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Oily Cart's Space to Be: Exploring the Carer's Role in Sensory Theatre for Neurodiverse Audiences during COVID-19

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2021

Alison M. Mahoney
Alison M. Mahoney*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
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Extract

Because sensory theatre productions are designed with neurodiverse audiences in mind, practitioners are first and foremost concerned with accessibility at all levels for their audience members, incorporating multiple senses throughout a performance to allow a variety of entry points for audiences that may have wildly divergent—and often competing—access needs. One-to-one interaction between performers and audience members results in highly flexible performances that respond to physical and auditory input from individual audience members, through which performers curate customized multisensory experiences that communicate the production's theatrical world to its audience. Given this reliance on close-up interaction, the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic have posed a particular challenge for sensory theatre makers. In in-person sensory theatre, performers focus on neurodivergent audience members, with parents and paid carers often taking a (literal) back seat, but remotely delivered sensory theatre during COVID-19 hinges on the carer's facilitation of sensory engagement curated by sensory theatre practitioners. Oily Cart, a pioneering London-based sensory theatre company, responded to COVID-19 restrictions with a season of work presented in various formats in audiences’ homes, and their production Space to Be marked a shift in the company's audience engagement to include an emphasis on the carer's experience.1 Using this production as a case study, I argue that the pivotal role adopted by carers during the pandemic has the potential to shape future in-person productions, moving practitioners toward a more holistic, neurodiverse audience experience that challenges a disabled–nondisabled binary by embracing carers’ experiences alongside those of neurodivergent audience members.2

Type
Special Section: Notes from the Field: Remembering Times of Crisis
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 340 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors, 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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References

Endnotes

1 Many neurodivergent children and adults require assistance from carers, both familial and professional, in performing tasks such as eating, ambulating, taking medicine, and decision making. I consider caregiving through a lens of interdependence informed by the disability justice movement, as discussed in Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018)Google Scholar, and Invalid, Sins, Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People—A Disability Justice Primer, 2d ed. (Berkeley: Sins Invalid, 2019)Google Scholar.

2 In highlighting carers, I do not intend to eclipse the presence of the disabled people for whom they care, as is often the case in discourse about caretaking. Instead, I emphasize the consideration of carers’ access needs alongside the needs of neurodivergent audience members as an integral part of the neurodiversity of sensory theatre audiences.

3 Gillian Brigg, “Theatre for Audiences Labelled as Having Profound, Multiple and Complex Learning Disabilities: Assessing and Addressing Access to Performance” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nottingham, 2013); Webb, Tim, “My Life in Cart: Writing and Directing for Oily Cart,” in Oily Cart: All Sorts of Theatre for All Sorts of Kids, ed. Brown, Mark (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK: Trentham Books, 2012), 17–25Google Scholar.

4 Grace, Joanna, Sensory-Being for Sensory Beings: Creating Entrancing Sensory Experiences (London: Routledge, 2018), 8–10Google Scholar.

5 Claire de Loon, “The Art of the Cart: Designing Oily Shows,” in Oily Cart, ed. Brown, 27–32; Webb, “My Life in Cart.”

6 Oily Cart, “Being Alongside . . . ,” https://oilycart.org.uk/resources/being-alongside/, accessed 10 April 2021.

7 Interview with Ellie Griffiths, 18 June 2020.

8 Oily Cart, “Space to Be Trailer” (London: Oily Cart, 2021), youtu.be/1kOM8GUGjiA, accessed 10 April 2021.

9 For accounts of pre-COVID discussions about the carer's role in sensory theatre, see Tim Webb, “The History of Oily Cart,” in Oily Cart, ed. Brown, 3–10; Annie Fergusson, “Raising the Bar through Inclusive Theatre: An Evaluation of The Isle of Brimsker by Frozen Light” (September 2019), www.frozenlighttheatre.com/s/Evaluation-Report-Frozen-Light-c3w6.pdf, accessed 7 May 2021.

10 Jill Goodwin, “Dr. Jill Goodwin: From ‘Doing’ to ‘Being,’” Oily Cart, 2020, www.oilycart.org.uk/resources/dr-jill-goodwin-from-doing-to-being/, accessed 10 April 2021.

11 Grace, 13–17.

12 Interview with Ellie Griffiths, 18 June 2020.

13 For reporting on the UK government's and National Health Service's (mis)handling of the pandemic with relation to disability, see Human Rights Watch, “UK: COVID-19 Law Puts Rights of People with Disabilities at Risk,” Human Rights Watch (blog), 26 March 2020, www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/26/uk-covid-19-law-puts-rights-people-disabilities-risk, accessed 12 September 2020; David D. Kirkpatrick and Benjamin Mueller, “U.K. Backs Off Medical Rationing Plan as Coronavirus Rages,” New York Times, 3 April 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/world/europe/britain-coronavirus-triage.html, accessed 12 September 2020; Rebecca Thomas, “‘Unprecedented’ Number of DNR Orders for Learning Disabilities Patients,” Health Service Journal, 24 April 2020, www.hsj.co.uk/coronavirus/unprecedented-number-of-dnr-orders-for-learning-disabilities-patients/7027480.article, accessed 24 September 2021.

14 Griffiths, quoted in Lyn Gardner, “‘Children's Theatre Doesn't Have a Voice in the Wider Sector,’” The Stage (blog), 29 June 2020, www.thestage.co.uk/features/features/childrens-theatre-doesnt-have-a-voice-in-the-wider-sector?fbclid=IwAR0DXjaaDgFi7ejUeepvmwv-kQ49BDyqJNARe2KLqnqi3BaXXGo1em8ErX8, accessed 13 July 2020.