Australian Arts Festivals Are Bigger Than Ever, But Are They Getting Any More Accessible?

The Australian arts community is heading into its major festival season and there are a truly exceptional number of events out there to choose from. After a record-breaking program featuring more than 370 titles the Melbourne International Film Festival has just finished up, giving locals a week’s reprieve before the Melbourne Writers Festival this weekend. After that, Fringe hits Sydney, then Melbourne, which leads into both the Brisbane and Melbourne Festivals, which gives way to Melbourne Music Week, which serves as preparation to the summer festival season.

When the weather gets warmer we all migrate to see bands in hills and farms and valleys, and ready ourselves for the whole rambling thing to kick off again with the Sydney Festival in January. Or, at least that’s what it feels like to people like myself — people who have the option of sleeping in small tents built atop giant piles of mud, or watching any listed screening on a whim, or hunting for shows in dark cobbled laneways, or climbing three staircases to gigs in the cramped backrooms of inner-city pubs.

And hey, that’s part of the allure. Melbourne, in particular, hoists its reputation on the fact its best art is often hidden in unexpected places. But to many, that can be pretty limiting; this whole situation can look vastly different to those in need of a better guarantee of accessibility.

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What Are Our Festivals Doing For Disability?

This year, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival featured a bumper lineup of more than 550 shows but — while most venues were wheelchair accessible — if you relied on Auslan interpreting, that number quickly dropped to 13. None of these were international acts, and if wanted a choice between more than one date, the only actual option was Adam Hills.

Alternatively, Melbourne Fringe has recently partnered with Arts Access Victoria — an organisation which provides training and resources to such projects — and looks set to offer a number of services including Auslan and assisted listening services, but it’s not yet clear to how many shows it’ll apply. Melbourne Festival helpfully offer both through the request of audience members, and Sydney Fringe don’t appear to have any public information on the subject at all. If you are someone who relies on any of this, that kind of inconsistency could be pretty frustrating.

Of course, there are a number of reasons for it, including but not limited to cost. Even considering the government’s recent cuts to the sector, the arts have never have much cash to spare on these kind of services. But perhaps more pertinently, it hasn’t traditionally been a major concern. Even the situation at Edinburgh Fringe — one of the world’s most iconic festivals — is pretty dire. A report from The Guardian this year revealed that just 53 percent of the 313 venues in use were described as wheelchair accessible, just 10 percent of shows had hearing loops available and only 1.4 percent were signed. Importantly, this was a report on how much more inclusive the festival was getting. The situation was presumably somehow worse than this in years past.

Comedian and disability activist Stella Young was a fierce spokesperson on these kind of issues and regularly drew parallels between Australia and the rest of the world. Just a couple of months before her death, she penned a piece for The Drum about accessibility more generally.

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It is nothing short of baffling to me how a city like Melbourne, where I struggle to find accessible facilities on a very regular basis, could be considered the most liveable city in the world,” she wrote. “I suppose it all depends on what makes a city ‘liveable’ for you.”

Addressing the fact that Australia lacks the regularly enforced laws which require accessible facilities and businesses that are now the norm in the US, Young suggested we “have some catching up to do”. “I dearly hope that future awards for the world’s most liveable city will encapsulate liveability for all, not just those who like their artisan coffee and cobbled laneways. More than awards and accolades, we need legislative change.”

Incidentally, Melbourne was awarded the title once again yesterday.

Speaking to her own experiences as a wheelchair user, spoken word performer and disability activist Jax Jacki Brown suggests this lack of overall structure is the same on the festival circuit. “I have been involved in producing and appearing in Fringe Festival shows both in 2014 and will be coming up very soon in 2015, and I’ve found that very little appears to actually be known on what accessibility actually is,” she says.

Just this year, Brown was met with a lot of confusion when organising wheelchair access at her own show. After calling to inform them her venue, which was listed as inaccessible, was actually fine, she was passed on a list of different options and noted a number of others had similar mistakes.

“I would love to see this position for a person with disability become a paid one and encompass more then just wheelchair access and Auslan. I would like to see a grant be made available to make shows accessible and encourage artists to work with artists who have disability,” she says.

In fact, Brown’s continued to have problems with festivals who are ostensibly doing much of this. MIFF has a specially-appointed Access Officer, they’ve ventured to make all their venues wheelchair accessible, are open to requests of all outside requirements and even offered a online version of their program in Auslan. But last week, she found the experience less than ideal.

“[They’d] failed to train their staff and volunteers on where accessible entrances were so … we were directed to lifts which didn’t have public access and it took some time for the right lifts to be located by staff.”

Citing her own work with groups like Quippings Disablity Unleashed. who have in the past decked out the Spiegltent with ramps for their Melbourne Fringe show, Brown suggests there’s heaps that can still be done.

“If a venue hasn’t done everything in their power to make themselves accessible then festivals should be refusing to work with them,” she says. “Artists should be making choices wherever possible to choose accessible venues or provide accessible alternatives. This is happening a little bit with some artists putting on an extra show in an accessible venue [but] there also needs to be thought given to broader access then just wheelchairs.”

At #Melbwebfest opening nite, wchair access, Auslan and captioning! pic.twitter.com/ku4i4NLDKu

— Jax Jacki Brown (@jaxjackibrown) July 10, 2015

#melbwebfest guest speakers just found it hilarious to make auslan interp sign wank and fuck repeatedly. So unimpressed. Not funny d'heads

— Jax Jacki Brown (@jaxjackibrown) July 10, 2015

Jess Kapuscinski Evans, another performer and disability activist who’s written extensively on the subject before, offers a similar point.

