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      in Theater

      Disabled People Fear Being Left Behind as U.K. Culture Venues Reopen

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      Some disabled people have spent a year devouring shows online, and they want continued access. Some theaters are promising to provide it, but fears persist.LONDON — Before the pandemic hit Britain last year, Michelle Hedley could only go to her local theaters in the north of England if they happened to be doing a captioned performance.That happened five times a year — at best, said Hedley, who is deaf.But during the pandemic, suddenly, she could watch musicals all day and night if she wanted, as shuttered theaters worldwide put shows online, often with subtitles. “I started watching anything and everything simply because I could!” Hedley, 49, said in an email interview. “Even subject matters that bored me!”“I viewed more theater than I had done (it felt like) in a lifetime,” she added.Michelle Hedley worries she will be forced to go back to being “grateful” for being able to access just a handful of captioned shows each year now that British theaters have reopened.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNow, Hedley fears this access is about to be lost.On Monday, theaters, museums and cinemas started reopening across England, some for the first time since March 2020. Audiences have been so grateful to be back inside theaters, they have clapped following the announcements to turn cellphones off.But for many disabled people, who make up 22 percent of England’s population and have diverse requirements — such as wheelchair access, audio description or for “relaxed” performances where audiences are allowed to make noise — this moment is causing more mixed reactions. Some fear being forgotten, and that struggling venues will concentrate on producing in-person shows and forgo online offerings, or cut their in-person services for disabled people.There is little evidence of that so far, and some venues say they will continue to include disabled people, but the real effect of venues’ reduced budgets won’t become clear for months.“I will be forced to go back to being grateful for just five shows a year,” Hedley said. “It is very frustrating.”Others are concerned, too. “I just have this sense of being left behind with people being so euphoric that they can do things in the flesh again,” Sonia Boué, an artist who is autistic, said in a telephone interview.Before the pandemic, Boué, 58, would only visit museums if she was convinced a show would be worth the huge amount of energy the experience took. Getting the train from her home in Oxford to London could be overwhelming, she said, as could dealing with crowds in a packed museum. “I’ve been in situations when I’ve just wanted to throw myself down on a station platform and lose it,” she said.Online, she could view shows whenever she wanted. Last year, she went back again and again to one by the painter Tracey Emin and the photographer Jo Spence, she said, with both influencing her own art. “The whole experience was so rich and wonderful,” Boué said.Sonia Boué believes that following Britain’s lockdowns, it should be easier than ever to identify with, and consider the needs of, disabled people.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesBritain’s cultural venues have struggled over the past 12 months, with thousands of layoffs. Many venues only survived the pandemic thanks to emergency funding from the government.Some high-profile venues have said they will keep working to include disabled people as they reopen. Kwame Kwei-Armah, the artistic director of the Young Vic theater in London, told The Guardian in May he wanted to livestream at least two performances of all future shows, with viewers limited to about 500 per stream, mimicking the theater’s capacity. The Young Vic intends to guarantee some of those tickets for disabled people, a spokeswoman said in an email. On Friday, the Almeida, another London theater, said it would film and released digitally its next season’s shows “where possible” but gave no further details.But for regional theaters that are coming off a year without ticket sales, streaming may not always be possible. “It’s a huge financial outlay, making films, so you really need to think about it from the start,” Amy Leach, the associate director of Leeds Playhouse, said in a phone interview. She hoped her theater would do that for future work, she said.People’s concerns are not just about cuts to streaming. Jessica Thom, a performer and wheelchair user who’s made work about her Tourette’s syndrome, said in a telephone interview that she was worried that some venues may see online shows as an accessibility alternative to offering the relaxed performances she loved to go to, where people were free to move around or make noise. “The anxiety about being written out is real,” she said.Last week, English National Opera said it would be doubling the number of relaxed performances it offers in its next season, although only to two from one.Leanna Benjamin, a wheelchair user who has myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and often experiences pain, said in a telephone interview she was worried venues may drop