With the Disability Discrimination Act coming into full force later this year, what more can arts venues be doing for artists and customers with disabilities? Roger Nelson explores a great many possibilities.
Do you know many actors who often get arrested? Actors who?ve worked with Graeae seem to get arrested alarmingly often, and they always have. In fact, the company once postponed a board meeting because half the board were chained to railings in a public protest. Why? It?s all about the long-running and sometimes bitter campaign for full civil rights for disabled people.
The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) has been around since 1995, but it?s only this autumn that it comes into full effect, raising the volume of the debate by a few notches by requiring service providers to make reasonable adjustments to the physical features of their premises to alleviate physical barriers to access. The relevant part of the Act makes it illegal to:
- refuse to serve someone who is disabled
- offer a disabled person a service which is inferior to that offered to other people
- provide a service to a disabled person on terms different from those given to others.
Graeae has been making disability-led theatre since 1980, so we have between us a collective experience of making our activities and services accessible: as a touring theatre company, a training provider, in educational activities and as an employer of disabled artists and other arts professionals. We haven?t always got it right (and still don?t), but are driven by the idea of creating a new aesthetic in theatre where accessibility is integral to the creative process and to what the cast and audience ? whatever their disability status ? experience, through the range of performers on stage and the means they use to communicate.
Creating a new home
We are about to face our biggest ever challenge as we work to create Graeae?s first permanent home, and the first professional theatre space anywhere (as far as we know) created specifically with and for artists with physical and sensory impairments. This Arts Council Capital Lottery-funded project is a partnership with London Metropolitan University, and will be used by students on performing arts courses too. The project will regenerate redundant heating and electrical plant rooms, so is currently known as the Boilerhouse. It will have artistic accessibility as its top priority; so what will we be considering as the plans are drawn up? How will we go about creating a building that aims to put the needs of disabled artists, students, workers and audience members at its heart? And how does this relate to other arts organisations grappling with the implications of the DDA?
We will be working to the social model of disability. This is crucial. The issue is not the individual and their impairments, but the barriers society erects through the behaviour of people and organisations. In other words, see the person and not the disability, and think about how your services/employment opportunities can be made accessible. Some of our strategies are specific to creating an accessible building, and others are relevant to any organisation interested in widening participation.
We?ll establish users? forums, where artists and audience members can have an input into design and bring their experience of other buildings (and the people running them) both good and bad. We?ll tap into local knowledge about the accessible infrastructure that already exists in the arts in our area, what works and what doesn?t, and what disabled people feel about getting to and from our site as well as getting around it. We?ll learn from other inclusive organisations and develop staff training programmes to instil an inclusive culture throughout the new building. This of course runs beyond purely physical accessibility to include the cultural and intellectual, for example, Mind the Gap?s great new ?Never Again? CD-ROM, which explores access issues for learning disabled people and arts venues. We will also be addressing ?attitudinal? access through disability equality training with staff, particularly those with most public contact. It doesn?t matter how fab your building is if the frontline staff are panic-stricken, patronising or plain rude every time a disabled person comes through the automatic and step-free door.
We?ll be taking on board the views and recommendations of those who?ve explored this territory before: from the Disability Rights Commission?s current ?Open 4 All? programme to the publications on good practice available from the Arts Council England and The Independent Theatre Council; from other successful (in access terms) arts capital projects, to the personal experience of disabled artists on tour.
Of course, even Graeae has a Disability Action Plan, and all this work will feed into the development of the plan so that it continues to inform our direction and ethos far beyond the completion of our building project.
Exciting times
This is an exciting time for disabled people in the arts: opportunities for creative recognition are at last increasing, through the inclusion of disability in the Arts Council?s Diversity initiatives, to the Department for Education and Skills attempting to address the exclusion of disabled people from arts training institutions, to the awarding of the first major Lottery grants for disability-related capital projects. April will see the BBC screen its first feature film with disabled lead characters ? and no ?cripping up? in sight. Disabled actors have finally started being cast in ?mainstream? theatre, from new writing at the Traverse to panto at Theatre Royal Stratford East.
At the beginning of 2004, the government announced further legislation to plug some of the gaps in the 1995 Act, covering the promotion of disability equality, clubs and societies, transport and more. It?s to be hoped that the effect of all this legislation will in a few years? time prove to have made a contribution to securing equal human rights for disabled people. Perhaps arts managers will be able to look back too and see the DDA as an opportunity to bring about long overdue change that left their organisations more relevant and better able to respond to the needs of their communities. And perhaps one day the only time disabled actors will be up before the bench will be in courtroom drama.
Roger Nelson is Executive Producer of Graeae Theatre Company. t: 020 7700 2455;
e: roger@graeae.org; w: http://www.graeae.org