{"id":188719,"date":"2017-01-02T13:59:39","date_gmt":"2017-01-02T21:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/?p=188719"},"modified":"2026-02-12T17:22:22","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T01:22:22","slug":"dvp-interview-maia-scott-and-ron-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2017\/01\/02\/dvp-interview-maia-scott-and-ron-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"DVP Interview: Maia Scott and Ron Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ron Jones interviewed Maia Scott at StoryCorps for the Disability Visibility Project\u2122 at StoryCorps in San Francisco on August 14, 2014. Here is one audio clip with text transcripts from their conversation about being disabled artists, what they value about theater performance, and how art can challenge an audience to think beyond binaries.<\/p>\n<div class=\"embed-soundcloud\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1360\" height=\"400\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?visual=true&#038;url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F300615945&#038;show_artwork=true&#038;maxwidth=1360&#038;maxheight=1000\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<h3>Text Transcript:<\/h3>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">[Instrumental music \u2013 bouncy, happy electronic beat]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">[Ron Jones makes intermittent musical sound vocalizations during and throughout the entire conversation]<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p><b>Maia Scott:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">We did meet though at the recreation center for the handicapped. Aka RCH aka the Janet Pomeroy Center. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ron Jones:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Yeah Janet Pomeroy Center. We did meet there and we were doing Theater Unlimited, Theater Unlimited. Explain what that consisted of.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Maia Scott:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Well, it depends on who you talk to. For many of the clients it was a place to have a voice, to tell stories, to be real, and be alive, and be integrated in the community, and to be whole.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ron Jones:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">You\u2019re Blockhead thing, to me, is the most inspirational, theatric, performance art I\u2019ve ever witnessed. You wanna, you wanna\u2026.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Maia Scott:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Are you calling me a Blockhead? [laughing] <\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ron Jones:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">No\u2026 explain what Blockhead is\u2026 [laughing]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Maia Scott:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Blockhead is basically a cube that sits on my head\u2026um\u2026that has velcro on it and I can put just strange objects like batteries and book lights and toilet paper rolls and big springs and anything and create faces. And then the body of course becomes the character that goes with each face.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Maia Scott:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">It came out of kind of a deep dark place as an artist, as a visually impaired artist who loves vision and color and movement. I find that when I do pieces like Blockhead or funny things or character things it becomes less about blindness or disability but more about ability and unity and com-munity. We seem to often go to social justice related issues and issues of the big bad able bodied people oppressing the disabled people who overcome. But don\u2019t we all go through that? I mean you could have the wrong colored hair at school and be oppressed for that. You could be the wrong religion. And I\u2019m saying wrong with big juicy neon quotation marks on the outside.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ron Jones:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Wrong\u2026 [sing-song tone]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Maia Scott:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Because there is no wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ron Jones:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">you\u2019re wrong [sing-song tone]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Maia Scott:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Wrong [laughing]<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ron Jones:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Yeah we\u2019re always told we\u2019re wrong. I wish we have someone just tell us we\u2019re right. You know, right for the love we have for each other, right for community, right for the absurdities we might present or the uniqueness we might have in our souls.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Maia Scott:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Right for our spontaneity, right for our pains and sorrows, right for our depression, oppression, and our confessions. Right for all the things that we dare to try and fail at. Right for failing, for crying out loud.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Maia Scott:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">I want to do work that doesn\u2019t separate us, that acknowledges that we are all broken somehow. We don\u2019t need to be fixed. It\u2019s about seeing each other through different lenses. We with our intent can change ourselves and our communities and\u2026 you know. The idea of healing is evoking change in ourselves and social justice is evoking change in our community and sometimes one come with the other and I\u2019d love for theater to do that without actually doing that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ron Jones:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">I think the theater, it gives us a life. It allows us to explore who we are, what we are, what we wanna be, the depressions we might face, the darknesses and the light. It just lets us express that and comes to terms with it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ron Jones:<\/b> <span style=\"font-weight:400;\">The stage is that strange place we all walk in together and we sit in this dark room and we kinda revel in life\u2019s experiences. Maybe life is improve and we just don\u2019t realize it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">[Instrumental music \u2013 peppy upbeat guitar building towards a drum entrance that fades out]<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p>Music Credit (Electric Mirrors by Reverse Commuting and Youth Pictures by Florence Henderson by To Sit Down or Follow So I Follow are licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License):<br \/>\nSource: FreeMusicArchive.org<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"text-align:center;\"><b>Support Disability Media and Culture <\/b><\/h2>\n<h2 style=\"text-align:center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/donate\/\"><b>DONATE<\/b><\/a><b> to the Disability Visibility Project\u2122!<\/b><\/h2>\n<h3><b>Suggested Reference<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Disability Visibility Project\u2122. (2017, January 2). DVP Interview: Maia Scott\u00a0and Ron Jones. Retrieved from:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/wp.me\/p4H7t1-N5R\">http:\/\/wp.me\/p4H7t1-N5R<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Image Description:<\/h3>\n<p>A photo featuring Maia Scott, Ron Jones, and Maia&#8217;s guide dog was taken on August 14, 2014: close up portrait of a guide dog, a woman and man all sitting next to each other looking at the camera. The guide dog on the far left is a golden retriever with its nose and face pointed at the camera. The woman in the middle appears to be white and has long brown hair. The man on the right appears to be white, is bald, wearing glasses, dressed in a black shirt, and smiling at the camera.<\/p>\n<h3>Credits:<\/h3>\n<p>Produced for the Disability Visibility Project\u2122 by Yosmay del Mazo and Alice Wong with interviews recorded by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the story of our lives. For more: <a title=\"http:\/\/www.storycorps.org\" href=\"https:\/\/exit.sc\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.storycorps.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">www.storycorps.org<\/a> and <a title=\"http:\/\/www.disabilityvisibilityproject.com\" href=\"https:\/\/exit.sc\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.disabilityvisibilityproject.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">www.disabilityvisibilityproject.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">For any questions, please refer to the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/about\/terms-of-useprivacy\/\"><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">Terms of Use<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight:400;\">. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ron Jones interviewed Maia Scott at StoryCorps for the Disability Visibility Project\u2122 at StoryCorps in San Francisco on August 14, 2014. Here is one audio clip with text transcripts from &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/2017\/01\/02\/dvp-interview-maia-scott-and-ron-jones\/\" class=\"read-more\">Continue Reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">DVP Interview: Maia Scott and Ron Jones<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":188810,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[548705951],"tags":[159346,177,132675,1337,10372239,2005041,4572256,1093,2282,1400,14694,1339923],"class_list":["post-188719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dvp-interviews","tag-ableism","tag-art","tag-blindness","tag-california","tag-disability-community","tag-disability-culture","tag-disabled-artists","tag-san-francisco","tag-social-justice","tag-storytelling","tag-theater","tag-visual-impairment","post-has-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/sfb002856_g1_edit-3.jpg?fit=350%2C239&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4H7t1-N5R","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}