VX Labs: Children and Young People – Artists’ Interviews
Children and Young People was a four-day long Lab, part of our VX Labs programme, that examined methods for making disabled-led work for children. The Lab was delivered in partnership with and hosted by Z-Arts.
After a workshare at the end of the Lab, Ciaran Stewart, Monique Jarrett and Ada Evarama, three of the artists involved in the process, sat down with us to discuss the process.
1. When you were invited to join this laboratory, what was the first question that you wanted to explore?
Ciaran: When I was approached for this project, one of my biggest questions was: What do the young people want from the process? What do they want from the show that we’re all creating together?
This week, we’ve been calling the young people we’re working with the ‘creative consultants’, which is a quite interesting thing that I’ve never experienced before. I grew up going to theatre and I know how special theatre can be. It’s so exciting to see the young people come up with ideas and then us, as professionals, create something out of scratch to show to them, and hopefully it worked well for them.
Monique: My first question was: how is this going to happen in such a short space of time? Also, I knew names of some people in the Lab, and I wanted to know how we’d work together, and hoped I’d do a good enough job!
Ada: As Monique says, I knew it was a brilliant team. So I asked, how do we combine everyone’s brilliance in the space? And when I first saw the comic strips, the resource and actually knew what we were working with, I was even more thinking: how are we going to make this funny and accessible?
2. What is your big take away from the week?
Ciaran: The importance of theatre and why we create theatre and why we do the show. It’s easy as actors to imagine we just want to be on stage all the time, but what I love is the process of getting to the stage. Today has reminded me to just have fun with rehearsals, have fun with creativity: especially the process hearing from the young people, the creative consultants, what they want. It’s really inspiring to play with their ideas and figure out how we’re going to make it happen.
Monique: In one word: Integrated. Integrated, with the creativity of access within it from day one. I don’t know if the kids even know, notice or realise that there is also creative access within the show. I think it was just like a great show, which is what I would want theatre to be anyway.
Ada: We all came in as individuals with different areas that we have a lot of experience in, brought together in this soup of this week, creating something. The process let hone their profession and do their job. We fed into it and listened to it and invited every voice to collaborate. We took and we added, added to the soup.
3. What would be the one thing you would like to change about how children’s theatre is being made or presented?
Ciaran: Just seeing more deaf and disabled talent on stage for children and young people to see and normalise. It’s so important to normalise seeing someone with a wheelchair or seeing someone who’s deaf have an interpreter in the space. For example, today, a young person was sitting next to Jude [a participant that uses BSL] and gesturing to demonstrate using binoculars, and this was a natural, instinctive acknowledgement that there’s sign in the space – and that is really important, because at the end of the day, they are just young people who want to learn and who just enjoy seeing the talent on the stage. Ultimately, that is what I would love to see in the future of children, because the more we do of this, the more that we are raising young, empathetic people who can be the leaders of this country.
Monique: A company doesn’t usually go in and ask kids ‘how would you like the show to be and then create it?’ The kids are why it was so successful. You can’t have a bunch of adults prescribing this is what kids want – you need to ask the audience you’re catering to. They have ownership and they know what they want.
Ada: If you’re making children’s theatre, especially for children with disabilities or with access needs, it also needs to be made with artists and collaborators with disabilities and with access needs to build into that. It was only able to be as accessible as it was because all these brilliant people were brought in.
4. What would be your top tip to anyone who is interested in creating an accessible children’s theatre show?
Ciaran: Well, number one: hire deaf and disabled talent, and with the right pay. And not just on stage, but also behind the scenes as well. They’re the experts, they’re the ones with lived experiences and therefore they’re the ones who can educate. Secondly: Just go for it, just do it.
Thirdly, go and see lots of accessible theatre. Access doesn’t have to be just about ‘how do we create that’s something that’s accessible for d/Deaf people?’ or ‘how do we make it accessible for visually impaired people?’ Yes, those are important questions and yes, we need to do that, but at the same time, access is for all. I think we need to change the language of access being for everyone. For example – today [at the workshare]- if the young person is looking at the captions, they’re actually learning from the captions, they’re making links between the written language, the spoken and the BSL. It’s as simple as that.
Monique: Very first and foremost – never assume what your audience wants. Always involve the audience and obviously make it inclusive, so involve disabled artists as well.
There wasn’t a situation of kids labelling the show ‘disabled’. It wasn’t mentioned that in the original the lead character in the story we worked on wasn’t a wheelchair user, but in the extract we developed and presented today [at the workshare] he was. They just took in the show.
Ciaran Stewart is an actor, BSL consultant and captioning consultant.
Monique Jarrett (left) is a performer. Ada Eravama (right) is an audio description and access consultant.
VX Labs is a cutting-edge three-year research programme by Vital Xposure, supported through Arts Council England, the programme is delivered in partnership with the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama as well as regional theatres.
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