Unseen Audio Drama and Live Event – A Touring Case Study

 

October 2023 – October 2024

 

Background
In winter 2022/23 the Vision Foundation announced a new fund aimed at raising awareness around the impact of domestic abuse on the visually impaired (VI) community following the release of the Unseen Report. Our Artistic Director/CEO and Artist Development Manager attended a launch event for the report and felt that this would be an important project for Extant to pursue, continuing the company’s track record of dramatizing fact-based reports.

We were successful in securing £17,000 from the fund and used £15,000 from our Esmee Fairbairn Funding (ringfenced for artist development) to create the project. Following a roundtable held by Vision Foundation and consultation with our network of VI creatives, we realised that people were responding very strongly to the concept and needed to create space for more VI survivors to input their voices into the project and for VI creatives to drive it. We changed to a co-creative devising process allowing more voices with different levels of experience the chance to feed in and partnered with SafeLives to provide creative writing workshops to VI survivors whose work also informed the devising process.

Unseen premiered online in March 2024 and at a live event at Camden People’s Theatre. We will tour the live event in October 2024 (funded from a separate fund from the Vision Foundation). The live event features extracts of the audio drama, live scene readings from the cast, an expert panel and open Q&A made up of the Unseen creative team, domestic abuse charities and other VI support services.
Unseen is a gripping new 45-minute audio drama that examines the subtle and insidious effect of domestic abuse on the blind and visually impaired community. Through the stories of two visually impaired protagonists, Unseen illuminates the unique ways that domestic abuse impacts on blind and VI people in their homes and intimate relationships, from love-bombing to gaslighting, care to coercive control.

Funding
Devising, rehearsal, recording and premiere – Vision Foundation and Esmee Fairbairn Foundation
October 2024 Tour – Vision Foundation

Note: there was a small amount of Extant NPO HR/staffing resource used to support the audio drama, live event and forthcoming tour, but 90%+ of the project has been funded outside of ACE NPO investment, but has clear alignment with many of the intentions of Let’s Create.

Location, Team and Environmental Footprint
Our cast and creative team were intentionally drawn from across England and Wales to ensure that the VI talent in our works are geographically representative and to ensure development opportunities are available across the country. Unseen was made up of:

21 Blind & VI team members, 6 on Devising Team, 1 Creative Lead/Director, 3 Workshop Facilitators, 1 Script Editor, 1 Sound Designer, 1 Assistant Producer, 9 voice actors & 5 in research group (some doubling of roles).

6 Sighted team members: Creative Producer, Sound Technician, 4 Access Workers.

The fund for the devising, rehearsal and recording process took place in London due to a geographical restriction (London only activity) put in place by that fund.

Using some of the Julie’s Bicycle tools our carbon footprint total for the devising, rehearsing, recording and premiere of Unseen was 1.1 tonnes CO2e. We had a total of 9954 train journey miles, 213 tube journey miles and 54 nights of accommodation. An additional consideration when Extant (and other disabled led companies are on tour) is that our cast/creative team are often accompanied by access support workers – which increases our costs and carbon footprint.

There is a severe lack of accessible accommodation in London and cities across the UK and that which is available is more expensive. When attempting to book at a chain hotel there’s often only one accessible room meaning we must split our team over multiple sites, increasing CO2 emissions and access support workers.

Financial Model
We have agreed to deliver three tour dates (two at NPO venues, one at an ACE project grant supported venue), one online event and one radio broadcast in October 2024. Each venue and host would not offer a guarantee and so we are working on a PWYD model, each venue have offered in kind support of their staff, venue and social media. The tour is being underwritten by the £8,000 funding from Vision Foundation, although there is no expectation from the funder to earn income from the live events, Extant has extensive experience of the “traditional” model of touring 8 shows over the past 20 years with fees, guarantees etc at different scales of venue. One of the conversations we had when applying for the fund to tour the work was around sustainability, because they had already invested in the creation of Unseen it made sense to them to continue to invest in Extant to ensure it has a wider geographic reach through this tour.

Challenges
Building on what peers have articulated in terms of ghosting, hesitance to engage in conversations, a reluctance to commit and pleading poverty when it comes to guarantees, the specific touring challenges that we as a VI led company have are multiplied because:

• Most venues, presenters and festivals have little to no understanding of how VI artists struggle to engage with their ableist infrastructure, templates, internal systems and communication methods let alone physical barriers and attitudes in the venue.
• On a previous 10 date tour, we delivered Visual Impairment Awareness Training (VIAT) in advance at each venue that we toured to. We did this so that our cast/creative team would have a better tour experience and we could be more confident that any VI audiences who attended our show would have a more positive venue experience with the venue staff and volunteers.
• “Where do I find blind audiences who might be interested in your show?”

The locations we’re touring to in Autumn 2024 (Wolverhampton, Salford and London) will have received VIAT from us and we’re the architects of our online event, so have put the necessary access support in place for people to attend. Whilst Extant does have a very successful access training department, providing training for venues across the UK why should we have to do this unpaid work around the basic, legal requirements that venues should have in place to ensure VI people are welcome, can visit and able to work in their buildings?

Data, Marketing and Reporting

In terms of audience development and marketing, we see a further lack of understanding and application of knowledge that we have already shared with venues. When we say we’re not going to share/repost any content about our tour which doesn’t have alt text/image description embedded or in the description and we still get tagged in, it is deeply frustrating and doubles/trebles our workload again, by having to contact the venue marketing team and articulating it again.

We are well connected and trusted with the VI communities when we tour across England and share our links into sightloss councils, VI support charities and key connectors in different cities with venues. However, if after we have toured, there isn’t another show that has audio description or access provision for VI audiences, then audiences will not attend as they recognise that their venue doesn’t offer work that is accessible to them.

Illuminate and the ACE IP and Activity/Outcomes documents are inaccessible to people who use screen readers. We must double our workload again by creating surveys and data capture in formats and software that are more VI friendly and then input it into the fixed ACE templates and Illuminate. This has been raised multiple times via our RM and we were disappointed again to see that the April 2024 update had made no improvements on this front.

May 2024