online ways of working that have flourished during the pandemic.In the last year, Benjamin was commissioned to write three short plays — her first assignments as a playwright. “I’m like, ‘Thank you, Covid!’” she said. “You may have made me be isolated and life feel really tough, but on the other hand you’ve launched my career.”Those commissions included work for Graeae, Britain’s leading deaf and disabled-led theater company, as well as “The Unknown” for Leeds Playhouse (streaming until June 5).She has been helped in such work by being able to have meetings and rehearsals virtually. “My experiences have been incredibly inclusive,” she said, “and I think a lot of us are having the same concerns about ‘Will we go back to old ways of working, when we’re told we need to be in the room?’”Leach, of Leeds Playhouse, said she didn’t think that would be the case. Her theater was intending to keep using video technology so it can expand work with disabled people in the industry.“I worked out the other day I’d need to be guided by about 25 people to go from my home to a London theater,” said Joanna Wood, who lives on England’s south coast.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesNot all disabled people have found the pandemic liberating in terms of access to culture. Joanna Wood, who is blind in one eye, and can only see blurred shapes with the other, said for her, the pandemic has been a disaster.Before the pandemic, she’d attended plays or gone to art exhibitions at least once a week, taking advantage of a boom in audio description (for a play, that involves a describer explaining what happens onstage in between gaps in dialogue).But it took months for theaters to start putting audio-described content online, she said. There were some highlights, she added — the Old Vic in London made sure all its livestreamed shows had audio description — but she often felt like she had gone back to the moment five years ago when she started losing her sight and couldn’t access culture at all. “It felt completely disabling,” she said of last year’s experiences.Some theaters, like the Globe in London, have started offering in-person performances with audio description, Wood said. But she won’t be able to attend for months. “I worked out the other day I’d need to be guided by about 25 people to go from my home to a London theater,” she said. “I can’t tell if someone is wearing a mask or not, I can’t keep distance, so I don’t feel ready,” she added.Many other disabled people feel similarly anxious about attending events in person, she said, having been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. She was worried theaters might cut back on services assuming there isn’t demand, even if the trend for that hasn’t happened yet.Six British museums and theaters said in emails they intended to maintain provisions for disabled audiences, and not cut back. Andrew Miller, a campaigner who was the British government’s disability champion for arts and culture until this spring, said many institutions would be hard pressed to “wriggle” out of commitments even if they for some reason wanted to, as much funding in Britain comes with a requirement to expand access. But future funding cuts could make the situation “messy,” he said. “There is a genuine worry there’ll be significantly less investment,” he added.Boué said she just hoped British theaters and museums kept disabled people in mind. It should be easier than ever to identify with disabled people, she said. When the first lockdown hit, “it was this jaw dropping moment when everyone felt completely immobilized and like they didn’t have the freedoms they’d always taken for granted,” she said.For once, “it was like disability was really everyone’s problem,” she added. More

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      in Movies

      The Golden Globes Celebrated Sia’s ‘Music.’ Autistic Activists Wish They Hadn’t.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Golden Globes Celebrated Sia’s ‘Music.’ Autistic Activists Wish They Hadn’t.Three decades after “Rain Man,” detractors say this new film about an autistic character is regressive and potentially harmful.Maddie Ziegler, left, and Kate Hudson in “Music.” Ziegler plays the title character, which the director, Sia, has said is based on an autistic boy she knew.Credit…Merrick Morton/Vertical EntertainmentFeb. 11, 2021Updated 5:45 p.m. ETWhen Charlie Hancock first heard about a new musical movie centered on a girl on the spectrum, she was thrilled. “I thought, ‘Great. I love musicals,’” said Hancock, a first-year student at Oxford University who is autistic and wrote an essay on the film. “‘This could be an opportunity for more representation and perhaps a type that we haven’t seen before.’”Her excitement quickly turned to distress.As details emerged in the last few months about that film, “Music,” which is directed and co-written by the pop star Sia, disability rights advocates grew increasingly concerned about potential bias in the plot as well as the decision to cast a performer who wasn’t autistic. Those worries escalated into a backlash in November, when the trailer’s release set off a fight between the musician-turned-filmmaker and her online critics, and again in January, when leaked scenes seemingly endorsed a controversial physical restraint technique. Then, to the surprise of industry insiders and the autism world alike, the film garnered two Golden Globe nominations last week. Though Sia has since offered an olive branch to detractors, the anger remains.