The disabilities services webpages, gave me the opportunity to dig deeper into the definition of disability according to the Equality Act 2010 and what falls under discrimination by law as well as the situation in which people are officially protected and what the (minimum) reasonable adjustments are that organisations should be making for employers (an in our case students too) with disabilities.

The pages champion the Social Model of Disability. People with disabilities are not defined by what is “wrong” with them, but by what they need. It aims at breaking down barriers (physical or caused by attitudes) that cause people not to be able to do certain things.

As the Production Manager of our Performance spaces, I am very aware about how this concept of breaking down barriers is key in how we organise our spaces and make them accessible to students, staff and audiences alike.

When I was at Southbank Centre, where I worked for 12 years before moving to CSM, I was the Technical Manager for the Unlimited Festival 2014: I managed all the events happening in the front of house spaces.

Unlimited is a festival that commissions work from disabled artists. The festival gifted me the opportunity to understand a lot more about disability and helped me realise not only how ignorant I had been, but also how able-ist is the world we live in. As part of the festival we put in place methods to make our events as accessible as possible. I was proud of that, but I didn’t realise how this effort was very much an add on toward the end of the production process as opposed to part of the everyday operations of the building. Disappointingly, after the festival ended, most those provisions got dropped. The few that were kept, e.g. audio describing shows, were in place only on special occasions. Why?

Nnow, here at CSM, I am facing the same challenge. Although our spaces are somewhat accessible, there still is a very long way to go to make them fully accessible. It seems that the argument is that it is too expensive and too time consuming to provide accessibility all the time, but accessibility shouldn’t just be add on, it should be incorporated in the events we put on. As a matter of course.

So as part of my practice I pledge to make permanent changes to our infrastructure and to work with students to think more closely about what it means to for a piece to be accessible and how that can become the norm.

I would like to hold some focus groups with students that are comfortable with sharing their disability and ask them how we can move forward.

I would also like to put together some workshops where students with disabilities and students without disabilities can make art together, ensuring it is accessible to all. I believe this would also inform the most effective ways to make changes to the infrastructure of our spaces. I would like to hear from people with disabilities to understand their needs first hand instead of making assumptions and imposing inadequate solutions.

References

Unlimited. At https://weareunlimited.org.uk/our-work/our-history/ (Accessed on 03.05.22)