To greet the spring, a variety of creatives have been cancelling their places on anti-war demos to devote their weekends to writers in the West Midlands. The Lighting the Fuse mini-festival hosted by Stagecoach has featured a handful of workshops aimed at getting writers to think in challenging new ways, and it was launched at Birmingham Rep on a Saturday morning with the arrival of Jenny Sealey, Artistic Director of Graeae Theatre Company.
Graeae (pronounced ‘grey eye’) is Britain's leading professional theatre company of people with physical and sensory disabilities, and takes its name from Greek mythology: the Graeae were three grey-haired, swan-like sisters who shared one eye and one tooth which they had to swap around between them. As if that wasn’t bad enough for them, Perseus came along and nicked them both.
The company has always aimed to redress the exclusion from performance of people with physical and sensory impairments, whilst at the same time creating pioneering theatre. But what can that teach writers?
Not much, you might think, but after a day of watching Jenny at work with a group of West Midlands writers, I began to see what she meant, and then I realised why someone who is deaf herself and spends her days dealing with issues of accessibility for sensory impaired people is uniquely placed to examine how writers can most effectively utilise both words and action to create meaning.
“I talk to writers all the time, in workshops all over the country,” says Jenny. “And what is quite shocking is that very few of them have ever thought about their audience. They think about the actors, and the director, but then you ask them about the audience and they tend to say ‘Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of them.’”
It’s about thinking about your audience. People with disabilities form a significant part of the theatre audience, often catered for with a signed-assisted performance for deaf people and an audio describer for those with a visual impairment. Through facilitating these services at close quarters, Jenny has come to appreciate the advantages of both, as well as how a signed performance can show up deficiencies in the writing, or an audio description highlight what is lacking in the visual element of the play.
“At some point it helps to break apart everything you know,” says Jenny. “To re-examine each thing in itself, the audio and the visual, and then put it all back together again in a new way.”
It’s only when you really stop to think about your audience as a writer, to wonder how your play can transmit its meaning purely through the sound or solely through the visual action, that you experience the problems that a blind or deaf viewer could point out to you right away.
“The thing with sighted people is that, there’s so much you don’t take in. When I did The Changeling I had an audio describer working with us full-time throughout the whole process and had two blind actors. The set contained a huge, famous photograph from the 1960s, of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards walking out of court, and he audio-described the picture to us. The detail that was there was phenomenal! Next to them was this woman with a Yorkshire terrier, and I’d been looking at the picture for six weeks and hadn’t seen it.”
So ask yourself as a writer, will my work be accessible to people who don’t hear, or people who don’t see? Is the visual picture strong enough for a deaf person to experience an emotional attachment, and then for a blind person to really be able to hear the emotional landscape and the physical movement through the language?
It’s almost as if she’s asking the writer to look at their play first as a silent film to make sure the images work on their own. Then to take that away and just think of it as a radio play: does the sound work on its own? Is it working on both those levels? And then, if you isolate those two things out and put them back together, do they operate as a whole for hearing and sighted people?
So a useful exercise she recommends for writers is to write a synopsis for deaf audiences and also write an audio description. It can often spotlight where the real problems are and give the writer that much needed epiphany to make the play work.
“Writers have a sense of ownership over their work, and that’s really important, but it’s also important to let go of it. Once it’s out there it belongs to all of us. You own those words, but also you share those words with other people.”
As an Artistic Director, Jenny deals with productions, education work and training, all within the framework of maximising opportunities for disabled performers and the challenge of artistic accessibility. “I suppose the biggest part of the job is constant lobbying and advocacy. It does my head in. It’s relentless. But it’s what makes the job exciting.”
She started out as a touring actor with a degree in Dance. “I realised I was never going to be a dancer. I just don’t have the right shape. So I tried to muscle my way into some of the drama activities in college, but there was a lot of suspicion about how I speak and whether I’d be able to pick up cues. Then I got a job with Graeae as an actor.”
After that she applied to become a trainee director with Interplay and was given the chance to co-direct and then direct. Eventually, a job at Graeae came up and she felt she had a sufficient number of plays under her belt to give it a go. “It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done. There’s fundraising involved and application forms and being strategic and managerial; it’s not just about putting on pretty plays all the time. There’s a lot of desk work. But we now have an executive producer, which means there are times when they say ‘Jenny, go and do something arty. Get out of the office. You’re just getting in the way.’ But I like that balance. If you don’t raise the money, there wouldn’t be any plays.”
The writers who took part in her Stagecoach workshop were from a wide variety of backgrounds and even those who’d wondered at the start what they had let themselves in for emerged with a new outlook on their writing.
“I think you should also say to a writer, you can’t be all things to all people, but in terms of bums on seats, disabled audiences will come to the theatre.”
She insists, however, that Graeae shouldn’t be branded: “A big part of my job is facilitating mentoring schemes for writers. Not all disabled writers want to write about disability; not all disabled writers want to write for Graeae. Why should they? But on the other hand, I do want to secure good writers for the company. All of our plays have a different accessible hook. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t; but at least we’re trying.”
Stagecoach is about to relaunch itself as SCRIPT, with a new and expanded programme for writers in the West Midlands including training and workshops, writer development opportunities, showcases of work, conference/discussion events, a hi-tech website, and special projects to discover new writers. SCRIPT’s exciting new remit is to offer writer development and initiate projects in all areas of dramatic writing, including theatre, screen, radio and live art.
Graeae Theatre Company: www.graeae.org