From Invisible to PresenceIng

Maria Oshodi, Artistic Director and CEO of Extant

In my early 20s, two significant things happened to me: the first was losing the majority of my sight, and the next was gaining success as a playwright. However, not too long into that decade, I made a sudden swerve away from my blossoming theatre career to head into higher education to study English with Drama at Middlesex University London (MDX) as an undergraduate. I wanted time to reflect, recalibrate, and to immerse myself within an environment where I could do this. Three decades on, I find myself pressing pause on my theatre-making career again, and taking a sidestep return to MDX—this time as a PhD researcher. The circle loops back, as I reflect and recalibrate once again: where does over 25 years of creating innovative access at Extant and PresenceIng the invisible in theatre find us now?

My first time around, I achieved a first-class honours in Drama with English, but the experience of studying through my degree years with no access in place made me determined never to go back into education again. I had been firmly told at the beginning of my undergraduate degree interview that I would have to ‘go it alone on this front’. The result was that I had to cajole fellow students to read my books on tape, so that I could access some publications to cite in my essays.

Through the proceeding years, I honed some arts management skills working for Shape London, and project management ones at BBC Drama, which led to me forming the idea of founding Extant, the UK’s leading professional performing arts company of visually impaired (VI) artists. I miraculously managed to keep this going year upon year (at the start, I genuinely thought it was a project that might last six months, tops). Now, more than 25 years later, I am in a phased exit as Artistic Director/CEO, through an initiative I have driven called Extant Evolve, a radical three-year succession-planning programme that aims to examine new leadership models and innovations in organisational development. This includes a root-and-branch company review, training of the next generation of visually impaired artistic directors, and researching and establishing an academic archival legacy of the company’s work to date.

So, in the autumn of 2023, with promises of access provision for disabled students having gone through a bit of an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) revolution at the university since I was last there, I returned to MDX, enrolled this time as a researcher. I chose to return to Middlesex not only because I am an undergraduate alumna of its Department of Performing Arts, but also because of the university’s support of artists’ return to research study in the form of a PhD by Public Works. This form of PhD gives me the chance to focus on what I’ve built over the last few decades through Extant; I will draw together a retrospective critical evaluation of the key drivers, questions, discoveries, applications, and evaluative outcomes that have underpinned producing interactive performance from a blind aesthetic within the work of the company.

My lead supervisor is Dr Josephine Machon, Associate Professor in Contemporary Performance. We have become familiar with each other’s work through our involvement with Punchdrunk and previous research outputs on immersive and interactive fields of performance, such as Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre (Alston and Welton). My PhD research aims to critically interrogate the political, thematic, and aesthetic interplay involved in blind theatre practice through Extant’s four main creative public productions between 2012 and 2020: Sheer (2012), Flatland (2015), The Chairs (2016), and Flight Paths (2019/2020). A critical question that arises is how to archive these immersive works in new, accessible ways alongside defining their conceptual themes. One of these themes is invisibility.

I didn’t imagine that my research into invisibility would be triggered immediately on my first day back, at my induction day on the MDX campus. Just in case I might’ve thought that Extant’s 25-year project to redress representation and inclusion had succeeded in such a way as to make my research proposal outmoded or irrelevant, the experiences I had during my induction put paid to that. The amount of interaction that by default took place with my access worker rather than with me during proceedings was very apparent, including from fellow researchers to whom I was introduced. During a faculty session, there was no use of self-description during the group introductions, in spite of there being a very obviously visually impaired person present. When I introduced self-description within my own introduction, it then shifted the culture in the room for everyone to include self-descriptions along with their names, area of research, and pronouns, which suddenly made the people around me become visually alive.

In his monograph The Metanarrative of Blindness, blind academic David Bolt describes nominal identification—naming oneself when addressing another—as a process by which one ‘breaks this ocularnormative convention’ and ‘rejects the privileging of visible identity in favor of a new social convention that is not, in these circumstances at least, disabling’ (32). Even if not all modes of visually impaired access have fully evolved within university culture since the dark days of my undergraduate degree, I do have higher expectations for other settings where disability is more visible, where there is supposedly more awareness of disability, and where disability is even augmenting the environment.

