By CRIPtic Arts Artistic Director, Jamie Hale.
This year, myself, Marcella Rick and Claire Beerjeraz were awarded an OFFIE for staging for our work on Transpose:SUBVERSE, partially produced by CRIPtic. As a director who has struggled to, well, direct, it felt like a very significant moment – to be awarded this by a jury of my peers. Even more significant was the fact that it wasn’t a piece of work about disability, or one that was about being a disabled director. It was one that I directed through the lens of my experience – including as a disabled person – but one that expanded far beyond my identity into the world of the work, supported by a fantastic team.
However, even at the OFFIEs, I felt like an interloper, guided in my wheelchair to three different floors before finding the photographer, making my way up the ramp to the stage terrified by the thin wood, the steepness, and its precarity. This wasn’t the fault of the event, as a wheelchair user I constantly feel like the interloper in the theatre industry, and most events are far worse. Indeed, I was pleasantly surprised that there was a ramp to the stage.
In many ways it’s a real shame that I had to be surprised that this existed – but in the theatre industry, and particularly the smaller theatre spaces that are rightfully recognised at awards like these, the presence of accessibility is more of a surprise than the presence of inaccessibility.
I watched nominations and awards go to work that I wouldn’t have been able to see, and even more go to places I wouldn’t have been able to work. Being a wheelchair-using director is knowing that the majority of doors are closed to you before you even approach them. This goes for some of the big theatres as well as to smaller basement, pub theatre, and upstairs venues, where there is no lift access, or if there is, it’s for audiences, and not for creatives.
It’s painful to look at adverts for directors, at opportunities I would like to take, at places I would like to take work, and to know that they’re not aimed at people like me. It’s also painful to watch awards recognising the incredible work done by these theatres and not seeing that success come with an acknowledgement that wheelchair users would never have been able to see the work or that, even if wheelchair users could have been in the audience, they could never have been on the creative teams building the work.
Many of these venues without wheelchair access, or with access for audiences but not creatives, are vital parts of the theatre ecology, and should be rightfully recognised for their success. Many do a huge amount of valuable outreach to underrepresented communities, and stage truly groundbreaking work. For many of them, adapting would be impossible, and for many others they’re constantly applying for the funding to do so. However, for as long as wheelchair users are locked out of building careers in so many of these venues, how do we acknowledge the extensive barriers locking us out of the buildings, on top of the disableist barriers that all disabled people face in those buildings we can enter, and the further intersecting racist, classist, ageist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, disableist barriers many of us face once inside the building.
Maybe an award ceremony, a time when we are celebrating the exceptional work being done, isn’t the time to start a conversation about how wheelchair users are physically barred from a large portion of the theatre ecosystem. But unless the inaccessibility of many venues starts to be acknowledged, our exclusion will remain invisible. And I’m not sure where we start to have these conversations.
How can we talk about the sector better? How can we celebrate its good work and recognise those people who are failed by it? How can we support venues to be transparent about the audiences and creatives they currently offer opportunities to? How can we recognise the additional barriers that some people are succeeding against, and how they intersect to affect us?
At CRIPtic, one of the things we’re thinking about a lot is where our expertise sits and the amount of knowledge we have in working very specifically with wheelchair-using creatives, as well as how rare it is that all of the venues we use have wheelchair access. We are excited that we will soon be announcing more ways that we support wheelchair users in building creative careers, in venues and with teams that are designed to meet their access needs. This sits alongside our commitment to all disabled creatives, and we are looking forward to announcing the wide range of people who have places on our development programmes this year.
