PATHWAYS TO THE PROFESSION SYMPOSIUM 2012 TRANSCRIPT OF JENNY SEALEY’S PRESENTATION REMINDER: THIS TRANSCRIPT IS NOT VERBATIM Date: 19/01/12 Venue: West Park Conference Centre, Perth Road, Dundee Operator: Louisa McDaid I am very excited to be here today. Let us make this day, this conference a conference to end all conferences. [applause]. It is a most fantastic kick start to the Olympic and Paralympic year which promises the ceremonies, with the Cultural Olympiad, to profile deaf and disabled people in fields and platforms to as many of us that we have never seen before, this is the year it is all going to happen. We are not going away. We have to think about 2013 but more of that later. What I am going to go on about? I will try and not waffle. All I will speak about is some of my thoughts, my observations, questions for which I do not have answers for, but it is all based on me and being in and around this sector for the last 25 years. So, let's start with the universal declaration of human rights. Article 23 everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to work in favourable and just conditions and protection against unemployment. Article 26 U. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementarily and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory, technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
So, with that in mind, we all have the right to pursue the arts if that is where our passion, our motivation and our talent lie. So, artists, by very nature of the profession there are so many barriers but as disabled artists we have the right to embark on a journey free of prejudice and attitudinal barriers, we have the right to have choices and to be free to challenge others who may have thought about what we should be doing. My careers adviser suggested that I should be a librarian because libraries are quiet. I am still trying to figure that out, deaf people are so bloody noisy, we can't hear ourselves, we are noisy, anyway. [laughter]. I am on, I have been on and I am still on a massive journey and I suppose my journey for me started when I was 7 and my best friend in the whole world Raymond Macintosh, small glasses, we were messing around, he pushed me over, banged my head on a table and I am deaf. But you are 7, you don't question it really, you just get on with it, I started doing ballet classes, my mum immediately thought, I was going to give up ballet. The dance teacher said no; follow the person in front, always making sure that someone is in front of you. I followed the person in front. Then I trot across to the polytechnic to audition for the dance course, I had to have 5 other interviews because they were very concerned about my problem at being deaf was going to cause them a lot of problems. My problem, I am deaf. I need communication. But at no point did they ever offer any solutions of what they would support me and provide me. I wanted to do that course; I had to blag my way through. I will sort out my access and myself. I did. You know, for dance class I followed the person in front, for lectures, I well I stopped going. [laughter]. I spent a lot of time in the library making a lot of noise obviously. [laughter]. So, I did love it, but, oh, it was, anyway, I won't go into that.
I left college and like all of us when you leave, you feel completely, oh my god, what? There was certainly no one for me to follow then, no one there. If only I had known that Sarah Scott, the dancer, I didn't know who she was. There were no other deaf people. Oh my god, I never really met any deaf people. All my education main stream, my university was main stream. I need to be deaf. Massive thing for me. But as luck would have it, one of these youth opportunity schemes for people way, way, back. Arts activities for deaf and hearing people. Dance, yes. So, for ÂŁ20 a week, I would go and do this youth opportunity scheme thing and it was great fun and together we decided to set up our own dance company. This is where it all went a bit tits up [laughter]. There was myself as a deaf trained dancer, some other dancers, deaf dancers but not trained were in the training sort of. A group of hearing dancers and the main was hearing, the real stuff. I could do that but when she put her choreography on to them, they looked naff. They looked stupid. I thought this is disempowering, we don't want to look stupid, we want movement. We want to look good at what we do. This started to be the objective for me, I started to think, the way I assessed my own dancing skills, realised I was not as good as some of the nondisabled hearing dancers. Being deaf was not that interesting as you know, I didn't have my unique selling point, just jut my head a bit to try and hear the music but, I do not have that fantastic difference of gravitational difference like Caroline, like David Toole, I have , I have visibly large breasts [laughter]. Five minutes, got that in? [turning to interpreter] With boobs in mind and the fact that I was not a brilliant dancer, I quit. I had lots of acting stuff at college. It was so much easier because of the darling Miss Parker sitting, darling Miss Parker, paving the way for deaf actors, this small theatre companies had a commitment for equal opportunities for inclusion, for participation. I felt like I had come home. I felt safe with the theatre, the half-moons... what was it? Norwich TIE... in the back of a van, two deaf people together. Heaven. I still went to auditions, every time I went for an audition, they would go, um, your voice is not very good. We would be very worried about you getting your cues. And, might upset the audience is little bit.
