Our Season of Cocooning
By Grace Ng-Ralph
Edited by Nicola Schofield
The Irish describe their time of shut down and strict restrictions of self-isolation and social distancing with a gentler and warmer term “cocooning”. This act of cocooning is done as an act of love in order to protect ourselves and help others by staying separate in the meantime.
This metaphorical warmth and comfort of “cocooning” was and continues to be felt very profoundly from my colleagues and leaders at The Lowry, of which I’m privileged to be in the employ of. They have sought to treat their staff, contract staff, creative practitioners, service providers and artists in the most honourable way despite such unprecedented and financially daunting times. When the virus first hit our shores it sometimes felt that people were more concerned with expressing racial abuse and xenophobia through the lens of orientalist trope of dirty and diseased, than making emergency preparations. The senior management at The Lowry were not only quick to build a protective layer around their staff and audiences, but also sought to amplify my voice as one of only two East Asians working in the building facing the added challenge of living within a community that was already petrified by an new unknown. My team mates were and still continue to envelop me with their care and concern just as they would a member of their family for me (and my husband) being van-lifers who must now stop our nomadic, off-grid ways in our new strange world.
Transformations within the chrysalis
Extending upon this metaphor, I believe that there can be wonderful transformations happening within the chrysalis for the arts sector which I work in:
A possibility for transformed perspectives towards the social model of disability. What is now possible now that society has been turned on its head and looks at the world through new lens. For some of my disabled colleagues, what was supposed to be impossible yesterday, is now possible in the blink of an eye.
A possibility for transformed (expanded rather) thinking on what representation and barriers to entry really means for underrepresented communities such as my fellow peoples of East Asian and South East Asian heritage or descent.
And this one’s a wee bit more blue sky thinking but well, with the way the world is now… a possibility for transformed creative processes where theatre is made through a cooperative of skilled theatre makers-designers-performers-directors-dramaturgs-playwrights-technicians who together, in a matrix-esque rather than hierarchical, strive for innovative ways to tell stories.
Here at Highlight Collective, Nicola and I set out in 2017 to make work that shed light on hidden stories and thought we could use our strengths of wielding the pen (keyboard rather) while in isolation – to really interrogate under a huge giant uncompromising beam of light on our ways then and imagine what it could be on the other side of our new world. We hope to highlight (pun of course intended) some outstanding artists and companies whose work inspire us, in order to think differently – to transform our perceptions within the chrysalis.
We hope in this blog, to shed a light on making accessible theatre.
The gestation
Let’s also acknowledge the ugly side that comes with this metaphor. That wonderful beautiful butterfly does not happen without the necessary gestation of the caterpillar’s very own body in order to create its new form – some nasty stuff! We’re surrounded daily by reports of death tolls and suffering from poor health, the crashing economy, uncertainty – lots and lots of it.
For us in the arts, this crisis and its lifesaving strict restrictions is counter intuitive to our live-ness and sharing/partaking/creating space. A study on audiences who are gathered and share the same theatrical space and experience – their hearts synchronise and beat as one. Within all of this, I have hunkered down and have come to accept two things: Loss and brace for change.
Loss
“We must lean into this pain. We must feel the grief. We must mourn. Mourn the loss of work, the loss of jobs, the loss of money, the loss of life. Mourn the temporary loss of an art form that demands assembly. Lean into the grief. Lean in. Lean in. Lean in. We must remind ourselves that mourning is a human act, not a digital one. It is only in this acknowledgment that we will survive. The internet isn’t going to save us, we are.”
Brace for Change
COVID-19 is changing our realities and our reality when we get to the other side of it - whenever that happens – feels an unknown. We will be living in a world that is defined either by a prolonged pandemic or an endemic where we learn to live with the virus amongst our midst in lieu of a vaccine.
“Even if we contain the Covid-19 crisis within a few months, the legacy of this pandemic will live with us for years, perhaps decades to come. It will change the way we move, build, learn, and connect. There is simply no way that our lives will resume as if this had never happened… The emotionally and spiritually sane response is to prepare to be forever changed.”
Since the closure of my workplace on 16 March 2020 at 6.30pm, I have continued meeting online with colleagues and peers who specialise in audience development and creating/improving accessible buildings for disabled audiences; access managers in venues who advocate for the employment of disabled people and creative programming accessible performances; and artist development practitioners like myself thinking about how we can enable artists to make accessible theatre from point of creation.
In those meetings I raised a nagging worry and asked a provocation.
