Interview: Graeae’s Jenny Sealey on becoming first Deaf director of a major opera with ‘The Paradis Files’

Jenny Sealey, artistic director of the deaf and disabled theatre company Graeae, is to make history this month, when she becomes the first Deaf person to stage a major chamber opera touring the UK. 

Ahead of preview performances of The Paradis Files in Leicester on Friday, The Limping Chicken’s Liam O’Dell sat down with Jenny to discuss the milestone, ableism and the challenges of directing an opera.

It started with a journalist – though not the one currently writing this article. Jenny Sealey, the Deaf artistic director of Graeae Theatre company, had just finished an interview with a reporter for The Spectator when they posed an idea to the theatre maker.

“She started explaining that she was interested in creating an opera about this blind woman who was a contemporary of Mozart, and she’s been invisible from the history books,” Jenny explains to me over a Zoom call. “The journalist herself was a visually impaired woman, and we were talking about how fed up we are about disabled people – deaf and disabled people – being left out of history.”

A few years after that conversation, The Paradis Files was born. “It’s a really good story about a woman who was, I think, a real feminist,” she says of the opera’s protagonist, Maria-Theresia von Paradis. “She lived her life how she wanted to live it.

“Her family who are part of the aristocracy – part of the court of Marie Antoinette,” Jenny continues, deciding not to bother fingerspelling the surname of the supposed cake ambassador. “[Maria-Theresia] was a sellable commodity for her family. She made money because she played beautifully. But because she was blind, she was also an embarrassment.

“They paid a lot of money to try to fix her, to cure her eyesight, but she didn’t want to be cured. She sorted out how to access music by herself. Another important part of the story is, why do people always think that deaf or disabled people want to be fixed? Like no. We work it out. We’re fine.”

Forgotten stories of disabled people is a fitting concept to explore during the coronavirus pandemic, of course, when six out of 10 Covid deaths between January and November 2020 were of disabled people. On-platform BSL interpretation wasn’t provided for UK Government Covid briefings, and ministers were condemned for treating disabled people as an “afterthought”.

“I mean, just think about who is out there now, who might be in the history books that needs to be there,” says Jenny, adding that for theatre companies led by deaf and disabled people, it’s about using theatre for “social change”.

“We put those untold stories on the stage,” she explains, “and remind people, ‘hello, we exist, we are skilled, we have something to say’.

“As you say, so many people – deaf and disabled people – have been so upset about that feeling of being forgotten,” continues Jenny, mentioning the #WhereIsTheInterpreter campaign about the uninterpreted Covid briefings. “Why are we not important enough to have access to what’s happening in the world?

“So we constantly have to use theatre to reinforce our part of the fabric of our society,” she concludes.

And the pandemic isn’t just an apt example of forgotten stories, but something which hit work on the production hard – turning it into an endeavour lasting four years amid a search for money, partners, and availability.

“The first year was revising, exploring [and] creating the story [with] lots of different versions,” recalls Jenny. “The hardest thing was trying to make relationships with the ENO [English National Opera] and the Royal Opera House, to try to get them on board as partners – they both said no, but The Stables at Milton Keynes said yes, and recently we’ve got the BBC Concert Orchestra, who are another partner.

“Weirdly, it feels like two years because the whole lockdown, two years, feels sort of like jelly in the middle – nothing could happen.

“But the first day of rehearsal,” she says, puffing her cheeks, “I mean, I had Covid, so I wasn’t there, but when I finally came in, I was very, very emotional, because it’s like, ‘finally, we are doing it’. So it does feel like a long time coming, but sometimes, good things come to those who wait.”

Yet “good” feels like quite the understatement when it comes to The Paradis Files, when it is the first mainstage opera to be led by a Deaf director.

I ask Jenny what that feels like. “It’s terrifying,” she admits, “it’s absolutely terrifying as a Deaf person, because I’m having to understand the process of an opera singer. They arrive, day one, having learnt the music. Actors never learn the script on day one, it takes four weeks to learn a script, but opera singers? They’ve learnt it.

“The music rehearsals are just polishing their singing,” Jenny continues. ‘So I’m trying to direct them like a theatre director, and they go, ‘Jenny, we always need to always be facing front’.

“I said, ‘can you move there’, and they’ll say, ‘no, the rhythm doesn’t fit’. [I replied:] ‘Well then you have to explain to me with the music.’

“It’s a real exchange. I have to put my theatre hat on, but they’re giving me their musical hat, so I’m learning how to work with them with a bit more musical confidence,” she says, stressing the “important” working relationship between her as director and Andrea Brown, the musical director.

Though in a weird way, she says, it’s useful being Deaf and working on an opera: “Because I can hear some [sounds], I sometimes take my hearing aid out, so I can hear nothing,” she explains. “But hearing nothing, I just look and see whether I can see the signers and the musicality from them, so I can get from the performers [that] they’re being truthful physically.”

As with past Graeae productions, The Paradis Files will come with integrated British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation and audio description, as well as creative captioning from video designer Ben Glover.

“How [Ben’s] created it, how the words come up, fits the music,” she explains, “so there’s a different form of musicality on the stage, that doesn’t necessarily rely on hearing, but is about emotion and rhythm.”

Musical director Andrea shared a similar sentiment. “Opera has the ability to touch us all and I wanted to be a part of that,” she explained, in a press release promoting the production. “New opera is hugely exciting.

“There are no limits or barriers in this realm,” she said, perhaps demonstrating once again just how expansive and inclusive Graeae’s art really is.

The Paradis Files previews at Leicester Curve on 8 and 9 April, with an official premiere at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 13 and 14 April.

It will then begin a UK tour which finishes in Sheffield, on 12 May. More details and ticket information can be found on Graeae’s official website.

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Photo: Henri T.

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.