Yet recently, even in these spaces, I have encountered visual impairment as invisible, further emphasising the necessity for pursuing this theme in my research. Two examples of this erasure of VI access in public events have taken place: once at a London disability festival and once at a conference held by the UK’s flagship theatre venue. The disabled artists at the former and the presenters at the latter ignored the brief to self-describe. In the second half of the festival, after I had put in a complaint at the break, some of the artists made a joke out of describing themselves, or added in visual gags that were not described at all. As is explored in the article ‘Puppets, Jesters, Memes, and Benevolence Porn: The Spectacle of Access’,

The reduction of signed language interpreters to entertainment material, even on serious occasions such as public health emergency broadcasts, signifies the value placed upon accessibility … and reinforces notions of signed language as lesser than spoken languages. (Robinson 329)

In this instance, by the ‘reduction’ of audio description, visually impaired contributors were made lesser; the perpetrators being disabled artists themselves added insult to injury.

At the conference, the presenters during the second half (having been similarly reminded during the break) this time displayed gendered differences in delivering their self-description. While those who had self-described as female gave straightforward, concise descriptions of their physical appearance, for which I shouted out a loud and clear ‘thank you’ from the audience, those who had self-described as male mostly shrouded their descriptions in jokes and chose to focus on their clothes, leaving out their physical appearance.

The reason I’ve highlighted these recent experiences is because one of the first tasks of my research journey is to engage in self-reflection. So as well as tracking the journey that initially led me to MDX—and, many years on, what brings me back there again—I felt it important to take the temperature of what I am experiencing around me right now, and use this to ignite the way into my research.

Extant was created out of a response to the absence of visually impaired performers galvanised on their own collective terms. It forged a space where we uncovered the first roots of how we could theatrically interpret, through form and content, the authentic way in which we negotiated our environment. Emanating from this, it also afforded us agency to initiate inclusive description into performance. As a result, we have slowly evolved the cultural landscape, where our sensory impairment has become more manifest, and whereby inclusive design for visually impaired people in performance, scripts, staging, and sound is more commonplace.

However, in other ways, our needs are still absent or invisible ‘in the room’, as exampled here: by being ignored, forgotten, joked about, or only partially delivered. Thankfully, complaints have become much more public these days, rather than us just taking it and going away grumbling, as was the case of the disempowered visually impaired of old. And, as with my yelling out of ‘thank you’, our voices can also be heard celebrating access loudly when it’s got right. This public acknowledgement means that I visibilise myself in a dominantly sighted audience, identifying precisely who is benefitting from the inclusion of this cultural change.

The externalising of access also affords others agency to engage in an active visibilising of themselves, literally participating in bringing the room further into visual being, through drawing a visual impression of themselves for someone like me. This PresenceIng of the room in an exchange of visual impressions and visually impaired people’s responses platforms our access in a way that was previously hidden through traditional audio description: delivered by professional describers somewhere offstage, contributing to our invisibility. In this live public form, audio description becomes equitable with other visible access provision such as British Sign Language (BSL), acting as a statement that visually impaired people are present.

My PhD research takes this concept of the PresenceIng of visually impaired people further, by extending what this has meant politically and artistically over the last 25 years and beyond. I consider how this has contributed to forging a more appropriate space for ourselves within theatre. I am excited by the prospect of returning to a university that values the practice of artists as researchers, acknowledges the ways that artistic practice can enrich and consolidate research, and encourages eclectic means of learning, critiquing, and presenting.

Not only am I intrigued as to what this will mean for myself as a practitioner, but also what it will mean for Extant: through the novel archiving of its historic work, and through engagement in debate around innovations in organisational development, while we explore succession transitioning and pathways towards different models for disabled leadership in the future.

Much like my years of conditioning through mounting Extant productions, there is a lot for me to do, fit in, focus on, examine, and produce in a short period of time. So, roll up the sleeves: let’s dive in and begin reading, thinking, listening, discussing, writing, designing, creating, accessing—and start building the future.

Works Cited

Alston, Adam, and Martin Welton, editors. Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017.

Bolt, David. The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing. U of Michigan P, 2013.

Robinson, Octavian. ‘Puppets, Jesters, Memes, and Benevolence Porn: The Spectacle of Access’. Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, vol. 53, no. 3, December 2022, pp. 329-44, https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.22.024.16613.