectives.

This year, the efforts have called together the souls of a community called Camp ASL ❤️.