Birds of Paradise Theatre Company (BOP) is a Scotland-based, disability-led theatre company and a pioneering force for change in the sector. The touring company has 30+ years of experience, offering knowledge and trailblazing career opportunities for disabled people in the arts. It promotes the work of disabled artists and puts engaging stories of disabled people centre stage, exposing non-disabled people to new experiences and resonating with disabled people who may not already be theatre goers.
We interviewed Robert Softley Gale, Artistic Director and CEO of Birds of Paradise, to learn more about his motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion and how he knows BOP’s EDI work is having an impact. We also find out more about BOP’s inclusive approach to making theatre more accessible for everybody, not just disabled people, as well as getting Robert’s key advice for other organisations considering similar work.
What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion?
As a disabled person and a disabled artist myself, I want and expect to have access to culture and the arts and if I expect that for myself, I have to extend that to other people – it's logical and morally correct. So, I guess a big part of my motivation is about making the arts more accessible to disabled people and to everyone.
How are those motivations embedded into your wider company strategy?
I've been working in the arts for 22 years and we've been talking about inclusion that whole time. We've been using the word 'inclusion' for decades now and in some ways, I think the meaning has got a little lost. We know how to address it with policy at organisational and government levels, but inclusion feels so fundamental to what society must be about. So, if we accept that we all need to work together in society, then we need to think of a way to make that a reality.
Inclusion is in everything we do in our company. When we recruit, we try to recruit people who are from a wide variety of backgrounds as possible—and we're not just doing that to be good or right. There was a piece of research done three or four years ago with Fortune 500 companies that showed the more diverse the company, the more productive it is. Diversity of ideas and diversity of experience brings with it a wider variety of approaches and that adds value to a company.
What are your goals? What are you aiming to change?
I think it's about normalising what we're doing and normalising the visibility of disabled people on stage. It shouldn't be remarkable when a disabled person gets on stage but it still is to a degree at the moment. Also, normalising disabled people off-stage and behind the scenes—production staff, directors, writers etc., who all play vital roles in bringing things to the stage.
We're also trying to make equality a reality. In the UK and certainly in the West, we’ve historically done a lot of work around legislation where we try to build in to law rights for disabled people and rights for other minority groups. That's important and necessary but it's not the only step you have to take to achieve equality. If you're having to rely on the law, then arguably you've missed the point.
There's a lot of research around the number of non-disabled people who never met a disabled person. Nine out of 10 non-disabled people have never had a disabled person in their home1. You can argue about that because they probably have but they're just not aware of it. However, it still tells us that people need to be exposed to the disabled experience to make it less alien, easier to understand or even a bit less scary. By normalising it, you demystify it and make people comfortable with it.
How do you reach your community to make sure they're able to benefit from what you're doing?
This can be hard and I'd say it has changed quite a bit in the last decade or so. I'd say maybe ten years ago or even longer, most disabled artists from the UK knew each other so when you were casting a role or looking for a director, you would call up a couple of people and say, 'I want a young, white, male, disabled guy' and someone in the network would jump and say, 'This guy'. Then, that was fine because there weren't that many people and we could all recommend each other.
Now, thankfully, we've got bigger. Still not big enough but we have increased in number so we are using casting directors and going to specialist casting agencies that have disabled actors on their books. We're also going to mainstream casting agencies that have disabled actors, which is great. We're doing callouts on social media because there are a lot of disabled actors who might not have an agent but want to apply and want to be seen.
Quite often, we'll build a show around the actors we have and create a show that we know will work well for them. So, there's a really interesting balance between making a bespoke performance or making a show and then casting that show. We do a bit of both.
In terms of audiences—both disabled audiences and non-disabled audiences—what is your approach?
Marketing and PR is a big part of what we do and what we choose to put on stage is a major part of that. People come to the theatre when they could be at home watching Netflix, so we have to give them something worthwhile to see. That doesn't mean it has to be light and lovely—it can be challenging, and it can be difficult, but it has to be really good.
A show might have a strong disability message but that's not what we're marketing. We're marketing it as a piece of theatre and a good night out. Some people ask, 'Why not be more upfront about the disability content?' but there are people who hear the word 'disability' and think it's not for them. Those are the people I want to get into the room because they're the ones we need to have the conversation with. For me, that's the argument for not being completely explicit about what we're doing, were inviting a wide audience to come and experience our shows and we don’t want that inhibited by people’s existing preconceptions of what disability arts might look like.
What do you perceive as being the risks for not addressing EDI in your organisation or in theatre more generally?
What sort of society do we want to live in? That's the question I always come back to. Do you want a society where we're all basically the same, where we all look the same and behave the same? I don't think anybody does want that and I think we can all see why that wouldn't be a good thing. So, given that we want a society that is diverse, the different parts of society have to be diverse too—that includes the arts, culture and theatre.
The risk of not doing what we do is that we just become more homogeneous and things become bland and boring. I think the risks go deeper as well. If you look at a lot of political discourse over the past even 10 years, things have become more polarised. We're either left or right. We're either right or wrong. However, if we appreciate that there's a range of perspectives then we surely get a more colourful, more interesting place to live and it seems obvious that this is the better way forward.
How do you know what you're doing is working?
One great example is when we were at the Edinburgh Fringe for 28 nights in a row. We sold out the whole run and played to 5,500 people. Normally, Birds of Paradise would play to 1,000 people a year at most but in that year, we played to six times as many people as a normal year. People were hearing about our show and each night at the box office, there’d be a queue for more standby tickets. People would queue up for hours to get these tickets and for a company like Birds of Paradise, making work by disabled artists, that doesn't happen very often—it hasn't happened before and it hasn't happened since. That's how we know we've done something right.
We also do a lot of evaluation. After every project and production, we'll run an evaluation and do a lot of interviews with the individuals who were involved. We will also speak a lot to external people to get a sense of their perception of the company. Two years ago, we commissioned a substantial piece of research where people who have been following BOP and people who hadn't been following BOP for that long all came together. We interrogated their perception of the company to find out what kind of impact we'd had on them. So, that's another level of measuring impact.
Can you tell us more about what you see as being some of the challenges, barriers or limitations around delivering work with disabled people?
One of the challenges is the number of people we've got in the pool and I think that pool needs to get bigger. We need to be working with the best people and the best people in a small pool is a very small number but the best people in a bigger pool means a bigger number of people. I also think the cost of working with disabled people is higher—we need to recognise that and say, 'Okay, we're going to need accessible rehearsal rooms and it might cost more to hire'. These kinds of things all add cost and that needs to be recognised and compensated in some way.
The other big barrier is still the general attitude that work by disabled actors won't be any good or it will be boring. However, attitudes like that are quite helpful because it gives us something to work against.
What advice or key learning would you share with other organisations considering delivering similar initiatives?
Tell a great story. Think of a great story and tell that in whatever form or whatever medium you're working with. We're all about telling stories and that even applies to very corporate work—they can still tell great stories. So, find a story and tell it well– the end result will be better for it.
To learn more about Birds of Paradise’s EDI projects in the theatre sector, please visit boptheatre.co.uk/projects or click here to read the Don’t. Make. Tea. Benefits Debate.
Explore other case studies today at diversity.wearecreative.uk/case-studies.
