# Blog post 16 Cripping Breath at DARCI: The Conference on Disability, Accessibility and Representation in the Creative Industries

• This blog is about the Arts Stream of Cripping Breath presenting their ideas at a conference.
• The conference is called DARCI, which stands for Disability, Accessibility and Representation in the Creative Industries. People from the creative industries as well as academics attended and presented their work.
• Here, we share part of the talk we gave at the conference. In the talk, we discuss different approaches to access. We give examples of access that go beyond access checklists, including performers using ventilation onstage. 
   

Between 10th and 12th September, Grace and Louise, from the Arts Stream of Cripping Breath, attended DARCI at the University of York. Kirsty and Jamie attended online (and presented on their own, different projects; we were well-represented at the conference!). We contributed a paper about our work on Cripping Breath, which included some early ideas about how the project and our methods might shift approaches to access in the arts. 

Below, we share an excerpt from our paper, ‘Access expansively conceived: Mechanical ventilation and scenographic access in Cripping Breath’. 

This paper is part of an iterative co-authoring process between members of the Arts Stream of Cripping Breath. In this paper, we’re wondering about including a performer’s life-sustaining technologies – namely, breathing support – in the aesthetics of performance. Our central question is: How might the methods, structures, and materials of access – captions, audio description, and sign language interpretation – intersect with medical technologies? We’re thinking about access in visual art and live performance as tied to representations and lived experiences of disability. And, we propose extending access – conventionally understood as supplementing the communicational apparatus of the theatre and sensorial experience in the gallery – towards encompassing a network of human and nonhuman support and a range of technologies.

By bringing scholarship from theatre and performance and visual art into dialogue with critical disability studies, we suggest that centring disabled experience might introduce other aesthetic components – ventilators, for instance – into a ‘web model’ of access, as Carrie Sandahl described it in her 2002 essay, ‘Considering Disability: Disability Phenomenology's Role in Revolutionizing Theatrical Space’. Our secondary suggestion is that incorporating other aesthetic elements into discussions about access will enrich access practices more generally. 

We include multiple human and technological actors in our analysis of access; we theorise the aesthetic representation of support workers and medical technologies alongside access ‘tools’ such as audio description and captions. Together, we wonder what the perception – the seeing, hearing, and touching – of these ‘body extensions’ (as Rebecca Horn, an artist who lived with respiratory illness, called them) and complex assemblages might do, onstage and in the gallery. 

Very soon, the Arts Stream of Cripping Breath will be joined by six further collaborators, all with lived experience of ventilation. Together, we will create a new theatre performance (at the Barbican Centre in London) and contemporary art for exhibition (at The Art House, Wakefield). Since this panel’s theme is accessibility in live performances, I’ll draw particularly on our theatre strand here – though it’s worth noting that these ideas run through our explorations in contemporary art, too.

There is some precedence in theatre and performance studies for theorising the aestheticisation of access workers and the technological aspects of access. I’ll offer three brief, hopefully illustrative examples: 

1. The first is to do with the presence of the access worker onstage. Both James Thompson and Dave Calvert have written about the staging of relationality, care, and access work (2020), and Becky Gold and Alex Bulmer have described the role of the creative enabler who: 

may also have an active or artistic role within the creative work, contributing to the access aesthetics of the piece. For example, the creative enabler may in some instances be asked to take on a role as a character within the play’s story – bringing the role of support within the structure of the piece to the fore. (2022)

As a side note – and perhaps a teaser for a paper yet to come! – this takes place in Jamie’s solo show, NOT DYING (2020-ongoing). In these scenarios, the support worker may sometimes fulfill a communicational role – supporting, prompting, or conveying performers’ speech – or may facilitate performance in other ways. In any case, the appearance of the support worker onstage moves us beyond a purely linguistic or translational notion of access. 

2. My second example is Captioning on Captioning (2020), a short film by Louise Hickman and Finnegan Shannon, in collaboration with real-time writer Jennifer. The film shows Shannon and Hickman over Zoom, being ‘presented with an insight into the machination of Jennifer’s work, including dictionary building, transcription errors, and speech-to-text latency’. They write:

In the process of editing the film, we questioned the impulse to edit out phonetic mishaps or tidy up the dialogue between the collaborators as a testament to the growing demands of real-time work. And those demands replicate the ideal of the automation of text (i.e., mechanical labour) that is shaped by a complete and objective view of translation work. (‘Captioning on Captioning’, n.d.)

There’s lots to say about the film, but for now I just want to draw attention to the staging of labour and interdependency between technology (in this case, stenographic software) and support workers (here, the real-time captioner, Jennifer). The subject of the film is access – captioning – and the human/nonhuman interaction which produces that access is articulated by little captioning failures. This not only underscores the relationality and situatedness of captioning as an access tool, and therefore how interesting it is in and of itself (!), but also, reflexively, the ways that access is more than additional communication, or straightforward translation. 

3. The third example is, at this stage, planned but speculative: the performers with whom we will collaborate on our sustained theatre-making process will (in summer 2027) perform while using mechanical ventilation. Thinking about this in terms of access – as access – might seem initially a bit strange. For some of the performers at least, using ventilation isn’t an extractable activity; it’s not (necessarily) something they can do without, and it doesn’t provide access to something else. However, this way of structuring access – as something that isn’t an additional layer, and instead as something which changes the work, rather than just communicating it to a different audience – is productive for critical access studies. 

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In the full version of the paper, we go on to discuss the fact that theatre institutions (and institutions more generally) tend to subscribe to ‘checklist’ approaches to access: approaches which begin and end with (legal) frameworks. We suggest that representations of health (and illness) might be a way to exceed and decategorise access as it’s often understood by mainstream theatre. 

Via an expanded, transformative approach, we argue that access can continue to evolve – not towards conclusive correctness or accommodation, but as an ongoing and relational practice. We argue that disability-led practice resists closure and resolution and, rather than accommodating disability (via access), produces an aesthetic which depends upon it.