RIA: Accessibility in theatres

Research Initiation Awards are small awards open only to people or organisations from outside the university. Our aim is to support individual people or community organisations to begin to build the relationships or help create the conditions that could initiate future engaged research.

Accessibility in theatres

This project is led by Chloe Llewellyn, with the support of the Turning Tides project.

All the world’s a stage… It would be nice if we were all invited!

This project stems from my love of theatre and writing. The first rule of play-writing is go and see as many plays as you can, but what do you do if the access in theatres doesn’t allow this? Figure out how to make that different!

There are many things that theatres could do to make performances more accessible to a wider audience, and some already do with BSL performances, Touch tours and Captioned performances. Relaxed Performances and Chilled Environments are available in some theatres but there’s no  clear definition. My aim is to make that different.

This award will fund me to undertake training in qualitative research methods. From this, I hope to collaborate with other people with autism or learning disability labels to develop a larger research proposal to consider issues of accessibility in theatres.