Gedeelde grond (‘Shared ground’) is a series of conversations with arts professionals from Flanders. What do they dream about? What do they worry about? In this last episode of season one we talk to Staging Access, an organisation that advises and supports cultural houses, workers and artists to become more accessible. Founders Joyce Vuylsteke and Saartje Cauwenbergh share how they guide the sector in offering an equal experience to people with disabilities.
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Staging Access guides players of the performing arts field to become more accessible to audiences and performers with disabilities. To do so, it looks at the infrastructure of houses, the communication of these organisations, their production logic, technology, logistics and more.
The organisation was recently founded from a combination of expertise and enthusiasm: to be able to offer an equal experience to everyone, with or without disabilities. Its founders, Saartje and Joyce, also bring with them a wealth of practical as well as lived experience. That lived experience is important, but is certainly not the foundation. “As a cultural worker or organisation, it is of course good that you involve people living with a particular disability. Lived experience is certainly useful, but the starting point remains professional expertise,” says Joyce.
“With the professional view and knowledge at your disposal, you can think more broadly, socially and use that expertise where necessary. If you take experiencers individually then their own experience predominates, which is very personal and rarely includes the necessary changes. There are so many disabilities and conditions ,and everyone experiences it differently. Staging Access is involved, keeping its finger on the pulse of interest groups and organisations charting that course.”
“Just because you have a disability doesn’t mean you know what technical options are available. Staging Access tries to tap into that wide range of possibilities that can lead in a very creative way to new solutions to make performances more accessible,” Saartje adds. At the same time, the duo does not claim to know everything: “nobody owns the answer to the quest that accessibility often is”. “It is always a bit of a balancing act between what is possible and what would be artistically interesting,” explains Saartje.
It is also important that the artistic experience remains equal. That is why the organisation looks with the makers at what they produce and bring to the stage. “By that, we don’t want to say that the experience will be completely the same for everyone. It is important to us that it is proportionally artistically interesting, even if it will be shaped a bit differently.” Together with theatre makers, directors and collectives, Staging Access engages in dialogue about ideas.
“It is tailor-made every time anyway. Therefore, we always look at who the question comes from, what the motivation is for involving us and what people are looking for. And it really is a trade-off, because we can just as well sense that the intentions are there, but we are still missing a very important factor. If someone wants to focus exclusively on infrastructure, there is a good chance that we will make an indication that communication also needs to be worked on, because it is usually an ‘and-and‘ story. You can make certain interventions, but if they are isolated, they very often get lost and turn out to create new barriers anyway. So it really does involve looking for possible solutions to specific problems faced by organisations, creators or cultural workers.”
To address that accessibility as broadly as possible, it is better to start at the beginning. “It is good that you are on equal footing. What is the budget? What are the expectations? What do you want to aim for and what is achievable? It is very useful if we can check that off together beforehand”, Joyce says.
That’s also where Saartje jumps in: “Very often there is always something to be realised afterwards. Our experience has taught us that trying to make something more accessible afterwards is often much more expensive. If you were able to make certain changes from the start, it is often much more organic and makes more sense. Then it is a more supported and sustainable story.”
Such a process takes time, but “sometimes it is also about very concrete, practical things”, says Saartje. “Stand in front of your building and see how the public enters it. Is it with a door for which you have to be half a bodybuilder to get it open? What about the layout of the entrance hall you enter? What about the ticket counter? Is that a counter two metres high? Are there certain things sticking out of the wall that you could easily bump into if you haven’t seen them properly?”
At the same time, the organisation remains very aware of the practical limitations with certain organisations or buildings. “If something is just not possible, you have to be able to choose not to do it and communicate that very clearly so that people know what to expect. In an older building, you can’t just move the toilet or suddenly make the doors wider. But then we do look at other options to install an accessible toilet.”
In their years of experience, there has been a lot of experimentation, and today the duo is also still discovering what works and what doesn’t. Still, they dream of an arts field where their expertise becomes redundant, and accessibility is something to be expected naturally. “Almost one in five people have a disability, visible or invisible. From our expertise, we do of course look at what the limitations are and what we can deploy where. But that there is generally an open attitude, that you can just come in and be made welcome, that you can buy your ticket, step inside independently without having to explain anything, without judgement. That it’s just all nice and accessible, that’s the dream.”
On the other hand, their nightmare is just the opposite: “Imagine having a career where you’ve been saying the same thing for 40 years, and in the meantime there’s still no change”. So their message is ‘reflect and begin’ – inform yourself well, and get started.
Gedeelde grond (Shared ground) is a new series of conversations with arts professionals from Flanders. What do they dream about? What do they worry about? Find out more about the themes that are alive in the arts field.