My worry:
In a changed world where our venues and organisations will have to grapple with the following:
financial impact of refunds, cancelled or postponed shows,
waiting for our furloughed marketing colleagues to reboot the work of marketing,
Front of House staff working hard to implement changed operational processes
rebuilding audience trust in their personal safety
Within this climate how do we continue to be an advocate for the adherence to the Social Model of Disability? But worry is not action, so then I also asked the following:
A provocation:
Is there now – in a changed reality with possibly lesser funds available to programme and subsidise tickets to accessible performances – an even bigger and urgent call for us Access Advocates to work together to enable the “supply” side of “product” on our stages to be in and of itself, accessible and results in a shared theatrical experience of people with abilities of all kind?
What took me to this provocation?
Before COVID-19, I was tasked to lead on curating a Making Accessible Theatre day on Wednesday 25 March 2020, which was motivated by the belief that we all play a role in the industry that is four-fold:
as a public space for audiences;
as artist development practitioners for the creative and professional development of artists;
as a receiving venue providing technical and producing support for touring artists to show their best work
to work together to ensure that in our industry, minority groups are represented in our workforce and creative output as well as equal opportunities to thrive in their careers.
Before COVID-19, I curated a day with the belief that the starting point is thinking not of how might a performance be accessible after it is stage ready but rather at the point of creation itself where - borrowing Graeae Theatre’s philosophy of the “aesthetics of access” – theatre makers can creatively embed audio description and sign language from the very beginning of the artistic process.
Seeing this in action
Theatre makers and companies who have toured to The Lowry: like Frozen Light Theatre, Candoco Dance Company, The British Paraorchestra, and integrated circus company Extraordinary Bodies have found that such an integrated artistic practice not only enables disabled and non-disabled artists to work equally together thereby putting forth creative work that represents the diverse makeup of our society, but also heightens the experience of their current audiences and appeals to people who do not usually engage with theatre productions.
For example, visual physical theatre company fingersmiths who recently toured Charlotte Keatley’s play “My Mother Said I Never Should” to The Lowry did so with an integrated cast alongside a bilingual performance of British Sign Language and spoken English. Charlotte noted how the cast were, “using their bodies, and their faces and their energy in the best way that actors ever do” (video interview here).
There is an onus on us as venues to have the tools available to help artists create accessible work. For example The Lowry are also co-owners with a collective of venues and arts organisations based in Greater Manchester of a captioning kit that consists of three LED screens, laptops, routers, and ten tablets. I also facilitated the training up of our very own in-house team of five theatre captioners made up of staff members from box office to programming. Collaborating together and harnessing this technology has allowed our collective venues provide for our audiences on the spectrum of hearing loss from D/deaf to hard of hearing, more captioned performances. There was also the positive of the lowered cost resulting from the shared kit, which had in turn led to more accessible performances programmed across the disability spectrum.
However this approach still relies on the anti-immersive experience of D/deaf audiences having to repeatedly shift attention between the performance within the theatrical frame and the captions above, below or on a separate screen.
I had the privilege of meeting with the co-artistic director of Red Earth Theatre, Amanda Wilde, who make work with an integrated approach to British Sign Language (BSL) and also worked with digital technologies like projection mapping of creative captions, that have resulted in positive audience response such as ‘having it all in one, not needing an interpreter on the side […]. And not having to move my head to the side, I can just watch the performance [...] And the best of it all ‘I could just feel it coming into my head, I was there with it. Fantastic.’
Harnessing the technology
Amanda introduced me to Dr Paul Tennent, Mixed Reality Lab, and Dr Jo Robinson, Professor of Drama and Performance, of the University of Nottingham who developed an open source software for projection mapping that work in synch with QLAB to project creative captions onto the set, where the action is. The aim was to equip small-mid scale touring companies we work with, with a cheap, flexible and robustly tested software that is easy to set up across a range of staging dimensions. This in turn enables companies to start embedding access into the creative process, and in so doing, enhances the creative output that are accessible to a wide range of audiences.
I am not by any means suggesting digital technology will now replace live theatre and performing arts. Far from it. The “live-ness” of theatre is our very DNA. To be in a shared space and sharing theatrical experiences together is still the very reason why artists make the work they do.
In the next few blogs, I wanted to share online the day of Making Accessible Theatre that never was by highlighting the brilliant companies who are making accessible work so we can consider how digital technology can be harnessed to augment and amplify accessible theatre – perhaps we can emerge into our new reality transformed in our perspective to make it happen.
Photo by Jonathan Borba from Pexels
Links:
Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure by Aisha S. Ahmad
The Forgotten Art of Assembly (Or, Why Theatre Makers Should Stop Making) by Nicholas Berger