제작처Art Collider 한예종 융합예술센터
등록일 2025-02-10
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I am a white man with gray hair and a gray beard and blue eyes I'm wearing an orange jumper and I'm in my gray office and I have been working in disabled access in theaters for 16 years here so with any piece of work we do we hope to attract a new audience a new disabled audience into our theater with each play that we put on so there are three levels of what we call three levels of risk for a disabled Booker so under the social model those three risks are reducers responsibility under the medical model those three risks are the individual's responsibility so at what point in any theater making process to the producers and the directors and the designers all talk about the barriers that are created in their [Music] place uh my name is bwood I am the head of access at the National Theater in London based on the South Bank of the river temps uh I started my career as a dancer and then became interested in the technical side of theater production uh where I took particular interest in disabled access that we'll talk about today um and I've worked in several theaters both in the United Kingdom so including Shakespeare's Globe as well as the National Theater the domar warehouse and the Old Vic uh I've given access advice to the United Kingdom's uh television and broadcast uh Watchdog who supervis access across all of the media platforms uh if it is useful to you um just to explain what I look like I am a white man with gray hair and a gray beard and blue eyes I'm wearing an orange jumper and I'm in my gray office it's very gray office this morning in London so we'll be talking a lot about disability and one of the core principles of disability studies in the UK is understanding that we shouldn't really talk about disability out of the ab in the absence of disabled people but sometimes we need to talk about access with whoever is present in the room and there will be time for questions at the end so in terms of disabled access to unit Kingdom theater it's a relatively mature strand of work um I have been working in disabled access in theaters for 16 years here it's a very specific strand of work because it covers every part of a theater so it touches both upon the physical structures of theaters the physical production of a play and the audience and front of house piece of work in in care for disabled and deaf people but before we talk about the work we have to agree upon definitions so in disability studies in the UK and a large part of America and uh parts of Europe we understand the term disability in the form of models so models of disability there are about 16 models that you can use to understand the word disability there are probably two to four which are used most frequently therefore at the National Theater we use something called the social model of disability the social model states that a person is disabled because of the way Society is structured these are generalizations but it indicates an important philosophical difference in the way we think about disabled people so under the social model UK theaters generally understand that the people who are disabled around them have been disabled by the barriers created in the theater making process which means that we have quite a a live debate around how to remove those barriers in our practices um and there are lots of straightforward ways to do this so generally we do uh a series of adjustments to a production they're called reasonable adjustments legally so those most common would include captioning or subtitling uh audio description for blind people and sign language interpretation for deaf people um across UK theater about 84% of UK theaters offer audio description regularly uh about 81% of theaters across the UK offer captioning regularly 87% of theaters across the United Kingdom offer what's called a relaxed performance relaxed performances are specifically tailored for autistic people and people with neurodiversity access manager or access officer will remove uh a lot of the sensory environment the edges from the sensory environment so there strobe lights or sudden loud sounds they get softened um to make a less uh startling atmosphere inside the theater but that's an adjustment we make whereas some theaters will produce plays that don't have those barriers in the first place so those are some barriers that people will face before they even know that you have a play on or how to book tickets and if people can't book tickets for your play if you don't have deaf people coming to your theater if you don't have blind people coming to your theater you don't have deaf or blind people giving you feedback about about your theater the information currently on the screen shows the bits in UK theater that we can improve upon so sometimes we need to think about how we innovate to create better access for our audiences and and here are two types of access that we offer at the National Theater they are the same access on the right is what we call open captioning where we present the script in text form to the entire audience on the left is what we call closed captioning so that is an individual member of the audience wearing smart glasses which are also displaying the caption units solely for that individual the open captioning is a form of preemptive access and it's equal access we will give those captions to everyone in the auditorium without questioning if they're deaf or not the closed captioning is a form of Equitable access so that's where we give an individual what that individual needs to access the plate considering the social model and the medical model again open captioning adjusts the environment closed captioning adjusts the individual both of the responsibility of the producer and both have costs attached to them but one of them means that a disabled person does not need to tell us that they are disabled and the other one means that a disabled person needs to ask us for the glasses and on the right is a girl called e stery who in this photograph is 13 she's a young girl uh white girl with blonde hair Ros and Ela are working on the audio description of a play called The Witches which was a play for Children and Families audio description is the craft of turning visual information into verbal information so that blind people can receive the same amount of information as their cited colleagues in the in the audience it's the designer's priority to give a lot of information to the audience in a visual format but the more information you give that way the more information you are withholding from blind people the decision of decisions involved in theater design is also a form of access where you can decide who is privileged to what information is your set design full of information that only visually confident people can access or is there a way of giving a a piece of design that is equally accessible to Blind and cited people and also if you are using audio description who is your eyes so when you have an audio describer they will filter to their