More of that later, I gone way off, but never mind. Lots and lots of theatre companies say, oh well, children of a lesser God has already been done hasn't it? [laughter]. Anyway, going back, the dance world and the theatre world were and to a greater extent still are gated communities for which we don't have the key, we had to have our own platforms, Graeae, Candoco, Stop Gap, Blue Eye Soul, Birds of Paradise, Mind the Gap, Extant and Deafinitely Theatre. They are just a few. We all shared an absolute drive for the pursuit of equality, participation and excellence thank you very much. We knew we would have to be better than our nondisabled counterparts. Our work was viewed as therapy or worthy. Excellence is a white middle classed male nondisabled construct and some of those very same people govern the arts and have governed the arts and still do. There is little room for difference or indeed acknowledgment of difference and therefore the flourishing of disability arts organisations in the world will remain underground for a long time until we were working out our own role models for ourselves, criticising, supports, until we felt butch enough to get ourselves out there in the main stream world. You know, that that fight for acceptance in the wider world gives us artists such ambition and determination to succeed. So, the disability arts community grew and grew and grew. Our definition of excellence we were really, it is absolutely rooted in our uniqueness, our physical and sensory selves and how we engage with the world and how we challenged ourselves as artists. Does anybody go the theatre over Christmas? Ow blimey, that is a bit bleak. Anybody watch films on telly? So, name any deaf or disabled actors on television, on the stage, or in films over Christmas that you have seen? NEW SPEAKER: Warick Davies. ANDREW DIXON: Mat Fraser NEW SPEAKER: Peter, in elf.
JENNY: 4 people, bloody rubbish isn't it, that is a sad state of affairs. So where are we? I started, I started as artistic director 15 years ago, I love my job but more about that later, I love it but one of my first jobs was set up a training course with 8 Graeae students and 8 RADA students, we did The Tempest. The RADA students would do the acting and the movement and I would do the Direction. It was a fantastic experience and a real learning curve because one Nicholas Barter, really understood that RADA were not quite ready to embrace inclusive auditions or teaching they just weren't quite ready. They wanted to be but needed more time to get the heads around it but also my actors desperately needed some deaf disabled, so they could be the people they were rather than, I cannot say the word, enigma. We don't want people to say, ‘oh God isn't sign language beautiful’, ‘I didn't know a blind person can do that’. We want to get on and be the best we can be, a training course, The Missing Piece, and we had guest directors, we had different tutors from various different drama schools. We ran the course over 5 years and it became an accredited course with London Metropolitan University. At the same time, the main thing that the actors learned was to be good actors. The second thing to be absolutely confident. To be confident about their access requirements and be confident about how to explain how they access rehearsals because that dismantles the sense of how do I deal with this person. They went to the audition knowing who they were and how they wanted to do it. We worked with the drama schools because they have the DADA awards trying to embrace a real diversity of disability and class. To give opportunities. In 2004 at one of the DADA things the head of a well known London based ballet school, said, Oh but! we can't have black dancers in the ballet because they have big bottoms and the tutus will stick up! They have huge feet. You could have heard a pin drop. I said what about wheelchair users? I thought she would keel over. If you think about it, the ballet world was fiercely white, about sameness. Can we have some music? [ music ] Okay! Right. So we have Swan Lake. Turn to the person next to you and have a chat about ... talk about which part of the body you want to move. The shoulders etc. Which part of the body are you going to move?
