Part 2 of an interview with Nathan Geering. Where do artists and creatives start when thinking about expanding the reach of their work beyond mainstream audiences?
What do you think are the key challenges facing artists trying to integrate accessibility within their creative practice?
The first key challenge is fear. They are just afraid. Afraid to ask questions, to just try stuff, to fail. That’s the biggest hurdle. They are afraid to offend somebody, afraid to look stupid. But if you can get over that fear and just start the work and be constantly in consultation with disabled people, you often find that it is nowhere near as daunting or as difficult as you think it will be. Procrastination is your biggest limitation.
Second to that is other people’s perceptions and expectations. Artists may feel that successful performance can only be done in a mainstream kind of way. But the ways they are used to, or have always known, may only cater for non-disabled audiences and artists. So it’s really about being able to challenge other people’s perceptions, and doing the work regardless. If we let other people limit us, new work doesn’t get made and then we don’t have a strong body of work that we can use to challenge the status quo with. It will always just be a little bit, little breadcrumbs here and there, which isn’t enough. Whereas if we keep making work irrespective of what other people say and tolerate uncertainty, we can learn from our failures and turn them into huge successes.
How do we as artists who are working in this way, encourage other artists to be brave, to get over that fear?
Lead by example; make the work and wherever possible talk to other artists about our fears and how we overcame them, so they can see that it’s ok to be afraid, you don’t get it right all the time. When you show your vulnerability, you show you are human.
Once you can find ways to tolerate uncertainty, you don’t think about the unknowns in the same way. You can accept that all the mistakes you make and failures you have are part of the process. A setback is just a set up to a greater success.
But you can only do what you can do; it’s not our job to fix everyone else’s internal insecurities, they’ve got to put the work in themselves. We can only show them the door, and lead by example.
In what ways could performing arts be made more accessible for performers and audiences?
The first thing to do is to make sure that accessibility is on the radar from a project’s inception. When assembling your team, look at different forms of application, written, audio and video submissions. Don’t limit your recruiting and casting to only encapsulate people who aren’t disabled. If you have a role that’s been written as a non-disabled character, don’t limit yourself to thinking about casting it that way. Think about how someone who is disabled could bring this role to life, what benefits could they bring. That doesn’t even have to be about making disability a part of the story, or the central point of that character.
Next, look at accessibility within the creative process. Does everyone have to be in the same room at the same time? In terms of theatrical performance, how accessible is your set design? For someone who is visually impaired for example, is it tactile? Have you mapped it out in a way that a blind performer could navigate the space? You should always be in consultation with performers and audiences who have disabilities, wherever possible paying them for their consultation as well, because it’s their knowledge and expertise your production is benefiting from.
What part does technology have to play in making performing arts more accessible?
As we are moving into a more technologically reliant society by the day, it’s playing a bigger and bigger part. Current technological innovations are already doing a great job of advancing accessibility. But technology is always going to be at its best when it’s not fully automated, when there is human integration, because artificial intelligence is still nowhere near a human being’s ability to sense and feel. When technology is used as a tool under the watchful eye of human interpretation, I think that’s when it can really shine.
Covid has been brilliant to help illustrate this because it’s made things that should be accessible for everyone inaccessible, e.g. going to the theatre. Because of that, it’s pushed a lot of people to think about accessibility that may not have done so before, they’ve had to use tech like ALT_TEXT to boost audiences. So again, for whatever reason, these things being on non-disable people’s radar is gradually enhancing accessibility. I think the next stage is to ensure that the ‘why’ is right — that this is done not for personal gain but to make the world a better place.
When it comes to technology for live performance, at Rationale Method we have been prototyping some things around motion capture and captioning. Normally captioning happens at the bottom of the screen, or on stage, whereas we’ve been playing with getting words attached to parts of people’s bodies so they can throw a word, or bounce it up and down. We’ve been hacking into things like X-box Kinect to try and get these things to work.
Another useful tool we’ve used is a loop station — for example these can be great for people with speech difficulties — they record vocalisations into a loop station and use it to make beats, become their own soundscape, and trigger the sounds themselves whenever they want. There’s some great eye-tracking software out there, and even mobile phone technology can be used to alter lighting states or sound volume just by a gesture. If you can just get people interested in the possibilities of what their phones can be used for, you’ll find a whole wealth of knowledge and information.
We are currently in the final stages of prototyping an accessible sound pad for people with visual impairment. This will help open up opportunities for blind people to become choreographers and directors, because right now there’s hardly any. It’s got my company’s accessible language programmed into it and its tactile. It’s been made in consultation with blind and partially sighted people from the get-go.
Shifts in culture are slow and take time, do you have any sense of where we are with this?
Shifts in culture do not always have to take time…..especially within the arts. It all comes down to how badly an arts organisation or person wants to implement that change. Granted some things do take time but there are many things that can be changed pretty much overnight. Covid is a perfect example of this as many institutions had to change their entire way of working overnight.
The biggest thing that needs to be done is we need to recognise and acknowledge each other’s differences, and appreciate and celebrate them. We need to look and see how we can benefit from these differences, rather than using them to keep a certain demographic down. We recognise everybody’s differences, but also that everyone is a person, a human being. The more we can communicate and understand one another, the more options we will have to make the world a better place.