Image: Joe Strickland at DaDaFest Scratch 2021, photo by Brian Roberts
This August, DaDa Executive Producer, Joe Strickland, visited the Edinburgh Fringe in their capacity as both a representative of DaDa and as a performing artist with Chronic Insanity. Get their thoughts on accessibility at the world's largest arts festival in their latest piece for the DaDa blog:
On the whole, the Edinburgh Fringe has been a mixed bag this year. I think there’s more public complaining because people are more comfortable demanding the basics that they require. Every complaint about access, burnout, finances, or mismanagement is a problem that has pervaded the festival for many years, so the increase in people actively and publicly complaining about it is a good sign that people feel empowered about standing up to industry and festival gatekeepers, something that can happen all too rarely in live performance. This is happening in conversations with artists, on twitter, and even in published think-pieces, such as this one by Fergus Morgan for The Stage.
There have also been many more shows, at all scales, actively promoting their access, in spite of the Fringe Society messing up and excluding shows with accessibility from being correctly labeled as such in the programme and ticket website. Plus, with the emergence of organisations like Neurodiverse Review and their excellent summing up of access issues at the Fringe in 2022 it’s clear that access is being forced into conversations about the future of the Fringe, and about time!
However, I can’t help but think that it’s all to easy for people to point the fingers between venues, artists, and audiences without anything actually ending up getting done. Also, a lot of people are demanding change but are these organisations actually going to do anything without people asking for more specifics?
Some potential ideas for these three groups are presented below to reflect on:
To Venues
- Do a major overhaul of assessing whether spaces are accessible or not, and making sure that most spaces can be made accessible, especially if they are traditionally popular to broad audiences.
This might be difficult in old buildings that house venues potentially, but then maybe find other buildings? Is having been somewhere for a period of time really worth ignoring the mobility or sensory needs of your audience? Can you set up an equivalent system elsewhere to view shows staged in inaccessible spaces (live streaming on an intranet for instance) or having a pot of money set aside to reasonably record shows in inaccessible spaces for on demand release.
Don’t just rely on these ideas either, as the priority is making live spaces accessible to everybody. That is why people come to the Fringe.
- Train your staff in audience access queries, and don’t work them so hard that it’s the first thing that gets forgotten in order for them to survive the month. Lots of stories coming out of the fringe this month have been about shows from smaller companies offering more access options but venues staff/volunteers being uninformed about access matters effectively. However, working at most Edinburgh venues leaves you underpaid, or even not technically paid at all, and exhausted. You may also end up hating the role since, working front of house or at the box office you will be bearing the brunt of any general hostility from members of the public. So kindness is required if a staff member forgets or mishandles an accessibility query. Venues need to do more about staff health and wellbeing anyway, and a wonderful side-effect of this will be a better access communication system for audiences that require it.
- Can’t all the venues just have a big website that has all the up to date access information on it, the big 8 especially now that they have EdFest.co.uk? The basic access built into shows, any extra accessible performances decided upon during the month? This really isn’t that hard to set up.
- Encourage shows to be more accessible with incentives (more favourable rents or ticket splits, free publicity about their access offering, equipment for accessibility provided as part of the general tech spec in a venue). Artists want to be accessible, they really do, but resources limit their ability to execute their accessibility desires
To Artists
The current show registration process means that you have to outline your access when you register your show, which is very early on in the rehearsal or creation process if you don’t have access built into the bedrock of your show. Some artists don’t have anything other than a name for their show when they are registering it in March time (for the early bird deadline at least). The best thing to do is to build access into the show from the get go, not tag it on later and then be unable to update your listing to reflect this (although obviously this updating should be a more streamlined process too).
Almost every artists I speak to about access wants to include it but doesn’t want to mess it up. We all innately understand how important expectations are when it comes to making an informed decision about which shows to go and see, especially when there is so much choice/competition at the festival. Unfortunately most artists end up deciding that if they aren’t confident in making their work accessible then they might do it badly, and that doing something poorly is worse than not doing it at all. Therefore, access is not built in. Also, it comes down to resources and the availability of resources.
Below are some suggestions:
- Audio-description should be in everything from the ground up, it isn’t difficult, just pretend your show is a radio play and add it in, or rehearse a second script for the show that describes anything visually on stage that isn’t already described with the script. Also, you can build audio-description into your sound design to emphasise and highlight visual moments if your show isn’t scripted, like emphasising the creaking of a door if one closes, or the tearing of paper if a letter is opened.