Okay! When the music starts, be a ballerina. In your own Swan Lake. Can we have the music? Sorry! I will have to do mine with the mic. I love it! thank you. [applause] See how easy it is! You can turn the music off now. Its not always about slotting us into the old but reinventing the old and giving it a new spin. I think one of the things that was difficult for dance schools is the rigidity around assessment. The I have had so many arguments with drama teachers - I am looking at Maggie over there! The state of neutral is about your personal alignment, the breath flowing in and around your body, looking inwards into your mind's eye. Neutral is about having two feet flat on the floor, body fairly straight. What? No, it's not. It's your own personal definition of neutral. That is one argument. The other is around voice versus British Sign Language. The voice is the tool to communicate but hands are a tool to communicate. To sign and move your hands you must breathe, understand text, your character, your hands become the character. Changing the voice to sign. But some of the training can be the same especially in terms of breathing. "Oh no we are not having that. " Its such bureaucracy stopping the teachers who want to do it. The bosses are putting the fear of God into the teachers because they must train the actors for the profession. They say there are not enough disabled characters in plays - its staggering. The inability to not think imaginatively around casting. We are sons and daughters, parents and actors. We are many things, not just defined by being a wheelchair user. My heroine is Marley Matlin. She is shit hot! A hot lawyer. And Mat in Metrosexual, a heroine dealer in that. No reference made to his physicality . This baffles me. Does our impairment have to be scripted? This is a review on a play on blindness - there is a deaf actor, a blind actress and a chap with little in the way of arms. No-one mentions the fact the portrait painter has truncated arms. This is odd considering his occupation. It reveals more about the prejudice of the reviewer than the play. Has he not heard of the artists who are foot painters. We are criticised if we don't mention disability and criticised if we do. A review by Kate O'Reilly for the Independent. It is presented by Graeae whose performers are all disabled, some with tiny limbs and another who is
deaf. “As a critic for the general audience I was not engaged. It's not a play but a vehicle for presenting the feelings of handicapped people”. We wrote back, not to salivate because it was a bad review. She didn't like the play. You take it. Our point was, why? Why was it important to mention that one of the actors had a torso the same side as her head? It's not only incorrect but offensive. This is a national newspaper. What was interesting, the letter, it evoked a response from the black artists community. People say, not again! But if they don't do a play around black issues they are told they should! Never stop being political about putting controversial issues into the public domain. You can be just as political with an all black cast doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There is the need to combat prejudice and fight for the right to be trained. Its only 20 years since black people were allowed into drama schools. We are still lagging behind. The play, Mogadishu, had great reviews. A brilliant play. I went to see Robert Softley's play Girl X at Dundee Rep - it was provocative and in your face and devastating and challenging and the reviews were good. One guy said, worthy. Yes. Worthy? Can we banish that word from the dictionary today? It's gone from now. The NTS have done so much work embracing deaf and disabled artists. Vicky Fetherstone was on the board and she gets it. The same is true with the National Theatre of Wales. Our national in England have a disabled person once every 10 years. In 2008 only then did they have the first original play written by a woman. You would never black up? A conflab with the person next to you. Films about disabled characters played by non disabled actors. Have a chat. JENNY SEALEY: Ok, let's bash out a few. Let's have a few and rain man. NEW SPEAKER: Anything that that Dustin Hoffman has done. NEW SPEAKER: My left foot. NEW SPEAKER: Inside I’m dancing JENNY SEALEY: Loads of good ones, so, somehow this, I don't know the answer to this, a fab play really well written, the character in this place, a wheelchair user, ends the play, the casts come forward. The actors, take their bow, the
audience. Then the actor who is in the wheelchair stands up. Oh, even bigger applause, fantastic. Same scenario, all forward, oh no, he is not going to stand up. Oh he really is? Oh. Why? , why? Is it fear, really we need to address this absolutely openly, belovingly and hardly in these 2 days. What is this fear? Is it the fear that oh my God maybe one day I might become a wheelchair user, I might be, you know when you are watching a black actress, your skin colour won't change, what is it? I am asking the question, I don't know, I don't get it. I do understand that acting is about somebody else, Daniel day Lewis, did they audition any disabled actors? So you know, we can and should be paying a multitude of characters, am I the only person that thinks Hugh grant is Hugh grant in everything he does? So, to cut a long story short we want, you need to hear this we want the roles of our disabled characters and we also want to be considered for roles where disability is not necessarily the part of the narrative, yes we want it all. We have had bugger all in the past, we want it all now. So firstly, those of you who are directors out there, casting, it is so much fun. I love it. Acting is about understanding and interpreting text, the ability to play someone else, with emotional integrity and to graft the complexity of the rhythm of the page and the energy of the play and the interaction. People say to me, Jenny, how do you audition you know, your actors? I let you into a massive secret. It is really complicated. I put an add out, usually on the web. Make sure it is accessible, all the rest of it. A workshop audition, script formatted appropriately. If they are good, they get the job, if they are crap, they don't. Is that not how you audition people as well? So, so I work with actors who really get under the skin and Mr David Toole, he has played, I can't remember the name of the character , in The Fall of the House of Usher? NEW SPEAKER: Neither can I. JENNY SEALEY: He played the soldier in blasted.
