Children enjoying an Extant workshopIn the past the Greater London Fund for the Blind has funded a number of projects for performing arts charity, Extant.
For the last few years,Extant have performed at the London Liberty Festival and you can check out a review of their 2009 performance on their website.
Our lovely volunteer journalist, Louise recently asked Extant’s Artistic Director, Maria Oshodi, to explain a bit more about their work.
Tell us a little bit about Extant:
We’re the first professional performing arts company run by visually impaired people, which means we pay everybody who works for us, and for that we expect a certain standard of delivery. I’m visually impaired, we have a general manager who is not, but we have a board that is made up of 50 per cent visually impaired people.
From the very start, the whole company, even before we were registered, was formed by a group of visually impaired actors, who are still part of our membership and work with us from time to time. We’ve had a stage manager who was visually impaired and we’ve had sound designers and technicians who are visually impaired working with us.
On our last project we had a visually impaired visual artist and a disabled scenographer working on the set. The artist didn’t have the experience in set design so we put them together because we wanted the ideas to come from the visually impaired artist but to be executed by somebody who was experienced in set design.
What’s your background?
My background is in theatre and writing and arts management and [back in 1997] I was at a point in my career where I was looking to do something else. There were a lot of visually impaired actors that I knew of who all seemed to be saying the same thing – we don’t get enough work, whether from the mainstream or even from the disability arts field. We felt that visually impaired people weren’t really the first choice in the “pecking order”.
I think at that time (maybe that’s changing a bit now), blind people made their mark in music. In terms of performing arts, getting up on stage, there was a bit of a fear factor around working with visually impaired people. If they were cast, it was often more for their vocal ability and not for their physicality because there’s a lot of fear about movement.
Why did you start Extant?
I was picking up on the frustration about how people were unable to express themselves over a range of parts. I had a physical training, I did a drama degree. I’m not a performer – I’m interested in the making of theatre – but I knew from my own ability, being more or less totally blind, that I could do it, and that if I could do it anyone can.
I’d also just gone on tour with a company made up of half disabled actors and half non-disabled actors and it was a really horrible experience for me. I thought “my god, this is what people think of me, as a blind person. I’ve got to do something about it.” That’s why I set up the company.
In those days we were just exploring some very basic things, like bringing some interesting experimental theatre style to our experience of being visually impaired and seeing where there was a connect, where there was disconnect, what worked and what didn’t work for us. And it was great! We just played, really.
When did you decide to bring in young adults and children?
So initially we were working with the adult group. It took time to set up the company, to set up the grounding for actual projects and productions.
We toured a show in 2005 and we added lots of workshops, some of which were for visually impaired young people. It was really good fun and I brought some of the thinking behind the production, the physical theatre stuff, to some of the workshops and from there we thought we would try and offer that as part of the training for young people to try and help get them working.
One of things we felt was that the actors that we were working with, and still are working with to a certain extent, are the same people, so where’s the fresh talent?
So we thought we’d better make it our business to try to do something about it.
What are the difficulties of working with young visually impaired people?
There are specific difficulties working with young visually impaired people.
The demographic over the years has changed. I don’t quite know why, but there are much higher numbers of visually impaired young people who have other disabilities as well.
So what we’re trying to do is run a youth theatre, just like you’d find anywhere, which can be quite challenging environments.
What the tutors will set up for the young people to do can be quite challenging – it’s new to them and there’s an intelligence behind it. We’re trying to bring that to our visually impaired young people, but in a safe space.
Whereas in mainstream drama classes, they’re often very quiet, in ours they really blossom because they feel very safe. We just try to encourage all that but it can be quite difficult when you’re dealing with other sorts of disabilities, like learning disabilities as well, which is what we often come across. So it’s made us have to think about what our approach is, really.
What do young people expect when they first come to Extant?
At first a lot of the young people come to the sessions just wanting to repeat what they’ve seen on EastEnders. They didn’t seem to have any awareness of their audience, so we try to bring in quite theatrical styles that can incorporate live descriptions. You describe what you’re doing as you’re doing it, so there’s a sort of an access built in but they don’t have to destroy the drama, it just means that it’s not going to be your average naturalistic scene.
Thanks Maria - we’ll post the second part of the interview next week, when Maria talks about some of Extant’s recent work…
