Disability Arts Online

Rachel Feldberg is currently the Artistic Director of the Ilkley Literature Festival. She is also the person who gave Jo Verrent, and many other disabled would be actors like her, their first job whilst Artistic Director of Red Ladder Theatre Company. Over the next few months Jo and Rachel are blogging about the overlaps between art, disability, leadership, equality and more.

At the time when you were at Red Ladder you employed so many disabled performers who are now almost household names (people like Jenny Sealey, for instance, now the Artistic Director of Graeae). What was it that drew you to employing disabled people, often fairly untrained disabled people at that, in a mainstream young people's theatre company?

To answer your question, like so many things, I would have to go back to the beginning.

Before I worked at Red Ladder, Ruth Mackenzie and I founded a touring theatre company called Moving Parts in 1980, straight out of university. From the beginning it was clearly a socialist feminist theatre company - we were all at the start of our working lives, Thatcher was in power and we were on a mission to change the way people saw women and men’s roles.

I had been very involved with the women's movement at university in England and when I had a year out at college in the USA. The hot issue in Moving Parts, to begin with at least, was men and women - how could they be equal. Could we all do the same tasks with a bit of training and support? Was it just conditioning that stopped us?

Every tour we swapped the tasks round so that admin, tour booking, driving, costumes, writing, directing and so on, were done by different people. Inevitably it became obvious that some people were more talented at some things than others (it’s all beginning to sound a bit like Animal Farm…) and we realised it would probably be easier for all of us if we stuck with what we were good at, if only for some of the time.

Once we had at least, partially, got to grips with gender, it became clear we had to look at race. Jatinder Verma (Artistic Director of Tara) came to see a show we did about the family which was touring to young people in youth clubs all over the country and asked me afterwards why all the actors in the company were white. Although I tried, I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer and I realised, as we all did, that sexism was just the beginning of a long ball of string.

Moving Parts slowly became a multi-racial company. It was both inspiring and incredibly tough for everyone involved - not least the black actors who came into a company of well meaning white socialist feminists who knew very little about black culture, black history or black politics.

It meant finding actors who hadn’t necessarily had the chance to go to drama school - lots of the best black actors in the early 1980s went to youth theatres like The Tricycle in Kilburn and to Anna Scher in Islington rather than drama school. It meant that we all had to rethink how the world worked and in the confines of a company van, find out what an integrated company meant in practice.

As we sat in traffic jams on the M1 we talked about eachother's life stories, about why being an anarchist was a cop-out and how to counter the inevitable racism we encountered in small towns and big cities all over the country. There are things that I will never forget - the welcome the white members of the company got in a black club in Bristol’s St Paul’s on the same night the local white run pub wouldn’t let the black company members in. Going to perform in a youth club in Barking which it turned out was run by the BNP (who told me in no uncertain terms that they hated Jews as much as they hated black people) and where the sense of threat from the shaven headed ‘youth workers’ was palpable. The three months residency we did in Moss Side in Manchester, where for once the white members of the company weren’t in the majority and my friend Mal needed to guide me through a world he completely understood and I didn’t.

Artistically, I realised that work we were making as an integrated company was much more exciting than anything we had done before - it drew on this whole rich diversity of art forms, it was much more edgy, it referenced contemporary culture and the audiences found it exciting too.

So when I ended up at Red Ladder it was unthinkable that the company wouldn’t become multi-racial: it was clear to me by then that you only really have two choices when it comes to oppression - you do something about it, or you do nothing and by doing nothing you collude. It might be important to say here that the non English Methodist side of my family were German Jewish and escaped from Berlin in the middle of the night in 1933 - so collusion has never seemed like an a attractive option to me!

By 1985, when I arrived at Red Ladder, all the ground work had been laid: I was already used to, indeed loved, working with a really diverse company when people came from different cultural backgrounds and different levels of opportunity in terms of experience. I had spent hours tracking down actors who had started out in youth theatre and were currently working as pizza delivery messengers or Manchester cabbies and persuading them to come and auditions. I hadn’t at that point worked with disabled actors although my family, like many people’s families, is full of people who were born with a disability or acquired one as they got older.

At college in the States my close friends tended to be radicals - well as radical as you could be in America in the late 1970's. We were all into learning sign language - they even had a signing table in the college dining hall which was definitely the most fun place to sit. They took me to see the National Theatre of the Deaf in Washington whose work is entirely in ASL (American Sign Language). And we talked about the politics of disability, as I did with lots of the women’s movement people I knew in London. When I was at Red Ladder I went to see shows by Sheffield TIE and Theatre Centre, both of whom were working with disabled actors at that time.

So I understood the networks you needed to use to involve actors who would otherwise be disenfranchised - apart from Rose Bruford College in Kent, you needed to skip the drama schools and go to youth theatres like the Tricycle or Bulmershe College in Reading which ran a theatre course for deaf people.

You needed to understand the politics so that you could appreciate what it was you were trying to do, you needed to talk to people and learn from them. Without doubt the learning is one of the things I have always enjoyed most.

So, given all that, employing young, talented, disabled actors on national tours to youth clubs seemed pretty obvious really!