This blog will chart the activities of two interns from the University of Glasgow.

Andrew Tickell and myself, Ceri Restrick, are working on a summer-long project with the National Theatre of Scotland to promote and broaden access to the theatre for audiences across Scotland regardless of ability or circumstance.

We’ll both be splitting our time between the National Theatre of Scotland and assisting the Federation of Scottish Theatre’s Access Project.

As a law graduate, Andrew will be focusing on legal policy and the implications for a national touring theatre company. As a Theatre Studies student, I will be focusing on access facilities in the venues we tour to and creating links with audiences. By the end of our placement we hope:

  • to have improved the network of communication between Scottish organisations dedicated to people with access requirements;
  • to have created a database with up-to-date contact details for organisations and audience members:
  • to have assisted towards the production of the next Access Scottish Theatre Guide, due out in September 2009;
  • to foster within the organisation a deeper understanding of how the Disability Equality Duty impacts on the National Theatre of Scotland.

Here’s a review of our progress to date in the three weeks since we started our internship

Week 1
Andrew and I attended the Access Scottish Theatre (AST) event at Dundee Rep Theatre.

The event received a small attendance, but the comments that audience members made were constructive and extremely useful. The event focused on captioning, a service which provides subtitles for a performance. One particular gentleman who was hard-of-hearing highlighted its relevance: “I haven’t been to the theatre in years. I came today because I was told there was captioning.”

The address from the AST coordinator Mairi Taylor made it clear that captioning reached a wider deaf and hard-of-hearing audience since it catered for those who do not use British Sign Language.

Week 2
Having filmed both the marketing team and audience members at Dundee Rep, Andrew and I met with Mairi Taylor at the Federation of Scottish Theatre (FST) headquarters in Edinburgh to discuss how to consolidate feedback from audiences into a report, film and database. We also created a marketing plan for up-and-coming Access events in Inverness, Edinburgh and Glasgow, in order to secure a larger attendance.

Week 3
This week, I’m in the middle of promoting the forthcoming Glasgow and Edinburgh Access events. Andrew will be filming at the Inverness event at Eden Court Theatre this Saturday. I also attended the Open Space conference in Glasgow which provided the opportunity for all those working in the arts to contribute ideas through informal discussions. I formed part of a group which discussed whether disability arts should be an art form in its own right or whether it should focus on being integrated with non-disabled theatre.

The conclusion of this discussion was that although people’s educational experiences had been quite segregated, they were more interested in an integrated approach to theatre, disabled and non-disabled. I found this relevant to our own access project because it got me thinking about the segregation of performances, how specific shows were scheduled to cater for disabilities rather than all shows catering for access at all times.

The issue with access we have discovered so far is that although facilities are in place in theatres, few audience members actually book accessible performances, based on the information we currently have. In the case of access for hearing impairment, with 1 in 7 people having some form of hearing loss surely there should be a significant number of audience members requiring captioning or British Sign Language in theatres?

by Ceri Restrick