understanding of the world and that's the vocabulary they will use to describe the play in front of them why for the witches for this play it was important that we used a young person as the describer because a young person is more able to understand what to explain to other young people in terms of vocabulary and life experience but potentially the most significant piece of in this photograph is that Elena the young girl is blind herself this is the first time the national theater engaged in what we call real toore audio description which is a form of thinking in the UK where we look at who is involved in our creative making decisions Does it include disabled people Does it include blind people and Does it include deaf people and the case has an economic position too so many producers will understand that captioning audio description sign language these are all additional costs to any production and that's because again under the medical model we as a society view disabled people as additional audience or additional ancillary people to the main people we're trying to talk to and engage with but how would budgets be used or divided if you had a blind person at the center of your production or if you had a deaf producer so with any piece of work we do we hope to attract a new audience a new disabled audience into our theater with each play that we put on and then part of the work of access is to listen to their feedback because we also need to reduce the amount of fear that organizations have in making errors around access in the current model of access programming and producing there is very little room for error because it is likely that you will only have one captioned or subtitled performance in a run this means that if your def audience only have one show to come to if that show isn't perfect will they come back for another show in the future so there are three levels of what we call three levels of risk for a disabled Booker to play the first one is the same as any Booker so if you book for a play there is a risk you won't enjoy it there is a risk that your money will go into buying a theater ticket for a show that you just don't enjoy the second risk for disabled people is the risk around access so they might enjoy the play but if the access isn't good enough they won't be able to understand the play or engage with the play so when they buy their tickets what Assurance do they have that they will be able to understand and engage with the play and if you're aiming for artistic Excellence for your non-disabled audience can you justify not aiming for Access Excellence for your disabled audience and the third risk for a disabled audience is to do with wider social economics so generally the cost of living for a disabled person at least in the UK is more expensive than for a non-disabled person so under the social model those three risks are a producer's responsibility under the medical model those three risks are the individual's responsibility so at what point in any theater making process to the producers and the directors and the designers all talk about the barriers that are created in their play you might be very confident in one aspect of access so it might be that surtitling subtitling or captioning you're very confident in delivering which is excellent for people with hearing loss or deaf people but then what happens when you meet indiv idual who have multiple access requirements so the English theatrical Cannon you'll be familiar is sort of one of the principal writers is Shakespeare for example so Shakespeare was writing in the late 16th century early 17th century um Shakespeare is notoriously difficult to read and and people had to study it for some time to get their heads around how to read that sort of English that form of English Shakespeare is however relatively easy to listen to so most Modern English speakers will understand all of Shakespeare if it's spoken correctly and then taking it one step further if you are deaf but you're also visually impaired and you can't see the captioning and you can't see an interpreter how do we make a play accessible for you in the case of death blindness we revert back to the principles of access so there are principles around accessible design and how we give information to disabled people and one of those foundational principles is called the princi principle of two senses the principle of two senses states that information given using two senses will generally be accessible to almost everyone so the principle to State senses asks us to think about other senses we could use to engage our death blind audience so an idea might be to use the senses of touch and smell and the principle of touch was employed in three ways so firstly the alphabet can be spelled out on a de blind person's hand secondly a map of the stage can be drawn on a death blinded person's back and actors can be positioned in Space by touching the individual's back and thirdly the person needs to be guided through the space so if they're on your set within your design they need to be guided and that's another form of touch for a death blind person so what we're offering there isn't the same theatrical experience we're not trying to make the death blind person have the same play as a cited hearing person but it's a parallel theatrical experience so you're saying that this play is unique to your experience of the world as much as a play I go and sit and watch is unique to my senses so these are just examples of how the social model informs how I work and how the National Theater Works um and it's not perfect we still have to make very big financial decisions uh which generalize our deaf audience our visually impaired audience but the key part is in that that Loop of information and being adapted able to the new individuals that you meet as you create work but the other two things it really needs is firstly the permission to fail so where access is is new or where new forms of access are being created uh you need to be able to get it wrong and you need to be able to listen to your disabled audience and what they felt about you getting it wrong but principally it also takes kindness because what act has ask us to do is imagine us play where we're not the audience and we're not the creators where the audience are disabled or or the creators are disabled and we need to put our kindness into their work because we believe in their their powers as creatives and their importance as members of our society I really hope this part of the Talk's been useful I hope that's laid the foundations for some thinking for you

한예종의 중장기 디지털 전환 사업인 "커넥티드 캠퍼스"의 일환으로 2024년 9월 커넥티드 위크 : 열린학교 "렉쳐 프로그램"이 진행되었습니다.
렉쳐 프로그램은 "서로의 생각과 경험을 나눔으로써 각자의 답을 찾아가는 열린학교"라는 컨셉 아래 Commons(공유지)라는 주제를 바탕으로 외부의 담론을 공유하고 교류하는 소규모 그룹 렉쳐로 진행되었습니다.
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세션5. 공연예술의 관객접근성 기획
연사ㅣ
David Bellwood (로열 내셔널 시어터 접근성 총괄책임자)
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기획ㅣ김보형, 안지은
보조기획ㅣ문하영
운영ㅣ손경환, 정순영
운영보조ㅣ김지안, 이수민

문의ㅣkarts.ac@gmail.com

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