- Captions should be an option everywhere, but you need to overcome two problems:
1. How will they be generated
2.Where will they be shown
If you have a scripted show, and that script is stuck to for every performance, there really isn’t an excuse for not having captions generated for your show (the problem comes in presenting them). Even just having the lines in a powerpoint and having an operator skip through them along with the show can be enough. If that sounds boring, then make your captions more creative! Different fonts, images, styles for different characters, there’s not set or standardised way of making creative captions, just make them visible and legible from where the audience is sitting and you’re good to go!
If, however, you have a show with improvised or unscripted elements, and don’t have the budget for a stenographer, or even an electronic note taker to caption the show for you, AI speech to text options can be used so long as they have a clear audio feed for the performers. The free speech-to-text included with Zoom is surprisingly good at accuracy regardless of regional UK/US accents if it has a clean audio feed of the performers speaking. However, displaying the captions for everyone might be distracting if they are not completely accurate. Unfortunately Edinburgh is full of venues with awful sight lines during the festival, but a screen or projection can be easily set up to be viewed by a certain section off the audience, as is usually the case with a BSL interpreter facing a particular section of seats during a performance.
Exhibiting captions is a larger issue in my mind, and one that can be solved by venues. You need a screen or projection to show the captions to the audience. You can use a system to have captions on a phone for an audience member but then they have to look away from the performance to read them, so ideally you’d have them next to or embedded into the performance in some way on the stage. However, it is unreasonable to expect every show to bring up their own TV monitors or projectors, so venues should supply some sort of audio-visual equipment as standard in every space, even just a £50 TV screen off of Gumtree, so that captions can be created by artists and displayed without undue weight on the limited resources of a theatre company.
Also, if you’re planning on having AD and captions, make it available for every performance, why limit it? If it’s built into the show properly then there’s no need to remove it.
Consider this? As a storyteller you want your story to be understood by the audience so that they can be entertained, enlightened, or bonded socially. We make creative decisions to allow us to do this whenever we make a show. Who we cast, how it’s performed, how the script is structured or paced, the order of the scenes in the story, the likability of the characters, how sections are highlighted by lights, sound, props, set, etc. By not including captions and AD you’re just limiting the people your story can reach, and doing so in a discriminatory and ableist way.
- BSL interpretation is more difficult to provide because it is more expensive and harder to organise for the average theatre company. I’d recommend using BSL if you know you’ll have BSL users in your audience, or you want to appeal to them with your show. There are not enough BSL interpreters for the number of shows that want to use them and, because artists use them inappropriately all the time, it can be hard to find interpreters for smaller events. There are rules artists don’t know, like how most shows require multiple interpreters due swapping them out every 15 minutes unless the interpreter is rehearsed into the show. Not every interpreter can interpret for every BSL user, there are dialects of BSL and personal preferences of the audience that can cause interference in the clarity of the interpretation. However, for larger organisations, BSL should be provided for the same reason as above, accessibility is a right.
For some of our own innovations around this topic, you can find a wealth of resources on DaDa's The Space-funded Augmented Reality BSL interpretations here.
- Finally, just commit to having relaxed performances, I guarantee that nine times out of ten your lighting and sound design is not so important that it should bar audiences from your show.
To Critics
Press organisations should actively seek out more reviewers with lived experience of disability, Deafness, or neurodiversity to review shows as non-disabled and neurotypical reviewers were particularly bad at ignoring, overlooking, or misinterpreting these elements in shows this year.
It’s not just with disability art that this should be rectified for, but it should be rectified alongside reviews from different global majority heritages, socio-economic backgrounds, ages, and gender identities.
Neurodiverse Review has been an absolute godsend this year! The Fringe Society and venues should support them at all costs so that it can continue for many fringes to come.
To Audiences
Money talks and artists care about online praise and positive publicity. Thoroughly praise venues and artists with good access in their shows if you can, so that it feels worthwhile to those as of yet unconvinced. This can also help other audiences find those shows doing it effectively.
Other than that, this isn’t your problem. Information should be simple and easy to find, not hidden away in sub menus on websites. Spaces and shows should be accessible. Is it really that difficult for a venue to get an access specialist in and to follow their recommendations? It can be harder for a show to make a production accessible if resources are tight, which they are for everyone at the moment, but larger and more established production companies, working with bigger budgets, should be doing better.
Summary
- Artists should do better at building affordable access into their work from the ground up, it doesn’t have to be difficult and some is better than none
- Venues should offer a lot more to support artists in doing this, and to allow audiences to attend physical and digital versions of performances (both are crucial)
- Incentives should be given to shows that are taking access seriously
- Publications should employ more disabled press and critics
- Audiences who have the energy for it should continue to fight for better access overall and praise good practice