Three very, very different characters. But it is just one David Toole, dam side better than Hugh grant. He paid me to say that. So the visibility of ours changes the perception. What I want to do is I want to get Ali Briggs on stage and Kevin Lennon, who is somewhere. We might be doing a co-production with Dundee Rep and we want to start looking at Blood Wedding. Oh my god, this is not for disabled people but we are going to do it anyway. Do we have the script? Can I play around with the actors I have and the physicality or the communication stuff? Can I play around with that and just completely bugger it all up, made it accessible to a really wide disabled audience. Shakespeare gets done differently all the time. All my actors are different. I will give you a glimpse, I don't really know what they are doing, neither do I. Watch. Don't take notes you won't learn nothing, but let's do it anyway. Ali get up here, this is the scene. Is this is a scene between mother and son. Mother is absolutely beside herself because her son is getting married, got one son, lost her husband, be isolated when her son goes. So would you like, we are going to read this, just, using voice Ali. Ok. For the sake of argument. Jude is going to be on interpreter on the side. That is how I watch a lot of my theatre, the interpreter on the side and the actors over here. Come over a little bit. Kevin: Mother? ! [loud] Ali: Yes. What is it?
Take something to eat. Kevin: Leave it mother, I will eat grapes, give me the knife. To cut the grapes. Ali: The knife? Dam the knife, dam the devil who created the knife. And the guns and the pistols, even the tiny knife, pitch forks. Anything that compares and cuts a man’s body, a glorious man, an angel. ... like a flower, goes out... to care for them. They are passed down from his father. Kevin: Mother that is enough. Ali: And he never comes back. JENNY SEALEY: Ok. How lucky am I? . Deaf, has a voice, has sign language, rich, Ali, can you do mum now just signing? Ali will sign her life as the mother, Kevin will speak his lines, suddenly not accessible, not accessible to people who won't see, or don't understand sign language. Sometimes life is about getting only half of the story. But let's give that a whirl, then I got a third. Kevin: Mother? Mother! [stamps] I am away now. The vineyard. What is it? Leave it mother, I will eat grapes, give me the knife. Cut the grapes?
Enough with that mother. Yes, yes. JENNY SEALEY: Ok, so the thing that Ali is signing about the guns and the pistols and the knife it is really important. But that is in a context, you only hear Kevin, the monosyllabic answers, so we lose it. So this time Ali, can you sign the mother again. Kevin just yeah, yeah, you have heard it about a million times before, it is her mantra, banging on about the same thing, make that your character. So a different version all over again. Take 3. Kevin: Mother! [stamping] I am away now, I am going to the vineyard, no, I won't wait a minute. What is the matter? Leave it, I will eat grapes, give me the knife. Yes, the knife, I know, you hate knifes, yes, dam the devil who creates the knives, enough of that, yes, guns, pistols, I know about this, you are always talking about it! [applause] JENNY SEALEY: So, we have the father of the bride, the mother and the son are visiting father of the bride and we have two maids, one maid who is speaking and one who signs. We have a mother who is still signing. We don't have to do any of this you know. We don't have to do any of this, but this is what I love doing in my rehearsal, love it. Sometimes it doesn't make any sense but always, always driven from the sometimes by placing these other elements; you start to escalate the script more densely than if you jump into it normally. So, we have got Dad who is a wheelchair user, we may or may not reference that. Mum is signing. Son voice over for his mum in this formal occasion? I don't know. Up to you.
