Barbara Lisicki is a British disability rights activist, comedian, and equality trainer.[1][2] She is a founder of the Disabled People's Direct Action Network (DAN),[3][4][5] an organization that engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience to raise awareness and to advocate for the rights of disabled people.[6] She is a featured subject of the 2022 BBC docudrama Then Barbara Met Alan,[7] and appeared in The Disabled Century on BBC2 in 1999.[8]
Early life and education
Lisicki was raised in North London with her siblings by her mother.[3] She has said she was expelled from a school that "was a convent run by nuns. I was rejecting the mindless discipline and religious zealotry."[3] Lisicki began showing signs of Stills disease around age 14, and spent more than a year in a specialty hospital using a wheelchair.[3][9] According to Lisicki, "we used to dump the wheelchairs in the bushes and hitchhike to the pub [...] They'd be sending out search parties and we'd be down there having a vodka and lime. I was 16."[3] She graduated from university and completed a postgraduate teaching programme, but was unsuccessful in finding work as a teacher.[3]
Career
In 1988, Lisicki began her comedy career in London, performing stand-up in a cabaret.[1][2] She has been described as "the first British disabled stand-up comedian".[10] In 1989, she met Alan Holdsworth when they were both performers in the Disability Arts Cabaret.[2] She co-founded the Tragic But Brave group with Holdsworth and Ian Stanton in the late 1980s, and they toured for years in the UK, Europe, and the United States.[1][2] Holdsworth performed music under the stage name Johnny Crescendo, and she performed as Wanda Barbara.[9][1]
Lisicki and Holdsworth were also active in the Disability Arts Movement, which adopted the slogan "Piss On Pity" and protested stereotypes of disabled people in advertising, films, and by charities.[1][11] In 1989, Lisicki participated on the BBC discussion show Network and explained the opposition to how disabled people were portrayed, stating, "If you make a disabled person an object of charity, you're not going to see them as your equal".[3] After ITV Studios began charity telethons, Holdsworth was asked to help organize protests against the depiction of disabled people.[3] According to Lisicki, "These were hideous TV telethons that lasted something like 27 hours and portrayed disabled people in a manner where they should be pitied. It wasn't representative of the disabled community and was patronising."[1] In 1990 and 1992, the Disability Arts Movement was involved in the Block Telethon protests outside of ITV Studios,[1] with Lisicki and Holdsworth serving as organizers in 1992 for a protest that included over 1000 people blocking celebrities from entering the studio building.[3][4] ITV Studios ended its telethon after 1992.[3]
In 1993, Lisicki, Holdworth, and Sue Elsegood became founders of the Disabled People's Direct Action Network (DAN).[3][6] DAN organized protests and nonviolent civil disobedience to promote the rights of disabled people, and Lisicki explained in 2015, "We brought people together who had had enough of not having any protection against discrimination."[4][6] Acts of civil disobedience in the 1990s included protesters blocking roads and chaining themselves to buses.[3][12] Protest locations included the Westminster Bridge,[3] the Nottinghamshire constituency office of Kenneth Clarke, Harrods, and the Tate Gallery.[13]
In 1995, the Disability Discrimination Act became law, providing the first protections against disability discrimination in the UK,[4] and protests continued, including a sit-in at Labour party headquarters in 1996,[14] and in 1997, protesters chaining themselves to the gates of Downing Street.[3][15] In 2015, Lisicki stated, "Some people thought 'we've won with the Disability Discrimination Act' [...] We didn't win. It was never a victory. All that I ever say to people is that at least now the government agrees with us that discrimination happens."[4] In 1999, Lisicki appeared at the end of The Disabled Century, a BBC production about the history of disability in the 20th century, which included her arrest at a demonstration and the activism of DAN.[8]
DAN continued as an active protest group into the 2000s, with Lisicki serving as a spokesperson,[12] and eventually disbanded.[3] In 2019, the National Disability Art Collection and Archive opened, and holds thousands of items from the Disability Arts Movement.[1] In 2022, Lisicki was a featured subject in the BBC docudrama Then Barbara Met Alan.[7][16]
Personal life
Lisicki and Alan Holdsworth have an adult child called Jasia (they/them), and a granddaughter.[17][9]
^ ab"Warning over new disability demands". Coventry Evening Telegraph. 1 October 2004. Retrieved 30 January 2022. Barbara Lisicki, spokes-woman for the disability activists' group Direct Action Network said: "I think there is going to have to be litigation to make people change. In the more extreme or outrageous cases, there will be an action organised." Direct action has in the past included disabled people chaining themselves to buses on which they could not travel.
^Milne, Kirsty (10 February 1995). "Able to protest". New Statesman & Society. 8 (339): 25 – via EBSCOhost. Last month, a group of disability rights activists picketed the Nottinghamshire constituency office of the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke. They made the BBC news. According to Barbara Lisicki, a national organiser of the Direct Action Network, it was a two-birds-with-one-stone protest. "First, it's his government that is denying disabled people a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill. Second, his surgery is inaccessible to wheelchair users. Disabled people are constantly being told to lobby their MPs. Yet when they try, they can't get in."
^Millward, David (23 December 1997). "Disabled take their benefits protest to Downing Street". The Daily Telegraph – via ProQuest. The protest against proposals to cut benefits for the disabled lasted only an hour. But in that time, demonstrators daubed red paint on the entrance to Downing Street and chained themselves to the gates. [...] "The group started as a result of disabled people's anger and frustration at the slow place of change," said Barbara Lisicki, who helped to organise the protest by mobile phone from her wheelchair. "We feel this Government has betrayed disabled people and we feel that direct action is the only way to send a message to them."
