Being prepared can help you to handle the unexpected. By working together with the staff: technicians, producers, managers, artists, volunteers and so on you can help to ensure that people of all abilities will be able to participate in your event. Let’s take a look on what the coordinators of Simbiòtic festival have done to solve unexpected issues and how they prepared their team to handle the problems, in order to help avoid and rectify common problems. But first a little introduction. Simbiòtic Festival is a scenic arts festival in Barcelona, with a contemporary and accessible offer for people of all abilities. The festival has had two editions so far and consists in two parts. Simbiòtic Laboratory: conferences, activities, masterclasses... and exhibitions of inclusive projects with the aim of generating a space for meetings and reflection on the accessibility of the performing arts. And Symbiotic Scene: accessible and multidisciplinary shows. The coordinators of the festival, María Oria, Aina Pociello and Ana Candela, will talk about how they trained their staff to make the event accessible, how they used different types of communication during the festival, and what the most common issues are encountered at various venues. They will also discuss what is meant by the so-called "unawareness barrier" and the importance of communication between all the partners. We are WE ACT ASSOC. We are Maria Oria, Aina Pociello and Ana Candela. We are an accessible stage arts producer that was born a year ago with Movistar Simbiòtic festival, an accessible to all festival of scenic arts. We put a lot of emphasis on training our volunteers, who are a team who helped us make the festival, we train them in the understanding of disability or sensorial diversity, what we have been seeing during the preliminary research was that there is a lot of ignorance about disability and people find it hard to approach a blind or hearing impaired person, they don’t know how to treat them, and for this reason we wanted that a trained team at the festival that could interact with people without any prejudice. Prior to the festival we held workshops on sign language, how to treat a blind person if they ask you for something, because we can be intrusive without wanting to. And so with this we tried to really emphasize it, as we think it is the basis of everything: training to change things. Then we also produced a part of our flyers in braille, because part of the blind population can only read braille and we wanted to give them easier access to the service. Amongst other things we also introduced ‘sensory’ elements, but shared. For example, there was a music event with live painting where the musician said to us: “Why don’t we see how we can make them vibrate, how can we transmit the ‘hang's’ [instrument] vibration”, because on that occasion there was a ‘hang’ with which the piece was played. So we distributed balloons to everybody and while specific sounds were played, so when people hugged the balloons, they could feel the vibrations on both sides. We try to transmit communicative sensibility at an artistic level with all means possible. But also the entire communication of the festival was accessible. If we did lectures there was audio description, our web starts to read the content when you access it... we strived that all communication of the festival did not lose the quality of a scenic arts festival but it is also accessible for groups that don’t have easy access to such cultural content. When implementing accessibility measures in the venues, we find what Ana mentioned: infrastructure problems, many venues are not designed to be accessible, to have AD booths next to the stage or above with the technicians booth, they don’t have an audio loop. Moreover there are theatre spaces that are renovating and they are not thinking about putting in an audio loop. There is no education around this, and there is the excuse of the cost. Of course these updates cost money, which could be met with a plan, but it’s not a priority. There is no problem, no problem at all. There is simply a lack of will to approach this group and sometimes it's both sides, not just the people who see and hear. They faced many daily barriers throughout their lives. Well, daily, political, etc. So they also have a reluctance or distrust to approach events or projects that are accessible and inclusive, because there were many unsuccessful ones due to lack of will, politics, financing... Many reasons. I think there is a disagreement, a lack of coexistence. The greater problem is the lack of coexistence and not having spoken about each group's needs. In fact, what it does is enrich somehow more mental barriers at the level of a creator, for example, who often thinks: "I'm going to place an interpreter on stage. But what is it going to mean for my work? Is it going to get ‘dirty’? Or is it going to respect the aesthetics of the message?" In any case it will enrich, but precisely we must educate, talk and share with all the actors involved so these barriers found by people who participate... in promoting accessible culture, communicative accessibility in venues, in any artistic work it must emerge from all the actors involved, from the spaces, the cultural managers, the creators, the same people who are dedicated to the accessibility and just all these actors that we have just mentioned should meet to find the way to make the best product that just corresponds to the need of all audiences. That is a vicious circle as the programmer thinks: "Why would I make something accessible if they don't come to see it?" They don't come to see it because you do nothing accessible.
