Meet Nicki Pombier, Teaching Artist
An in-depth interview about confronting storytelling problems, embracing risks, and creating more inclusive theatre and storytelling spaces.
What storytelling experience has had the greatest impact on you?
When my younger son, Jonah, was born in 2012, he was diagnosed with Down syndrome. Correction: the morning after my son was born, he was diagnosed with Down syndrome. I had one night with him as a blank, just my baby, not yet even named.
It was a peaceful night; my first birth was scary and complicated and ended in emergency surgery crowded with interns and experts. This one had been smooth, drugged painless, intimate. And, after, the Knicks game was on, and we got takeout from a nearby diner, a grilled cheese on thick, butter-fried bread, fries fried to salty perfection, a milkshake, vanilla, my favorite.
A nurse pressed Jonah’s feet to an ink blot and stamped them on a clip-art certificate: Welcome, Baby Boy. I slept, he ate, the drugs faded, and pain bloomed here and there but mainly we just blissed out on each other: my baby boy and me.
When the hospital pediatrician came in the next morning, Jonah and I were alone. She stood in the doorway, the doctor, preparing to change everything. I can still see her there, assuming a posture of care. A slight shift of one shoulder toward me, a tug at the hem of her white jacket. And then, she ticked off his differences: the shape of his eyes, the thickness of his neck, a line across his palm called the simian crease. These indicators suggested he had Down syndrome, she said, but, “Nothing changes in terms of love and care for the first six months.” What then, was all I could think, my mind filled with sudden static: what happens after the first six months?
What happened to the baby in my arms between one moment and the next — between an infant and a diagnosis — is a storytelling problem. Nothing changed in terms of love or care from one moment to the next and yet, everything changed. I thought I was in one beginning, and suddenly it was another story entirely. As I took this in over the coming days and weeks, I began to understand that my feelings — most profoundly the grief I felt having lost someone I didn’t know I’d imagined in the first place — were a function of ignorance. I had no story for what life with Down syndrome was, or might be, and onto that blank canvas my mind offered only stories from a world that has told disability as something to fear, to avoid, to hide, to cure, to correct, or to pity. I knew there must be a different story, one told by people with disabilities themselves, and I dedicated myself to seeking out and sharing those stories, ever since.
I began by creating a collaborative oral history project working with self-advocates who have Down syndrome. It was in listening to, learning from, and telling stories with people like Sara Wolff, David Egan, and Claire Bible, that I was able to begin to transform my fears, and release my grief, and be changed into someone committed to disability justice.
You do a lot of work with taking risks when telling stories. What fascinates you about this relationship?
The first storytelling project I did in collaboration with narrators with disabilities was working with self-advocates who have Down syndrome, as I described above. Self-advocates are public speakers and activists who stand up for the rights of themselves and others. They are often people for whom speech is a strength, and therefore natural collaborators on an oral history project. I knew, however, that this approach was leaving so many people out. The more I learned about disability history from disabled activists*, the more I wanted to challenge the very premise of oral history: the centrality of the voice. Could we lose the “oral” in oral history and move toward a practice that is closer to the radical inclusivity that is in the lineage of my field?
That particular risk — of losing the very thing that defines my field — has meant looking to the arts for inspiration, new methodologies, and approaches to collaboration. It has meant being willing to let go of some of what we think of as central to the told story and embracing the many ways that people, all people, have of expressing their lived experience, their desires, their grief, their longing, their joy, their memories, their hopes, their loves, their likes, their resistance and resilience, their relationships and losses, the complexity of all that makes them human.
*Mel Baggs’ video manifesto In My Language is a powerful and central inspiration to me.
What do you see as the link between theatre and storytelling?
Looking to the arts to expand the practice of oral history beyond the “oral” has made the language of theatre a profound resource. In this way, storytelling with people who communicate nonverbally, or in ways that challenge traditional tools of oral history, requires the knowledge of theatre — the attention to bodies in space, the power of the gestural, the many modes and uses of silence, a process that is iterative and collaborative, wholly alive to the expressive potential of movement and stillness and the poetry of image. Conversely, I have seen that theatre made through engaging across ability can generate stories that transcend lines that can keep people with disabilities, and disability history, separate.
Soon after Jonah was born, I learned of an oral history project that the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University was undertaking to document and activate the history of the intellectual disability rights movement in Pennsylvania. The centerpiece of this work became a play, written by Suli Holum, with choreography by Nichole Canuso, devised with an inclusive cast, drawing on oral histories, storytelling workshops, and the biographical experiences of cast members, to create a gorgeous, engaging portrait of a history largely unknown: A Fierce Kind of Love. I joined the Fierce team as a community engagement partner and have worked with Temple ever since to develop storytelling and art-based work that centers the experiences and perspectives of people with disabilities in telling, interpreting and activating their own history. More about those projects can be read on my website and I remain compelled by and committed to mining the rich intersection of oral history, theatre and disability, in the service of a world where people like my son Jonah, now eight, will be seen in all their complexity and treated with dignity and humanity.
Nicki Pombier (she/her) is an oral historian and educator with more than ten years’ experience teaching and practicing oral history. She earned her MA in Oral History from Columbia University, where she is now on faculty, and she also teaches in the Drama BFA program at The New School University’s College of Performing Arts. She previously worked at StoryCorps, the national nonprofit organization, where she led community engagement efforts including the National Teachers Initiative, a collection of more than 300 interviews with teachers and students nationwide, and StoryCorpsU, a high school storytelling curriculum. www.NickiPombier.com
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