“I need a paid support worker or parent or friend to go anywhere, and it can be hard to see numerous works in the space of about three weeks,” she says. Despite her avid interest in the arts, Evans finds herself being occasionally put off completely by fatigue, uneven surfaces, and crowds. Regardless, she’s noted good experiences with smaller, more grassroots events like Meredith Music Festival and Next Wave.

“Some festivals are starting to have access policies [and] sometimes arts funding is now targeted towards making an existing venue more accessible and many grant programs have a disability specific category,” she says.

“There’s the perception that you can have either good art or accessible art but that the two are not compatible. This assumption excludes people with disabilities from artistic things in general.”

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“Cultural Changes Take A Long Time”

Mudfest — the University of Melbourne’s biennial student arts festival — kicks off tomorrow night with 60 shows and events in what is its first ever explicitly accessible program.

After nine months of planning, the festival’s two Creative Arts Officers Bonnie Leigh-Dodds and Bella Vadiveloo (who are also students) have lobbied the University to fix long-busted chairlifts and infrastructure to ensure each venue is wheelchair accessible (though not always successfully); they’ve organised Auslan and specialty audio-describing services by audience request for the vision-impaired; staff, volunteers and artists will all have free access training to hopefully avoid the situations Jax Jacki Brown found herself in; and they’ve even created a designated hangout area for guide dogs.

Sorry, no. You probably shouldn’t ditch the festival to roll around with them.

That’s not all. Each artist involved in the nine-day festival was asked to explicitly address how their work could be made more accessible when applying to be involved; the organisers have set up grants to reward the best ideas; offered “relaxed performances” which are often helpful for some autistic audience members; and are even cutting drink prices in half for punters who order in Auslan. The opening night party will feature a specially-created video with instructions for each drink projected on the walls.

“Bonnie and I came into this job and asked ‘what is going to be at the centre of how we do this?’,” Vadiveloo says. “[We both wanted to] make sure that anyone feels welcome — we wanted community building and inclusivity. I think lots of arts organisations would say that, but having access at the core of your principles is what you have to do if those are your values.”

“The idea of making accessibility in the arts an exciting one, rather than a dragging one,” Leigh-Dodds adds.

With a full festival budget of around $90,000, the pair estimate they’ve spent about $10,000 on these services. But they also realise they’re in a pretty privileged position to be able to do this.

“The biggest question is, what if we spend $1,000 on Auslan interpreters and no deaf audience members come,” Leigh-Dodds says. “The answer is: well, then you’ve planted the seed. It’s not about ‘We’ve paid off that because we had four deaf audience members come’, it’s about making it the norm … Because we’re students, we’ve got the opportunity to create that cultural shift and let these students go off into the world and make their art, and for access to be the norm.”

“These cultural changes take a long time,” Vadiveloo adds. “It takes a long time for trust to be built between communities and for a long time that money has to be spent.”

Importantly, they haven’t done this alone. With the goal in mind early on, the team petitioned the student union to hire a part-time Access Officer, Joshua Lynzaat — the first for any student arts festival in the country. He managed the majority of this, and in turn created a small collective of students to work as an advisory committee and approve big things like budget decisions and major initiatives.

“The aim for the access think tank was to establish a diverse group of student access advocates, who are also artists, to bring together different perspectives on making art,” he says. “It’s impossible to create a group to encompass the entirety of human experience, so while members of this group have provided specific perspectives on access for blind/low vision patrons for example, the aim of the group was really to talk about diversity and access, to define what these terms meant for the festival, to talk about how to create a cultural shift this grand in scale.”

Another reason why the team found this committee helpful was the fact that none of the three organisers identify as having a disability, and have expressed an openness to the criticism that may bring. They do, however, feel content with the measures they’ve introduced after much consultation.

“This question is something I wrestled with for a very long time before agreeing to work on this project,” says Lynzaat. “I think the fear is that someone without a disability, with little lived experience of discrimination, will speak for people with disabilities. But what we’re doing with Mudfest this year is saying, for example, that no artwork will be presented in a venue that isn’t wheelchair accessible … If we remove that barrier, then that wheelchair user can choose to come or not.”

“Generally, in our everyday lives I think there’s a fear around talking about disability — a fear of saying the wrong thing, so we don’t talk about it. As festival organisers this fear is still there … You’re always going to make mistakes, but you can learn from them.”

This kind of optimism is what many often expect from student-run organisations. It’s the same type of determination that leads 19-year-olds to walk the streets and chant at politicians threatening their livelihoods, or challenge the federal treasurer on live TV; but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily idealistic or unattainable for the rest of the industry.

Operating biennially since 2004, The Other Film Festival has been consistently committed to presenting their program in the most accessible way possible. All speeches are Auslan interpreted, all films are captioned and audio-described, and the event explicitly operates with the mission to “change how the community thinks about disability”.

Since then, the idea has caught on. This June, the Undercover Artist Festival started up in Brisbane offering an alternative space for those experiencing disability in the arts. “Collectively these artists and individuals expressed a need for greater presentation opportunities,” the website reads. Though only a small festival, it does represent what seems to be a growing demand for change.

“This is the first year Mudfest has attempted to be more accessible [and] one thing we’ve learnt is that changing an arts culture takes a bloody long time, and it’s really hard,” Lynzaat says. “The bureaucracy at Melbourne Uni makes it very hard, so I’m not going to judge festivals who seem like they’re doing nothing because maybe that’s not true, maybe they’re trying really hard and are just learning. But then you look over at [festivals like these] who of course just blow us all out of the water, it makes me think: if they can do it, maybe we just need to readjust our priorities. Maybe we need to aim higher.”

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Mudfest is on at the University of Melbourne from August 20-29 if you’d like to check it out first hand.

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Feature image: Emma Bennison performing at Undercover Artist Festival via Facebook.