Ellie Harris: How Limping Chicken readers helped develop D/deaf audiences in Gloucester

Hello!

Some of you might remember my blog from last year where I made a desperate plea for help to engage Deaf & hard of hearing audiences at Arts events in Gloucester.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the Events Producer for Strike A Light: a charitable Arts organisation based in Gloucester, working in partnership with Battersea Arts Centre. We’re made up of five kick-ass women who have been striving to bring accessible, high quality, professional performance to the city.

We have, in the past, worked with Unlimited to bring in small pots of money to allow us to pay for a BSL interpreter for one of our shows each season (Jo Ross came and did Intergrated Interpretation for Bucket List, for example), and previously had not had any luck in engaging a single Deaf / Hard of Hearing audience member – to our knowledge.

Lots of people from the Limping Chicken community got in touch in response to my last blog and your help was invaluable.

I learned that ‘Interpreter’ denotes more professionalism than ‘Signer’, I was sent a completed PhD to into improving access for Deaf and hard of hearing audiences in theatre to read (!), and one of the biggest findings was that there are actually very few BSL users in comparison to those who would use captioning to access performance.

As a result, we are bringing a captioned performance to Strike A Light Festival this season – Joan by Milk Presents to Gloucester, Monday 26 March, 7:30pm at Gloucestershire College: http://www.strikealightfestival.org.uk/events/joan/

The show has toured with The Difference Engine which live-streams captioning to the audience member’s smartphone or tablet in real-time.

Last year we bought award winning theatre piece, Ross & Rachel to Gloucester and for the first time we had audiences who identified as Deaf or Hard of Hearing at the performance – 5% of our total audience, in fact!

We used BSL Interpreter Elizabeth Oliver for the show and had volunteers from the BSL College on hand as Front of House stewards to assist anyone that might need it. We had signage up around the venue to let people know that there would be a hearing loop in the performance space, that there was reserved seating allocated for those wishing to utilise the BSL Interpretation (we had worked out sight-lines with Elizabeth in advance) and volunteers to show people to the allocated seating.

However; I’d like to hold my hands up and say that I don’t think the performance was the right choice for BSL Interpretation. Though the set was visually quite beautiful, with a pool of water and low hanging lights on stage, the content did not lend well to interpretation. The fast-paced narrative felt confusing at points as a hearing person which must have been difficult to interpret.

As they say, you learn from your mistakes and I am taking the above as a positive leaning. We are now looking at the shows that we programme in a way in which we did not before.

We are looking at what feels right for access rather than making an initial decision to add BSL Interpretation (or other accessible format) in. Our programmer and I have spoken about having other people in the room who identify as having access needs to inform this decision, too, which feels like a positive development in the way in which we consider accessibility.

Having a captioned performance this festival is not to say that we’ve completely moved away from BSL Interpretation. We’ll have BSL volunteers on Front of House as stewards again and to help people get set up on The Difference Engine if they need to. It feels like an important avenue to test whilst we are in the stages of improvement.

The audience development side of this journey to becoming more accessible feels like it’s in a good place and moving in the right direction. We’re not under any illusions that we’ve reached the summit, we know we’ve still got a long way to go!

Anything you can do to help us develop our Deaf and hard of Hearing audiences, or to help us on our mission to make the theatre and performance that we programme more accessible is always incredibly appreciated. Any words of wisdom will be kindly received – thank you for your support on this journey.

Ellie Harris is a freelance Events Manager and Producer working in the Arts, based in the South West. She’s currently Strike A Light Festival’s Marketing and Events Manager, Green Man Festival’s Settlement Manager, and is currently producing Bristol-based company Wattle & Daub, as well as Bootwork’s Theatre’s new show The JukeBoxes. Outside of work she likes to spend her time swimming in the sea and eating crisps (not at the same time).