Stagetext celebrates 21st birthday at venue where it all began

In its anniversary exhibition at the Barbican Centre, arts captioning charity Stagetext argue that ‘captions speak louder’, but when individuals gathered in the venue on Saturday to celebrate the organisation’s 21st birthday, supporters were much louder and emphatic about Stagetext’s work over more than two decades.

They spoke on the penultimate day of this year’s Captioning Awareness Week, in a building which housed the first performance captioned by Stagetext in November 2000. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Duchess of Malfi was made accessible to deaf audience members, beginning the journey of an arts charity which has captured countless live events and theatre productions since.

Peter Pullan, who co-founded Stagetext alongside Merfyn Williams and Geoff Brown, told attendees at the Barbican: “The vision must be that the provision of good quality access becomes ingrained in an organisation and is seen as an essential customer service.

“We continue to see new ways of creating and delivering captions and subtitles, both in live performance and online,” he added. “The availability of choice is wonderful, but it is critical that the high quality of captioning is maintained – both in the preparation of scripted shows, and in the delivery, where captions should be outputted on time via a mechanism which is comfortable for the audience to use. 

“This increases the audience’s ability to hear and lipread the actors, which adds to the impact of the performance and enables a deaf person to laugh and cry at the same time as everyone else.”

 

Peter concluded his speech by paying tribute to fellow co-founder Geoff, who passed away in 2011.

“He was fond of the song ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ from The Wizard of Oz. So Merfyn and I would like to express our profound gratitude for making access to the arts a dream that really did come true,” he said.

The user benefit of captioned performances was then emphasised further by Dawn Jones, a Stagetext volunteer and captions user.

As well as thanking the charity for “giving me access to stories”, Dawn said: “With captions I get to use my eyes, and it is sublime. 

“Captions trick me into thinking I can hear every spoken word, every audio cue and every lyric. 

“I can fully immerse myself in the story I’m being told without effort, and who doesn’t want that? To fully engage an audience, after all, is the end goal of any performance, and that’s exactly what captions do for me. They are the missing piece that my ears will never hear.”

It became clear over the course of the evening that to the speakers, captions are as much a gateway to the arts as they are an art in themselves – something Deaf poet Raymond Antrobus has explored in his latest poetry collection, All The Names Given.

In addition to reading two poems – one from his debut collection The Perseverance and the other from its aforementioned 2021 follow-up – Antrobus told attendees: “I am grateful for organisations like Stagetext and their deaf-led campaigning and providing accessible content.

“Captioning is not straightforward. It’s not just an act of translating sound into words. The universality of sound is a hearing myth.”

Alongside celebrating their 21st birthday with cake, attendees also had a chance to look at the free Captions Speak Louder exhibition, which “explores the history of captioning through the stories of those who made it happen”, as well as those “whose lives were changed as a result”.

“Based on an archive of Stagetext’s history, it details how the charity evolved over the last two decades, and how captions and subtitles have made theatres, galleries, and museums a much more welcoming place for deaf audiences,” reads a description of the exhibition on the Barbican’s website.

Captions Speak Louder can currently be viewed in the Pit area of the Barbican Centre until 9 January 2022.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is an award-winning Deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.