Jenny Sealey: making access sexy

To mark the company’s 30th anniversary Graeae Theatre’s Artistic Director, Jenny Sealey tells Disability Now about her role, her enthusiasm and why she has reasons to be cheerful

People come here disempowered and disenfranchised but still fighting against barriers. I love that fire and grit. In Greek myth The Graeae were three sisters who shared an eye and a tooth. It suits us politically and emotionally: the culture of disabled people sharing resources and fighting back.

Thirty years since Nabil Shaban and Richard Tomlinson founded Graeae, their reasons are still there. It’s a space where we can explore identities and stories, profile our skills and excellence, and it’s a learning ground.

There still isn’t equal access to drama schools, it’s getting better and we have an ever-evolving teachers’ manual supporting drama schools to be inclusive, but Graeae is often the first place actors have their access needs sorted.

Disabled people auditioning have giant £ signs over our heads. Access does come at a cost but this is 2010 and it’s our basic human right. We give actors’ confidence to say “I have access requirements and we can get these paid for by Access to Work (ATW)”.

I’m just back from a conference in Australia. It was weird talking about the freedom ATW gives me to do my job because they don’t have it. An Australian opera singer lost her sight and was told she couldn’t perform because she might fall off the stage. Unbelievable!

Graeae nurtures people to go out into the wider world carrying the mantle. Maybe one day there’ll be so much opportunity we won’t need a Graeae. We’re a long way behind the Black theatre movement but we’re getting there. Now Coronation Street might have two disabled characters. Why not?

Acting is about being somebody else so maybe Daniel Day Lewis as Christy Brown was bloody good, but did they give a disabled actor the opportunity to audition? If you aren’t casting a disabled Richard III then have disabled actors in other roles in the play. Directors need to be more imaginative.

We’re making access a sexy word! Exploring the aesthetics of access, we’re in a position to find things out creatively. How does an actor with a differing voice pattern play a snooty aristocrat in a Restoration comedy? Maybe he’s too posh to speak so delegates the talking to his servant.

We layer the work: words, music, visuals tell the story. It’s multi-sensory. There are so many ways to communicate and collaborate. I used drawings and eye contact to design a whole show with a French designer whose English I couldn’t lip read.

We’ve used stage directions as audio description in The Fall of the House of Usher and Blasted.

And we want writers to think about access from the start. Young blind people told us they didn’t want to wear headsets so in The Diary of an Action Man the protagonist describes his adventure through his diary.

We’re still battling with education models. When they say integration, I think on whose terms? Learning, I find easier in a disabled or deaf environment. There’s the safety to make mistakes, plus I don’t have anything to prove. I’d have benefitted from being educated with other deaf people but I wouldn’t be the person I am now.

I have huge gaps in my education but I make what I do know stretch.

I have a recurring nightmare that my colleagues find me on the phone, say “You can hear!” and I lose my job. I went deaf when I was seven so it absolutely defines who I am but I’m still learning how to be deaf. Learning BSL felt like coming home. We have to make sure that young disabled people get the chance to be the disabled people they want to be and 2012 is a huge opportunity. Art challenges ideas of what disabled people can do and so does Paralympic sport.

Unlimited [the Cultural Olympiad programme] will be a beautiful programme of work and a stamping ground for new and emerging artists. We have to leave an extraordinary legacy because we don’t want the younger generation still scraping at glass ceilings. 2012 is the time to smash them and it’s only two years away.

Our first Unlimited funded work is Garden, a sway pole piece at the Greenwich festival this June and in September look out for Reasons to be Cheerful, a musical based on the songs of our late patron Ian Dury, and we’re fundraising for a disabled writers’ group.

It’s my ambition to create something 100 per cent accessible. It’s never going to happen but by God am I going to try! That’s the artistic ambition of Graeae. Never ever can we sit on our laurels. There’s always a new way of doing something. There’s so much to learn, so much to do, I want to do it all.