The UK’s arts and culture sector is the world’s fifth largest exporter of creative services and its value increased more than twice as fast between 2019 and 2022, over the pandemic, than the rest of the economy But as most of us know, the real value of experiencing great arts, culture or hertitage is not calculable in pounds and pence. Lord Melvyn Bragg in the House of Lords has described it as ‘an essential positive force for society, bringing joy, inspiration and opportunity to our lives. The creative industries form the national conversation through which we define our shared values.’

In this series of three blogs Jane, who is also Chair of the Arts Marketing Association, takes a personal look at the impact of the arts, how it feels to be excluded and what needs to be done to improve inclusion. You will be able to read Parts Two and Three of this series each month.

You might expect a live concert to be difficult to provide access for a deaf person and a film at the cinema to easier. My recent experiences may surprise you.

A few weeks ago I went to an orchestral concert. I went alone. But I had three tickets. One was for my Dad who had died two weeks earlier. The other was for his widow. Dad had been a wheelchair user in his later years so I was seated, poignantly, next to his wheelchair space.

I thought it looked oddly like a conductor’s podium and smiled, imagining Dad conducting from his chair. I am a musician who briefly worked in an orchestra and I still play regularly in my local orchestra. I wanted to go to the concert, despite not being able to hear the music, or at least in the same way as most others in the audience. It was a way to honour Dad, who loved music and had been looking forward to the programme. In a sense, I arranged my own access. I asked the Box Office for a seat with a good view of the whole orchestra and I borrowed library copies of the musical scores with me which I had read beforehand to try to connect my aural memory of the music with what I could see on the concert platform and the bit I could hear with the help hearing aids.

You may wonder how this experience compares to a hearing person’s. If it’s ‘worth it’. I was a hearing person myself until the age of 25 so can say the experience is different but still magical. There is something about sitting in a large auditorium full of people – the quality of the atmosphere, and the drama of the performance, which can not be easily gained elsewhere. I left feeling a mixture of melancholy that Dad could not enjoy the music and also peace that I had done so for him.

So an experience you may expect to be inaccessible was, in fact, pretty good.

Trying to see a good film was somewhat different.

A good way of dealing with traumatic situations such as bereavement is to seek escape. For me there is no better escape than sitting in the darkness of a cinema and getting absorbed in a great film. At the end of the working week, prior to my Dad’s funeral, I really yearned to do this. It should be easy, right? In fact, no. Despite digital technology making captioning automatic, cinemas are still oddly reluctant to schedule captioned performances. So despite deaf and hard of hearing people despite representing 15% of the population, we probably end up with a choice of about 2% of the available screenings. Plus cinemas need to get more imaginative about access – second language users, for example, find captions beneficial.

I live in Salford, Greater Manchester, and have communicated with local cinemas and arts centres about the terrible choice of captioned screenings. I have received responses varying from the apologetic: ‘Sorry but some hearing people don’t like captions’. (Have they tried watching a film without sound? May shift their perspective?) to the downright hilarious: ‘We didn’t get much interest in our (ahem, 3!) weekly captioned screenings – so reduced it to 1 – and there is still close to no interest’. (Really? And does that surprise you when the original offer didn’t let someone who needed captions to go to the cinema at popular times i.e. when they were not working – yes, we do work actually and no, we can’t always adjust our lives around getting to you mid-afternoon on a Tuesday?).

Why does this matter? Does it matter? One more saddened person in a world embroiled in so much turmoil and conflict?

Actually it does matter. It is about all our physical and mental health. Not just those with the luck and resources to be able to access the full ‘mainstream’ offer. The right arts experience at the right time can help a person avoid disaster and despair. Why else would ‘social prescribing’ by GPs now be a thing? Our area of Greater Manchester recently received a major Arts Council grant to help it develop as a creative health city region. It is becoming increasingly clear that without access to creative arts is vital to us thriving. This blog describes my own experience. People may be unable to enjoy the arts for a range of reasons. 

• Physical access to the building and facilities such as toilets 
• Navigation of a venue and clarity of signage and information 
• Sensory overwhelm (‘quiet’ performances for neurodiverse people are sometimes offered) 
• Feeling self-conscious because you stand out at an event because the other visitors or audience all look like each other but don’t look like you. 
• Language barriers. 
• Cultural barriers which could make you feel uncomfortable. 
• Cost.

Now that digital information makes entertainment via our phones and devices easier, including live-streamed performances has our motivation to bother going out and experience performances in person reduced? What has your experience been? Let us know. We will include your experiences in the next part of this series in November.