Tuesday, April 05, 2016
When It Comes To Accessibility At Theatres, There Is A Law
HowlRound: Prompted by the much-deserved attention generated by the Broadway run of Deaf West Theatre’s Spring Awakening, the National Endowment for the Arts’s New York City convening to discuss issues facing Deaf theatre and deaf theatre artists was an important step in the vitally necessary conversation about arts for the Deaf and disability communities. As someone who is not a member of those communities, but who works to be an ally to them, I felt honored to be in the room. I was part of the contingent designated only as observers—I was there to learn.
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4 comments:
I really enjoyed this article because I am very passionate in everything that this article is trying to improve. Disabilities are overlooked or ignored by people way too much. When you are making a building or planning an event you only think about the normal everyday person, it rarely comes into people’s minds that maybe some one in a wheelchair would not be able to participate like everyone else. Theatre is mostly created for and performed by regular abled body people. Theatre is one of the most open and inclusive art forms so you would think that would apply to everyone, but a lot of the time it does not. Growing up with a brother in a wheelchair has given me a totally different perspective on the world. I see things in whether my brother would be able to do them or not. After working in many theaters I have seen that it would be extremely hard for people in wheelchairs to get around or even get backstage to come on the stage. When I worked at the Nederlander my brother could not even come backstage to see what I did because there were steps and the hallways were very tight and he would have blocked anyone else from getting through. He needed to wait in the lobby while I took my mom backstage. That broke my heart that he could not get the opportunity to come backstage at a Broadway show just because he was in a wheelchair and could not stand up and walk. Having a disability should not limit a person from following their dreams or doing what they want. We should be able to adapt our world to accommodate all different kinds of people.
As someone who is not physically disabled, I totally agree that a lot of society is almost blind to this issue. The first time I became very aware of performances for the deaf was when I attended a Bo Burnham show at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology, which has a huge deaf population). He was on tour and on the live screens there were captions as well. It was the first time on his tour that there had been captions at all so he made lots of jokes in reference to them, not in a mean way, but like saying words that were hard to spell and such. It was really funny, but it made me realize how strange it was in relation to other shows I had seen - of course a deaf person would find these jokes funny! Why shouldn't they be able to read them? I have since seen other shows with interpreters but on such a large scale it'd be hard to also broadcast them. This just really shows how the theater community boasts so much about inclusivity but still has such strong restrictions for so many people.
You’d think that with a field that can be as liberal as theatre can be at times would have an easier time creating an environment that was accessible to all kinds of people, including people with physical disabilities. In a perfect world, art would be accessible to all who wanted to experience it, and it makes sense that an artist would want everyone to be able to experience their art, so why don’t people make it easy for those who, often through no fault of their own, need accommodations that are different from accommodations of patrons who don’t suffer from a disability. Why not make it easy for everyone to enjoy, or at least make an honest effort to try. This article does a very good job at pointing out an issue in theatre without being overly dramatic about it, or doing so in a shaming way, it just calls for some curtesy. I don’t think anyone can argue against that.
The first thing I noticed about this article upon reading it was the unnecessary capitalization of the word deaf. The ideas behind this article are great. I’m all for equality, but I think this article has a couple of flaws. First, from what I know the ADA laws only apply to organizations that receive federal funding. The for-profit commercial entities don’t need to adhere to the same rules as non-profit organizations. The other flaw I noticed in the article that it says the ADA doesn’t care about your non-profit status and/or budget says. While this may be true, there are certain rules about the number wheelchair seats, for example, based on the size of the venue and the total number of seats. In the end though, I think that this is something that people do need to be aware of. With funding for arts being in the state that it is, it seems like opening up opportunities for people with disabilities is not only a great way to be more inclusive but also to get more funding for the arts.
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