The Trouble with Access

The back of a woman on the left hand-side corner of the photo; she looks towards the centre of the photo, where six people stand in pairs and create a triangle in the space. Another person in the background is on a small stage, pushing a theatre chair.

Early in September we held an extraordinary week-long creative laboratory exploring fresh ways of layering access modes into theatre-making.

We worked with award-winning playwright and radical theatre artist Lachlan Philpot, CEO of Playwright Australia, and widely published academic and award-winning Director, Alyson Campbell, to explore the artistic possibilities of Philpott’s narrative voice as part of an access aesthetic.

The goal was to examine creative tools at the core of theatre-making to ensure audiences with sensory impairments enjoy a richer and more informed theatre experience. We invited an extraordinary, creative team of D/deaf and disabled artists to work with us on developing an inclusive creative process for new work.

We made so many discoveries, so many ideas and learning emerged from that week’s laboratory, which will feed our on-going theatre-making processes and lead to our next dream production for 2019 – 2020.

A big ‘thank you’ to participants / contributors (in no particular order): Amelia Cavallo, Crin Claxton, Karina Jones, Louise Fryer, Stephen Collins, Stephen Rudder, Sula Gleeson and Tricia Hitchcock