Disability and the Performing Arts
Nabil Shaban answers to DfEE questions about problems for disabled performers gaining employment
Question 1a Are there barriers for some or all disabled people wanting to start or
continue working in the performing arts?
YES
Question 1b Do you consider that is more difficult for disabled people who want to:
start working in the performing arts?
YES
continue in the performing arts once they have become disabled? ......
YES
please explain:
“Body Fascism”, a term I created in 1983, which places a value on a person’s worth on the basis of
physical appearance or attributes....thus someone with an able body that appears perfect, fit,
hansome or beautiful, has a superior status...whereas a person who deviates from a socially or
culturally physically acceptable norm...i.e too fat, too thin, too short, physically deformity e.g
hunchback, wasted hand, clubbed foot, impaired in mobility or senses (blind, deaf etc)...”ugly” in
some shape or form....are deemed to have an inferior status. Consequently, the heroic, the romantic,
the good, the desirable are portrayed/represented by performers whose physical or bodily attributes
evoke the greatest sympathy / identity from the largest possible audience. Producers of the
performing arts, if they want....or are forced (through lack of government subsidy or incentives or
sanctions etc).... to maximize profits either through box office sales or audience ratings, believe they
cannot afford to alienate the greatest potential audience with content that places the disabled
performer in the central or key role. Basically, the performing arts is organised, structured, motivated
by the market imperative of giving the arts and entertainment consuming public what they want. If the
dominant consumers of the performing arts are young, white, male, able-bodied who want stories
about the beautiful and the handsome and the physically perfect, then it is, and has been, much more
difficult for disabled people to work in the performing arts. Equally, this is also a problem for women,
elder citizens and ethnic and racial minorities. The problems of Sexism, Ageism and Racism in the
performing arts are particular aspects of Body Fascism. “Body Fascist” Market Forces are not just a
problem for disabled people.
Question 1c Could one of the barriers for disabled people starting out in the performing arts
be due to access to training?
......YES
Drama schools etc, will only audition/interview and give places to aspiring performers who physically
fit a pre-conceived mold of the “perfect” performer in terms of physical appeareance and physical
abilities. Drama schools claim that they can only accept as students those who they consider to stand
an excellent chance of obtaining employment after graduation....thus applicants who are perceived
as too fat or ugly or physically inept or disabled and therefore of little marketable value, will not be
accepted for performing arts courses. Where the majority of performing arts training institutions are
concerned, criteria of talent and motivation come second place to desirable physical attributes.
Another problem for today’s drama schools is that the training syllabuses have a heavy emphasis on
able-bodied movement and physical agility...the courses are designed with the assumption that all
students can stand, walk and run on two normal legs, that they have normal hearing, sight and
speech. The movement, dance and fight training do not take into account physical differences.
Drama schools argue that it is pointless accepting disabled people for performing arts training, as
they would not be able to effectively participate in many of the mandatory courses.
Question 2a Are the barriers of a practical nature - for example, restrictons on physical
access to buildings or communication difficulties?.....
YES
If so, what are the main barriers?......
For people with mobility difficulties, steps and stairs are obvious barriers.
Restrictive width of door frames, heavy fire doors, height of door handles, inaccessible entry-phones,
electronic pass-points. Restrictions on access to studios, performance spaces. Lack of accessible
dressing rooms, make-up, costume departments. Inaccessible toilets and shower facilities backstage.
Similarly, technical equipment may be inaccessible for people who have restricted or no hand/finger
dexterity, e.g. cameras, recording devices, editing facilities with smal buttons and controls. Even
where there are lifts, the push-buttons might be beyond the reach of a wheelchair user. Also for
people with sensory impairments, barriers to the performing arts are posed by communication
difficulties, e.g. information on notices that are not conveyed to the visually impaired, or lack of
induction loop systems for the hard of hearing.
However, barriers of a practical nature are never sufficient to prevent active participation in the
performing arts, where there is the will on the part of the producer to employ the disabled performer.