“Nominating ‘Emily in Paris’ is one thing. It’s a harmless bit of mediocre fluff,” Ashley Wool, an autistic actress in upstate New York, said, referring to the Netflix series that also received surprise Globe nominations. “‘Music’ is something that’s doing active harm to people. This gives it a veneer of legitimacy that it doesn’t deserve.”The film will be available on demand Feb. 12 in the United States but has already opened in Sia’s native Australia to dismal reviews and a weak box office. It follows a girl named Music and her newly sober half sister, Zu (Kate Hudson), who becomes Music’s guardian. Music, played by Maddie Ziegler, can’t speak, and viewers are simply told that she is a “magical little girl” who sees the world differently. Song-and-dance interludes illustrate what’s going on inside Music’s head. Sia, who has said Music was based on an autistic boy she knew, has described the film as “‘Rain Man’ the musical, but with girls.”Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise in “Rain Man.” Disability rights advocates say Hoffman’s character played into stereotypes about autism. Credit…United ArtistsYet that 1988 film represents exactly the kind of stereotypical portrayal that disability rights advocates say they don’t want to see in 2021: a neurotypical star (Dustin Hoffman) playing an autistic savant stereotype. Research shows that disabled characters are overwhelmingly played by nondisabled actors on film and TV. A recent rare exception was Pixar’s 2020 animated short film “Loop” that won praise for featuring a nonspeaking autistic actress of color in the lead voice role.Like Music, the “Loop” actress and character had difficulty forming words but still frequently vocalized. More common is the casting of a nonautistic performer like Ziegler. The actress, a recurring Sia collaborator, ultimately replaced “a beautiful young girl nonverbal on the spectrum” who found the experience “unpleasant and stressful,” Sia said in a tweet.Because there are so few autistic characters onscreen, choices about depictions matter greatly, critics contend. “Some people might say any representation is better than nothing. I’ve heard that argument as a Black person. I’ve heard it as queer person. I’ve heard it as a woman. I’ve heard it as an autistic,” said Morenike Giwa Onaiwu, a visiting scholar in humanities at Rice University. “I’m tired of the scraps and the crumbs. I’d rather not see us on the screen than see us in a way that fuels stigma.”Publicists for “Music” did not reply to requests to speak to Sia or to clarify details surrounding the film for this article. Publicists for Hudson and Ziegler, who was 14 when the film was shot in 2017, did not respond to requests for comment.Many detractors say problems with the film are, as Hancock put it, “baked into its very DNA” because Music isn’t really at the center of “Music.” Instead, they say, it’s Zu who is given a complex narrative of growth and depth; Music merely serves as a catalyst to help Zu on her journey to become a better person. It’s “the idea that we’re not characters or people in our own right,” Hancock added, “but we exist in order to inspire the nondisabled people in our lives and, by extension, the audience.”After the first trailer dropped in November and activists on Twitter criticized the film’s approach, Sia reacted angrily, arguing that she had spent three years on research and that her intentions were “awesome.” When one autistic performer said she felt that “zero effort” had been made to cast an autistic lead, Sia replied, “Maybe you’re just a bad actor.”Musical interludes in Sia’s film, with Hudson, left, and Ziegler, serve to illustrate what’s going on in Music’s  mind.Credit…Merrick Morton/Vertical EntertainmentFor autistic artists, the fact that Sia said a neurotypical actress was recast as the lead sends the troubling message that autistic people are bad hires.“First, it’s undermining autistic people’s capabilities and making us out to be infants,” Chloé Hayden, an autistic actress in Australia, said. “Second, if your film is about inclusion, but you’re not making the actual film set inclusive, it completely belittles the entire point.”Critics have also taken issue with two scenes showing Music having a meltdown and being subjected to prone restraint, a practice in which people, often disabled, are put in a facedown position while force is used to subdue them. Versions of the method have been linked to serious injuries and death. But when a saintly neighbor, played by Leslie Odom Jr., restrains Music, it’s portrayed as an act of kindness: He lies on top of her and says he’s “crushing her” with his love. Later, in a public park, he instructs Zu on how to use the restraint on Music.