Summertime

"All is Full of Love"
Artistic Discipline: MusicMultidisciplinary
Category: Brooklyn Arts Fund
Grant Year: 2021
Location: Williamsburg
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Summertime presents All is Full of Love, a puppet musical about the love, sex, and fantasy lives of people with disabilities.

All is Full of Love is a freewheeling, handmade musical variety show created by writer and puppeteer Priscilla Frank in conjunction with seven character-collaborators who identify as having a disability. The show -- adapted from first person accounts of the collaborating artists -- provides folks with disabilities a shame-free space to share intimate experiences and desires, using puppet alter egos.

Love, sex, and creativity are mostly absent from conversations about justice and rights for people with disabilities. Too often, our culture views pleasure and play as superfluous to a full-bodied human life, when in fact they are essential.

The show’s joyous celebration of love in its many forms and iterations will inspire audience members to embrace pleasure as a human right. Viewers with disabilities will be represented in their fullness as people with complex desires and inner lives. Viewers without disabilities will learn from the firsthand accounts of intimate experiences that defy rigid sexual norms and assumptions. All will delight, frolicking in the space where innocence meets maturity and play meets pleasure.

Summertime is an art studio and gallery in Brooklyn, championing a more inclusive art world where artists with and without intellectual disabilities create and display work alongside one another. Summertime is a microcosm of a different kind of art world, one free of labels and exclusivity where creativity, connection, and joy flourish.