For example, recently I worked as an actor at the Royal national Theatre....and because the venue
and director were determined to include me in the cast, appropriate adaptations including accessible
toilet/shower and dressing room were created for my personal benefit. Equally, I have on three
previous occasions, worked at the old Royal Court, which was not wheelchair-friendly backstage, but
because the demand for my performing services was great, every effort was made to remove the
barriers to my employment. Similarly, when I have worked in film and television, sometimes in difficult
studios and foreign locations, the production strenuously endeavours to minimise barriers to my
involvement. For example, film companies, invariably provide me with an Access Worker.
Where there’s a will or financial incentive, there’s always a way....and excuses surrounding problems
of a practical nature seem to always mysteriously disappear. When a producer is negatively
prejudiced towards employing a disabled performer, then problems of a practical nature become
convenient opt-out clauses.
Fire regulations or problems of insurance cover were/are another convenient excuse for not
employing disabled performers.
Ultimately, barriers of a practical nature are the product of ingrained attitudinal barriers.
Question 2b (or not 2b) Are there difficulties with attitudes towards role portrayal - for
example, seeing the disability rather than the person’s talent?.....
YES
If so, please describe them
The performing arts and entertainment industry is primarily concerned with telling stories....and within
the story-telling conventions, it is not considered socially or culturally acceptable or appropriate for
the principal protagonists to be “ugly” or disabled. If a disabled character is central to the story, then
the performer playing the role must appeal to the widest possible audience, with the invariable
casting consquence of the role being played by a non-disabled actor. Producers seem to believe that
the dominant non-disabled audience need disability to be sanitized, rendered less threatening or
disturbing through the medium of non-disbled perormers or stars. Hence, we have Daniel Day Lewis
playing cerebral-palsied Christy Brown in “My Left Foot” or Al Pacino playing the blind key character
in “Scent of A Woman” or Helena Bonham Carter in “Fear of Flight”. In an industry where the
star-system, the product of market forces and “Body Fascism”, prevents disabled performers from
playing leading disabled roles, its not surprising that it is even harder for disabled performers play
roles where disability is not the issue. In those rare situations where disabled performers play central
roles, the producers always ensure that the narrative has a non-disabled lead character who reflects
the interests and sympathy of the majority non-disabled audience. This also allows the producer cast
a non-disabled star. Generally, these productions tell the story of the “problems” the disabled
protoganist causes the non-disabled protoganist....so, we see the disabled person through the trials
and tribulations, and consequently, through the learning experience of the non-disabled parent or
non-disabled spouse. Thus, for example, Bernard Hill’s character in BBC’s “Skallagrig” or the abused
wife of paraplegic in Lars Van Treer’s “Breaking the Waves” (a film I consider to be highly offensive
to disabled men).
Disabled performers suffer from the entertainment industry’s attitudinal prejudices on at least two
counts. First, roles rarely portray disabled people as lovers, mothers, fathers, romantic, heroic (other
than the boringly predictable “overcoming” illness or disability). A disabled person could be a private
detective, a barrister, a forensic psychologist (I have a degree in psychology) a spy, a smuggler, a
contract-killer, a pilot, a taxi-driver, a UFO or ghost investigator....yet, such opportunities are never
forthcoming.
Secondly, popular (i.e. commercial) entertainment which overly concentrates on police or hospital
dramas, or period costume dramas inevitably denies employment opportunities for disabled
performers. Where the central characters are police detectives or doctors and nurses what roles are
there remaing for disabled performers? Villains? Victims of crime? Sick patients? Hardly positive role
models for disabled people. And what opportunities for disabled perfomers in yet another
Shakespeare or Dickens or Bronte? Even in Richard lll, the one major disabled Shakespearian
character, one is unlikely to find a disabled performer playing the role. whereas black actors, have
played the Moor, Othello... and Jewish actors have played Shylock. In the discrimination stakes,
disabled people are the lowest of the low....
Disabled people live and work in the community, and yet you wouldn’t think so, if you thought
television soaps were an accurate depiction of life in Britain today. I live on a council estate, go to the
local pub and shop at my Asian grocery store just around the corner. I have a local girlfriend, who is
not physically disabled but culturally inhibited in that she is a Pakistani Muslem, and so not free to
have an open relationship with a disabled white non-Muslem man. Yet where is this existence of
mine depicted in Eastenders or Coronation Street or Brookside etc?