“It really shows that a project about autism will be hollow and not serve our needs — and can even be harmful to us — if we’re not helping tell the story,” Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said. “This is something that could kill people.”In an emailed statement, Odom said, “When we make something or when we sign up to help someone we respect make something, our hope is always that the work is the beginning of a conversation. The filmmakers make the art, but we don’t get to dictate or decide the contents or parameters of the ensuing conversation. The other half of the conversation regarding this work is just beginning. I am listening.”Following the news earlier this month that “Music” had been nominated for two Golden Globes (best musical or comedy, and best actress for Hudson), three advocacy organizations — Gross’s network, CommunicationFIRST and the Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint — joined to issue an open letter expressing “grave concerns” about the restraint scenes and calling for the film to be pulled from release.The letter noted that “a committee of nonspeaking and autistic people” had been invited to screen the film and provide feedback in late January, and the filmmakers “failed to respond and address” their recommendations, including cutting the prone restraint scenes entirely.Hours after the nominations, Sia tweeted an apology and said that her “research was clearly not thorough enough” and that she had “listened to the wrong people.” The star, who soon after deactivated her Twitter account, also announced that a warning would be added to the film stating that it “in no way condones or recommends the use of restraint on autistic people,” and that those scenes would be removed from “all future printings.” Those scenes remained in a screener provided to a New York Times critic reviewing the film.A change.org petition calling for the film to be “canceled” has nearly 19,000 signatures. But Onaiwu of Rice University said she was not looking to destroy anyone’s career, even if she condemned the film.“It’s not about demonizing Sia. You’re not canceled. We need allies and powerful voices,” Onaiwu said. “Use your platform to try to help dismantle ableism and promote neurodiversity and make opportunities for autistic people. You can use your experience to do that.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Music

      I Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His Music

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyI Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His MusicGabriela Lena Frank, a composer born with high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss, describes her creative experience.“Is it an exaggeration to say that composers after Beethoven, the vast majority of them hearing, were forever changed by a deaf aesthetic?”Credit…Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDec. 27, 2020Gabriela Lena Frank, a composer and pianist and the founder of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, which aims to foster diverse compositional voices and artist-citizens, was born with a neurosensory high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss. In an interview with Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, she described her creative practice and her exploration of the music of Beethoven, who gradually lost his hearing and by his 40s was almost totally deaf. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.From the time I was a little girl, I have been fascinated with how deafness affected Beethoven. If you look at his piano sonatas, in that first one in F Minor, the hands are very close together and the physical choreographies of the left and right hands are not that dissimilar. As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart.The progression over the course of the sonatas — a musical document of his hearing loss in transition — is not perfectly linear by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s undeniable. By the time of the “Waldstein” Sonata, not only are the hands far apart, but they are doing very different things: that left hand pounding in thick chords against the right hand’s spare little descending line, for instance.Well, I recall from my therapy classes for hearing-impaired children that I was taught to recognize thick from thin. My therapist had me close my eyes and indicate from which direction a rumbly drum was coming, as opposed to a high-pitched whistle. I couldn’t really hear them, but I could certainly feel them and their contrasting energies.I think it’s fascinating, too, that as Beethoven’s hands stretched for lower and higher notes, he demanded pianos with added notes, elongating the pitch range of the keyboard; he asked for physically heavier instruments that resonated with more vibration. More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person, trust me. A more dissonant and thick language, with clashing frequencies, also causes more vibration, so the language does get more physically visceral that way, too.That said, if I don’t wear my hearing aids for a couple of days, my composing ideas start to become more introverted. This can produce music that is more intellectual, more contrapuntal, more internal, more profound, more spiritual, more trippy. And I think these are also hallmarks of Beethoven’s later music, and not just for piano.Yet more from my own experience: When I’m really under a deadline, and need to get new ideas quickly, I don’t usually listen to music, as some