On December 1st, Opera Mariposa brought together a panel of artists and advocates to discuss accessibility in opera during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. Opera Mariposa is Canada’s first – and so far, only – opera company that’s entirely (and openly) disability-led and run. With a focus on centering D/deaf and disabled perspectives, the event provided a platform for those with first-hand experiences of both disability and working in the opera industry to share their perspectives. This is the first of two posts I’ll be writing about the event. In part one, I’ll be summarising some of the panelists’ strategies for inclusion and accessibility in the industry.

The panel

• Robin Hahn (moderator)

• Ava Hawkins (ASL Interpreter)

• Stephanie Ko

• Ophira Calof

• Landon Krentz

• Karen Lee-Morlang

• Guest Panelist

• Christie A. Pollock

Learn about the panelists on the Opera Mariposa website. 

The discussion kicked-off with some pertinent remarks on the importance of inclusion in the opera industry. These discussions are timely. While one in five people in Canada currently lives with a disability, Stephanie Ko notes that the number of disabled people is actively increasing. One in every ten Covid cases results in long-term health impacts. As such, more and more members of the opera world will require accessibility provision in the future. The World Health Organisation estimates that around 15% of the global population lives with some form of disability, but access and inclusion lag behind the statistics in all facets of society, including the arts.

Panelist Ophira Calof suggests that the opera industry reflects the actively exclusive status of the status quo and, in order to challenge this, there is a need for ‘active inclusion’ on behalf of opera creators. For several of her co-panelists, a key strategy for creating truly accessible content is the involvement of D/deaf and disabled people from the very start of the process. Stephanie Ko warns producers against soliciting a single disabled perspective when putting events together: ‘[W]e’re not a monolithic group. My access needs aren’t other people’s access needs.’ Stephanie and her co-founders established Opera Mariposa partly to accommodate access needs that were not being met elsewhere in the industry. In her time as the company’s general manager, she’s observed a trend whereby performers with disabilities are a) hesitant to share their access needs and b) require their needs to be kept confidential for fears of being deemed ‘unemployable’ in the wider industry. The solution, she suggests, is normalising the provision to meet a diverse range of access needs as standard practice and working to address misconceptions that people with disabilities are unreliable.

“When we look at a term like intersectionality, and we recognize that none of us are exclusively any one identity – you can’t parse out the various needs that you have. It has to have a holistic view.”

— Guest panelist

Echoing this need for disability-led events, rather than those that simply consider disability as an afterthought, Landon Krentz draws upon the experience of working in Deaf theater: “if we can have a Deaf-led event with hearing people assisting us, it’s much better, rather than a hearing event where they have Deaf sub-staff”. Landon anticipates a paradigm-shift in the wider theatre industry post-Covid but warns that change will be slow because decision-makers are making changes on behalf of marginalized and often excluded communities, not with them. The suggestion, then, is that instead of considering how we can ‘accommodate’ disabled people in embedded industry practices, we need to incorporate a broader range of perspectives from the ground up.

Such a change also opens up new avenues for exploration in terms of the stories being represented on stage. Ophira refers to her efforts to center a disability-led process ‘cripping the script’. She asks how we can transition opera into ‘a cool crip art space with all of the amazing techniques and processes that already exist, and have been developed by elders throughout many generations of Deaf, mad, and disabled folks?’ In a previous post, I wrote about how Graeae’s The Paradis Files is doing just this. Elsewhere, Toria Banks and Amble Skuse’s We Ask These Questions of Everybody, which premieres later this month, features an exceptional all disabled ensemble and creative team to tell the story of disabled people’s experiences under austerity in the UK. As I’ll discuss in more detail in my next post, authentic stories such as these have the potential to foster real change in terms of social attitudes towards disability.

Landon is currently working on a Deaf-led ASL (American Sign Language) opera and emphasizes the relevance of this work to those outside of the D/deaf community, using the example of non-German speaking audiences of German opera:

“They don’t speak German, they’re not going to understand the opera. But they can still enjoy the show. Why can’t Deaf people and other audiences do the same thing? Come to an ASL opera even though they don’t understand sign language, but still appreciate that the language is being expressed in a different modality.”

— Landon Krentz

Of course, many Anglophone operagoers expect to find English surtitles at the productions they attend, and some theatres even provide muliti-lingual translation. Initiatives like Komische Oper Berlin’s translation system provide a great starting point for expanding accessibility to opera in terms of language. Couldn’t this kind of system be adapted to include sign-language interpretation?

The panel acknowledges that there are serious budgetary considerations to creating accessible opera, and the prevailing perspective is that creators need to ensure that access measures are central to discussions about funding. They recommend separating accessibility costs (such as sign-language interpretation) from other production costs. Otherwise, disability-led projects run the risk of running on reduced budgets because so much of their allotted funds are spent on accessibility.

The pandemic has prompted the broadening of perspectives around accessibility in opera and theatre, even for funders. At times though, this has been met with frustration from those who have been involved in accessible opera-making for many years. After all, it’s taken a global pandemic and the associated shift from physical to online engagement with the arts for access needs to be widely acknowledged by so-called ‘mainstream’ creators and audiences. Moderator Robin Hahn asks whether there is a risk that new and emerging accessibility practices in the opera industry will be abandoned with the return to ‘normality’. How do advocates make the case for continued good practice when theaters reopen?

Opera often faces charges of irrelevancy, and Stephanie emphasises that most opera companies want to reach more audiences. She argues that if companies like Opera Mariposa can demonstrate cost-effective ways to expand their audience, others in the industry may well follow suit. In fact, she reveals that the panel discussion has already prompted positive change:

“We were thrilled with the response to Making Opera Accessible! Many of the attendees said they left the event feeling galvanized to create positive change in our industry, and to find ways of working toward more active inclusivity in Opera. After the panel, a major international company reached out to let us know they’d decided to cast at least one artist with a physical disability in their next project; other opera creators told us that the things they’d learned would shape how they worked moving forward. Obviously our panel could only explore a small portion of such a huge topic, but it was still wonderful to witness how even one event could already result in tangible impact.”

— Stephanie Ko

In addition to these insights on accessibility and inclusion in the industry, the panel also shared some interesting thoughts on the role of storytelling and tradition in relation to disability representation in opera. I’ll be diving into this in my next post, but in the meantime, you can catch up on the recording of ‘Making Opera Accessible’ on Opera Mariposa’s YouTube channel.