♿️ How Accessible Is Your Art?

What do we even mean by accessibility now, and how do we push it forwards?

For those of you that don’t know, I work at an outdoor performing arts venue with an historic house and 80 acres of gardens, woods, and pathways. After my first year working there, my responsibilities increased from selling tickets and answering phone calls to being primarily responsible for providing the best experience to our guests.

Beyond making sure that our signs were clear, our ushers were well trained, and the seats in our theater were clean, this new responsibility pushed me pretty deep into the world of accessibility in the arts. My team and I were responsible for assisting guests in wheelchairs, getting assistive listening devices to guests who needed them, and (in one very touching instance), locating, hiring, and overseeing an ASL interpreter for a children’s halloween storytelling.

Recently, however, our department’s conversations around accessibility have continued evolving. Yes, it is critical that we continue to provide, and improve, the services we offer for guests with visual, hearing, and mobility-based disabilities. But what about guests with developmental disabilities? Does our existing “wheelchair-and-assistive-listening-device” style of guest services apply to them? Maybe in some cases, but it can’t possibly be the correct approach.

This conversation originated around welcoming students from schools for children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Down’s Syndrome, but then the effects were massive. Obviously, COVID has shut down plans of welcoming any guests to our campus and events, but this conversation continued around the ideals of accessibility — that it is the obligation of an organization to ensure that anyone who wants to engage with us should be able to do so, and that the burden is on us, the organization, to provide whatever services are needed for them to do so.

In our existing accessibility context, this was an easy enough statement to make. Accessible parking and seating, improved listening devices, Braille programs, etc. As the conversation moved to guests with developmental disabilities, we acknowledged that we were not a staff of experts and needed to reach out to teachers and professionals in the field for advice, training, and guidance.

But then the conversation kept going.

If we were to look at the following statement

It is the obligation of an organization to ensure that anyone who wants to engage with us should be able to do so, and that the burden is on us, the organization, to provide whatever services are needed for them to do so.

and play it out a few steps further, shouldn’t we be expanding these same ideals to other guests who may not feel welcome at classical music venues?

What about guests who don’t have a formal training in music and, for so long, have felt that you need to be proficient in score study to enjoy Mozart.

What about those without cars, for whom access to a venue 3 miles away from the nearest train station and without a walkable route is so limited.

What is accessible about evening concerts for a primarily older audience, who have told us time and time again that they don’t feel safe driving in the dark.

How are we, a classical music venue in Westchester County, NY, making sure that we are accessible to audiences of color, who have been shut out of concert halls for so long.

What obligation do we have to make sure that ticket prices are not a barrier for guests, to make sure that everyone who wants to see and orchestra or a string quartet can do so, regardless of how much they can afford to spend?

Ask anyone who works in classical music what they’re biggest fear about the next 50 years is, and I can all but guarantee that 9-out-of-10 of them will tell you that classical audiences are dying and that there’s no one there to pick up the mantle. Some organizations have stuck to their guns — leaving the problem of declining audiences for the next generation of arts administrators. Others have pivoted, diversifying their offerings to include Tony Bennett alongside Brahams, Madonna alongside Mozart. Others still have leaned into a world of contemporary music, with young composers and musicians, a social atmosphere, and electronic- and indie-influences.

I don’t know that any of these is right or wrong (if I did, I’d be making a lot more money), but they all showcase another reason why focusing on broad-based accessibility is the smart move: it’s good for business.

Not only should arts organizations be focusing more on expanding their reach by making the experience more broadly accessible. I don’t know how they can afford not to. The opportunity to expand an audience base to people who are otherwise potential audiences but have been shut out because they didn’t know they were allowed in, or they couldn’t afford it, or they simply couldn’t get there is such a low-hanging fruit that we absolutely have to reach out and take it.

This conversation doesn’t preclude action and growth on our existing accessibility projects. We just recently met the bare minimum requirement for accessible parking spaces, and our assistive listening devices are on a frequency that was purchased by t-Mobile and will likely become obsolete very soon. We still don’t know what changes we need to make to ensure that our campus and events are more welcoming for guests with developmental disabilities.

We still need to do this work.

But if we uphold the ideals of accessibility, we have a lot more work to do as well.