composers do. In fact, I do the opposite: I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream when unusual and often impossible events come together, the perfect place from which to compose. And when I put in my hearing aids again, I can feel all these wonderful ideas and connections fly away, just as a dream disappears when awakening.The composer Gabriela Lena Frank in Boonville, Calif. “When I’m really under a deadline, and need to get new ideas quickly, I don’t usually listen to music,” she said. “I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream.”Credit…Carlos Chavarria for The New York TimesI wonder: Is it an exaggeration to say that composers after Beethoven, the vast majority of them hearing, were forever changed by a deaf aesthetic? And that the modern-day piano wouldn’t be with us if a deaf person hadn’t demanded its existence? This is beyond my expertise, but I’ve also wondered about sign language. Are there certain spatial gestures in the language that appear in the choreographic execution of certain kinds of music? And if so, does this imply yet more levels in which a deaf sensibility infuses the music-making of a hearing world?I often wonder how Beethoven would react to modern-day hearing aids considering his great frustration with the ear trumpets of his day. Personally, I miss the old analogs of my girlhood, for their simplicity. Nowadays it’s an effort not to roll my eyes as a technician fits me with the ubiquitous digital aids that, in addition to all manner of dazzling bionic-lady bells and whistles, default to the type of correction desired by late-deafened people — namely, high frequencies and spatial reorientation to help with speech recognition. That’s completely understandable as losing the ability to communicate with loved ones is an awful and dispiriting experience.Yet those of us born with hearing loss are often champion lip-readers (as I am) or use sign language. And whether or not we are musical, we join musicians with hearing loss (at any stage) in desiring hearing aids that prioritize beauty of sound, unchanged pitch, unchanged timber and naturalness — restoring proper weight to middle and low frequencies, and spatialization. We don’t want hearing aids that ply our sound world with obvious artifice, like a supposedly “acoustic” album that’s been overworked by a manic sound engineer.In this vein, I don’t think Beethoven would like how so many modern-day digital hearing aids massage all kinds of processes into what the wearer hears. It helps to have an imaginative and sensitive technician, preferably one with experience with performers and composers. A good fitting is an art so the music can just breathe.At the piano, I usually start practicing without my hearing aids, entering a world of profound silence familiar from my earliest years, when I wasn’t yet fitted. At first, I’m still hearing the music in my head, but after a while, I’m more aware of the choreography, how it feels like a dance in my hands. Focusing on a physical experience that feels good and healthy can counteract bad habits which appear when you are only listening to the sound.For instance, if one plays a large chord of, say, eight notes, the tendency will be to bring out the lowest note and the highest note — the bass and the melody — to give them more audibility and importance. Because of the structure of the hands, this means the weakest pinkie fingers are bringing out the most important notes. To help the poor fingers out, the hands may be tempted to angle out, left hand pointing to the bass, right hand to the melody.This is a very unnatural position for your hands to be in, and in fact it mimics the wrist-breaking karate locks taught in dojos, inviting injury. Imagine a series of these chords up and down the keyboard, in such an unnatural position. But because you are chasing a full-bodied sound from this eight-note chord, and not paying attention to its physicality, you start to do dangerous things. With the ability to take the sound out of the equation, I focus on the feel. I solidify a good technique first, and know it. Knowing it, I can hang onto it once I do put my hearing aids back in, and then work on the sound.So, ironically, even though we are talking about a sonic art form, sound can be a distraction. Sound can take your attention away from the many other factors that go into making music. Music, after all, is about so much more than volume. For my own loss, I’m just missing volume. I’m not missing everything else one needs to make or enjoy music. And I even have perfect pitch, so in some ways, I hear better than hearing people.And I think that had to have happened to Beethoven. He learned to create music without sound, however reluctantly. While he increasingly withdrew from society and disliked talking about his disability, he left us a living document of his hearing loss in transition likely starting with music written in his mid to late 20s, when his hearing began to fade. In other words, I think he encoded his deafness in music. And as I say, the progression in his music is not a perfectly linear one, just as his progression through deafness was likely not perfectly linear, but the journey is there. Unmistakably.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More