Annie (maid): Please come in. Will you have a seat? They will be with you in a minute. David: How long did it take to get here? [shrugs] Kevin: Four hours. Annie: Must have come the long way round. [signing], Kevin: My mother says that, she is too old for all that scrabbling up and down the river, it makes her sick. JENNY SEALEY: Ok, I will stop here. There is some horrible subjects going on here. Really horrible. Because son, from the son is really important but he maintains a good relationship with dad. The mother sat in between the dad and her son looks so vulnerable. She is having to look to the maid for the communication. Suddenly her status is diminished and the son is saying, my mother said this and my mother said that. Or, we could change all of that on the head and speak we have Jude is still signing, in my own plays always but this suddenly, this weird thing of everybody looking and thinking, what is going on here? What is going on? That is so much about what blood wedding is about. It is about what is said but what is not said and we are reinventing a whole other new sub text. Yes they are talking about this, does this service the play? Does it serve the text? Maybe not, but it is a valuable process to start to think really get to the deep, deep heart of the gut of those characters. Robert you can come up this ramp. You can rest now. Thank you. Right, where is Emily? We have got Ali and Jude. So, we have our Leonardo, gorgeous, strong, handsome, all man!
So, Robert is my Leonardo, the bride is beautiful and we have our Emily. We have Annie and Jude and dual maids. Let's run a little bit of this theme, there is different questions which we will pose after. Ok. Annie: You, yes. Robert: Yes me, good morning. Annie: You are the first. Robert: Of course. Here I am. Annie: And your wife. Robert: I came on horseback. She is coming the long way around. Annie: Did you meet anyone else? You are going to kill that horse. Take a seat, nobody is up yet. Robert: The bride? Annie: I am going into dress her now. Robert: I expect she is very happy? Annie: And the baby? Robert: Baby? Annie: Your son. JENNY SEALEY: Ok, they were talking about; some people will need time to tune into Robert's pattern. Earlier in the play we would have had the opportunity. We are looking at the character of Leonardo, when he meets a maid it is like; she is so not interested in her. Doesn't need to ask anything from her, she is the maid. The maid's job is to protect the bride. So yes, so I want them to do the same thing again but I don't want them to be listening to each other, they are talking over each other, a nightmare, it will be a
nightmare for people to hear but it is about the energy of Leonardo’s, get in that space, straight past the maid to talk to the bride. So let's see what that is like. You, yes, me. You are the first. Of course you are invited. Here I am. Where is your wife? Go and get [talking over] You are going to kill the house. Take a seat, nobody is up yet. I am going into dress her now. And the baby. The baby? Your son. Will he be coming? JENNY SEALEY: Suddenly Robert as the character starts to really flash out. That is, as an episode it works, to think about the character and how it drives forward. Let's meet Leonardo and the bride. Move on a little bit. This is an intimate moment but maid is still around. She is not letting him off the hook. Let's see what happens. Bring some of Robert's words back at him. Don't come out like that half-dressed. Why have you come? To the wedding. As I watched yours?
You... You tied him up with both his hands. But they can't split on me, not with their silver. I never forced you. I don't I am a man of honour. [mimicking], I am a man of honour. Mine would be louder. Stop this, don't rake up the past. JENNY SEALEY: Different again, so if the maid is not voicing over for Robert, his voice is his voice, but you can play around with that, the maid is like, man of honour! She forced you, she is commenting and you start to get really under the skin of the maid! If you, you all know Robert has a different voice pattern you do have to look and engage to get your ears around it. How sexy is that? Look. I am in heaven, that is what my rehearsal is like, I have a thrill everyday. I would like to say thank you to my actors [applause] It is just a glimpse of the world I have and how bloody lucky I am. Sometimes I can be a selfish pig, I don't want anyone else to be doing it. I love it for me, but actually no. Come on, theatre is about interpreting, it is about being different, it is about being. It is about really challenging the fore and it is about being accessible. Missing out on a whole diversity of audience by not engaging with the things I am able to engage with. So, come with massive open arms and start playing with it. You will be amazed at the process, you really will be. This conference I have already said we have to unpick all of this; it has to be the final one. We have to be brutally honest with each other. If someone said, what is the point of working with disabled artists, that play is not for disabled people? Shakespeare didn't say Juliette was a wheelchair user, what if she is? Stop making everything a problem and on a final note, come and see Graeae's
production, shamelessly plugging this Febraury of Reasons to be Cheerful. It is really is a reason to be cheerful. Disabled and nondisabled cast and band. So much fun. Jude next to me, she plays Debbie who does the dancing, she dances, sings, the whole lot. She could do a one woman show. But it is going to be on at the Rep. We have to make theatre for everybody, that is what it is, it is for people. We are people. So, March 20th to 24th March, see you all there, have a fantastic conference and thank you for listening to me burble.