The BBC were once very daring and adventurous by casting a disabled performer in a leading role in
one of their soaps “Eldorado”....Julie Fernandez, an actor who has the same disability as me, and
uses a wheelchair, looked set to pave the way for other soaps...until the “hate mail” from Sun-type
readers / neo-Nazi viewers, who complained that she shouldn’t be allowed to live, let alone be
allowed on television. Such a response seemed to have frightened the BBC off the idea of having
disabled people featured on mainstream, prime-time television. The BBC and Channel Four, forced
by the Government and market forces to be ratings conscious, are providing less and less
opportunities for disabled performers.
As British television and film industry is pressurised to pander more and more to the lowest common
denominator (in an attempt to be more popularist and therefore commercial) so disabled performers
will be increasingly excluded from job opportunities and media representation, with the effect that
anti-disabled attitudes will continue in society.
Role portrayal by disabled people is not just an issue within drama. Instead of the Government
spending money on an advertising campaign telling people to see the person not the disability, the
money should have been spent as incentives and sanctions, pressurizing advertising agents to
employ disabled people in television commercials selling such things as Coca-Cola, Rover cars or
Levi jeans or Chanel perfume. If I don’t see disabled people advertising these products, why the hell
should I buy them....they are obviously not meant for people like me.
Question 3 How widespread are these problems, for example are there some areas of the
performing arts where these difficulties are more likely to arise than in others?
In my experience as a disabled performer, I have found that the bigger the budget or expense of a
production, the less likely a disabled person will be included in the cast....or the more commercial the
enterprise the smaller the role for the disabled performer.
I have played the leading roles in theatre which is subsidized or require less funding and therefore
not dependent on maximum box office receipts.....whereas my roles got smaller in television which
needs to be more commercial....and even smaller, often cameo roles in film where the investment is
greatest. The more money put into the venture, the less risks the producer is prepared to take.
I have played Hamlet and other romantic leads, Jesus, Khomeini, Haillie Selassie etc on stage
(particularly in the alternative, fringe arena) where the profit imperative is not paramount,
consequently, directors are more adventurous, creative, daring....because there is less to lose if the
production isn’t commercial.
In television, I have more rarely played leading roles ( my romantic lead in Channel Four’s “Deptford
Graffitti was a notable exception) but had in the past, played substantial supporting roles....that was
until televison during the late Eighties became too ratings-conscious. I have always thought it
significant that the most commercial television channel, ITV, has never given me acting work. In fact,
Granada back in 1988 would not allow an independent producer, they had commissioned, to cast me
in the leading role of a children’s drama series “Microman” because the television executives
believed my physical disabilities and being in a wheelchair would frighten the child audience. It was
said had the project been a single drama they might have allowed such creative casting but to risk
the investment of a seven part series on a disabled performer was not worth taking.
I have noticed that the BBC and Channel Four, since they have become more populist, employ me
and other disabled performers less and less. Now, I am lucky if I am offered cameo roles and
one-liners.
Likewise, with big budget commercial movies, I am offered smaller roles, usually the disabled
stereotypical roles of cowardly dwarf or pathetic begging cripple. Often I am offered “signpost” acting
roles...i.e. my character’s sole function is to point the main protagonist in the right direction.
It seems I am considered a talented enough actor to play Hamlet on stage but not on television or in
the movies.
In the early Nineties, the production department of the British Film Institute started to seriously
consider making movies about disability issues with disabled actors in leading roles, or films by
disabled writers and disabled directors. I was commissioned by the BFI to write a feature film about
disabled people being exterminated in Nazi Germany. Before I could write the second draft, BFI
production was disbanded and then absorbed into the new monolithic Film Council....whose brief is
to only fund commercially viable films. Suddenly, just when I thought things were looking up for
disabled people in the British film industry, the rug was unceremoniously pulled from under our
wheels and white sticks, yet we are being shoved out in the cold again, by populist, market
imperatives.
In short, in those areas where the performing arts are most heavily subsidized, tend to lie the
greatest opportunities for the disabled performer.
