Chaz's Journal | Roger Ebert: The Cinemark movie theater I frequent in Sacramento boasts four wheelchair spaces. As a movie lover with disabilities this is a process not unlike fitting in additional guests at a dinner party. You wonder how friends will sit together and have optimal access to the food on hand. A trip to my local theater to see “Black Panther” in February saw my metaphorical dinner party end with the equivalent of thrown plates and wasted food, a sad reminder of how movie theaters in America continuously fail patrons with mobility issues.
4 comments:
Entertainment should be accessible to everyone or we can not call it art or revolutionary. Nothing is revolutionary if a it excludes the disabled community. Movie theatres and straight theatres are not accessible enough. It is entirely unfair that it shouldn't be required that a handicapped person sit in the handicapped seats. It's like how only a person with a handicapped sticker can park in a handicap parking space. Able bodied people need to understand that we have life incredibly easy from the stand point of being able to walk and move with ease even day. Most disabled people have chronic pain which stops them from being able to do as much as they might want to. As able bodied entertainers we need to think a lot about the type of creators we listen to. We go to a school with very few disabled people and that is because of ableism which is prevalent. Ableism is hard to identify in ourselves because it is so overwhelming in pop culture but getting rid of it can start with something as small as making entertainment more accessible. Disabled people deserve more than 10% of seats.
I read this and nothing, but pure anger builds up within me. I have many a friend who fall into the category of needing the handicapped seating. The issue here is that they allow others to reserve those seats hoping that they won't be required for others and also limiting the available space for tickets sold. The more significant problem with that is those seats should already be considered reserved for those who need them. Thus not allowing this issue to occur. We don't often encounter this issue in our theatres because we are attracting a much smaller audience and seldom have large numbers of handicapped people attending. However, when this does happen, I have only seen it resolved peacefully in the live entertainment industry. That is not to say it doesn't or hasn't happened but rather that when these issues that I have been a part of having happened that they are usually resolved because those reserved seats stay reserved until the last possible moment.
This kind of blatant disregard for people with disabilities is not only terrible by itself, but the fact that it is covered for under the thin veneer of company policy is awful. In a world that is working so hard for equality, even the most modern places often forget there are huge sections of the population who aren't necessarily able to physically do things most of us take for granted, like sitting in a movie theater chair or walking up stairs or being able to hear the film properly. I feel like in modern theater especially this is a huge issue, too - only ever rarely have I seen handicapped spots in traditional theaters. As a medium that prides itself on preaching inclusion and bringing light to under advocated causes, theater first and foremost has a huge responsibility to provide these seats and spaces and accommodations to help people with disabilities enjoy our art to the fullest without having to sacrifice anything because they don't have a seat despite buying a ticket.
This is so unfortunate. It is disheartening that someone has the chance ripped away from them to have access to the arts because of a disability. The fact that the theater put I very little almost microscopic level to comply with ADA and then not allow the people that those seats are made for use them it truly appalling. People don’t realize that tings marked handicapped are the only things there that are accessible to people with disabilities. It is easier for you to move than people with disabilities do be a decent human and jut move. It saddens me that the arts don’t do a better job at giving access to people with disabilities. I remember when the Deaf West Revival of Spring Awakening was on Broadway there was a lot of talk about the disabled Actress playing Ilse and how most physical theaters on Broadway didn’t have wheelchair access. I think this is something that also needs to be changed. All Broadway houses should be 100% wheelchair accessible so that the accessibility of the physical building isn’t the blockage of someone’s availability to the arts.
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