Access and the Arts – Strength in quality but not quantity

Paddy Masefield offers a personal perspective on the ways in which attitudes towards disability have evolved in the arts world over the past 40 years.

I have spent 40 years at the heart of the arts funding and policy-making establishment, divided exactly into 20 pre-disability and 20 as a disabled person. Looking at the situation now, I would argue that things are both largely unchanged and very simple to explain. It is often said that the campaign for disability rights is the last great outstanding human rights struggle in the UK. It has existed long before recorded history. Indeed, there is no history of disability except in the perpetually recycled stereotypical prejudices to be found in the Old Testament, in The Iliad, in Norse sagas, in fairy tales, in the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Richard III, Captain Hook and Morse! And it is for this very reason that the arts will be the key battleground in this campaign, just as they were in the undoing of the USSR, Eastern Europes Velvet Revolution and the beginning of an American conscience during the Vietnam War.

Invisibility

This leaves you uncertain? It sounds overtly political? And worst of all, you havent found much evidence of the wonderful art work created by disabled people? Of course you havent! Disabled people constitute 11.7 million of the UK population. Thats 1 in 5. Yet in the entire arts industry of more than 650,000  from which are drawn the creative industries that contribute more to the Gross Domestic Product than the entire manufacturing industries  we shrink to an almost invisible 1 in 500: surely varietys most successful vanishing act ever!

Interestingly, there are twice as many disabled people as black and minority ethnic citizens in this country (1 in 5 of whom are, of course, themselves disabled). Can you imagine the outrage, demonstrations, media concerns and funding cuts if the National Theatre (NT), Royal Shakespeare Company or Royal Opera House had never cast anyone of a skin type other than Caucasian? Yet, to no roll of drums, disabled people have been overlooked for overt employment as stagehands, assistant costume designers, and, of course, as actors, and are never, ever considered as artistic directors or choreographers.

But only 22 years ago as a founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain, I was part of the onslaught on the NT for never having employed a woman as a director, and nodded patiently as within 12 months that situation began its inevitable change. After all, the arts are traditional defenders of rights  such as that of free speech! Of course, there have been rare lone sightings of Homo Invalidus. Percussionist Evelyn Glennie, short-listed Turner Award nominee Yinka Shonibare and, of course, Thora Hird. And, yes, now the Independent Theatre Council and the Foundation for Community Dance are raising awareness. But where are the long-term results?

As my personal contribution to change, I was able  as the only disabled Arts Lottery Board member  to ensure that every one of the one billion pounds spent on new arts buildings in my five-year tenure was dependent on maximum access for disabled people. But it was largely pointless, as three years later I failed to interest either Arts Council or Government in the modest investment of £300,000 over three years to create an arts employment agency for disabled people that would have assisted arts employers to meet the unenforced requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act, while trebling the disability presence in the arts workforce.

Representation

That would even have helped the hapless arts marketers harried by Arts Council pressure to reverse declining live arts attendance figures. You see few of us in society regularly attend arts events in which there is absolutely no representation of our images and actuality. And while Arts Council England (ACE) ring-fenced 0.5% of its budget and workforce for a disability arts presence in the heady days of 1994, today that figure is halved, the fence has been removed as an eye-sore, and a frightening proportion of ACEs long-running disability apprenticeships scheme fall out of the arms of the unwelcoming arts within three years.

Throughout the past 20 years, the words Its not our responsibility have ping-ponged off the walls of every hall in which I was commissioned to deliver speeches on this theme. And, of course, that has been largely my failure to see things the right way round. For years weve been struggling to grasp the wrong end of the wriggling worm of inclusion. Weve fought for the inclusion of disabled people in mainstream education, on public transport and in any form of vocational tertiary arts training. How stupid of me! What we should have been proclaiming was the need for YOUR inclusion in OUR struggle. That would enable me to introduce you to the magical artefacts of disability arts; to Survivors poetry, to signed song, to wheelchair dance, to the visual arts of learning disabled people recognised each year by the Paddy Masefield Award.

Diversity

Perhaps then the gigantic hole in the tapestry of life could actually be woven by disabled people into a beauty that is magnified fourfold when it represents the portrayal of all of our society in the arts. Yet even I had not realised quite how apt my books title of Strength was until I came to research the diversity of riches that are its 50 illustrations. Adam Reynolds, a disabled sculptor of national significance who died in 2005 at the not so unusual age of 46, expressed it as simply as any when he said, I have been particularly keen to help others enjoy the contradictory nature of the universe. In my own case, I am clear that my greatest strengths stem from the fact of being born with muscular dystrophy, to others apparently my weakness.

Paddy Masefield OBE is a writer, director and arts consultant who has spent the last 20 years campaigning for the rights of fellow disabled people in the arts.