Following a public vote, OACC pipped Katrina Mazella-Wheeler's project to improve gender inclusivity in brass banding, The Pink Singers' long-running LGBTQ+ community choir and the Wolverhampton Symphony Orchestra's ambitious programming and community work to take the Inspiration award.
I spoke to OACC's Musical Director Beverley McGeown about the journey the group has been on, the practical side of things (for both vocal and instrumental performers), and some of their biggest triumphs so far.
You can donate to Open Arts NI on their website, or by contacting the organisation's CEO Eileen Branagh.
An obvious opening question: Where did the idea for Open Arts NI come from, and how did you put it all together and make it happen?
Well, Open Arts began in 1992, under the directorship of Kate Ingram, the founding CEO. The charity began as a pilot project to try and engage more disabled people in the arts. At that stage it was a bit of music, some drama and a bit of visual art – so no dance or creative writing at that point. And we got funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to run the various programmes. Myself, I came to the company in 1995.
I’m sure you’re very familiar with people generically singing your praises in the press, and rightly so, but I’m curious about how your groups actually work in practice. How do you cater to such a range of people without patronising or boring them, from people with more challenging disabilities to non-disabled people?
It's a great question and the only answer I can really give is that the artists we work with, our workshop facilitators, are all amazing. We’ve been working with many of them for a long time, so they’ve got extensive experience and have undergone bespoke training to work with people of a wide range of abilities. So really it’s about working with the right artists, some of whom have lived experience of disability – that’s the short answer!
In my own practice, I like to try and find a kind of middle ground. So if I’ve got a group of people with a wide range of abilities, I don’t want to make things too easy for the more advanced participants or too difficult for the less experienced. In our choir, if someone is struggling to learn a particular song or choreography movement, we offer them extra tuition – but most of the time it’s their fellow choristers who provide the assistance. Of course a lot of choirs are good at this, but I think our Community Choir is particularly gifted at supporting all its members. People often describe it as something of an extended family because of how much they support each other, both musically and in life generally.
Another thing Open Arts provides is Disability Equality Training for local organisations and businesses, and a lot of this deals with disability terminology. For example, we don’t use terms like ‘able-bodied’ anymore (mainly because it is ‘ableist’ and doesn’t take into account the many unseen disabilities that exist), so for about ten years or so now the preferred term has been ‘non-disabled’. Likewise, we never use the term ‘handi***’ – we actually refer to it as ‘the h-word’ because most disabled people in the UK and Ireland find it so offensive. So, ‘Disabled’ and ‘non-disabled’ really covers it. Of course language and terminology is constantly changing and tomorrow it could be something else, but at the moment that’s the way that we (myself as a disabled person, and I think you referred to being disabled yourself too?) would talk about ourselves.
Yes, recently disabled in my case – so I don’t have that background of years and years of pushing back on people using offensive turns of phrase to describe me.
Right – and much of the reason we do the training is that a lot of people are afraid of using the wrong terminology, and we want to give them the confidence to speak to, and about, people in the right way.
In general, I’m sure you’d always rather adjust and adapt an activity than say ‘no’ to someone – but do you ever have to have difficult conversations with someone who is struggling to make good on their ambitions? To take a perhaps frivolous example: my right foot and ankle no longer work properly – would you try to gently guide me away from, say, tap-dancing?
If you were dead set on it I’d probably encourage you to do one-footed tap-dancing! Where there’s a will there’s a way… but perhaps the more serious answer is that we always try to adapt the activity to the individual participant. As with our Gamelan orchestra (which is a set of gongs and tuned percussion from Indonesia), we’re able to adapt any of the instruments to make them playable.
That Gamelan element surprised me at first, but thinking back I remember other community projects from when I was little that also used the Gamelan, and it strikes me that its different layers of complexity make it amazingly well-suited to mixed-ability music-making. How did the Gamelan come into the picture for you?
The different musical layers in Gamelan are useful up to a point, yes – faster and slower material. If someone is missing fine motor skills, then playing the saron [bronze metallophone generally used for melodic material] could be challenging, so I might suggest they try playing the kempul [a set of hanging gongs] which will play less often. But it’s critical to make them aware that their kempul part is just as important as any other part within the ensemble – it delineates particular sections and phrases, and helps to keep the other players together.
I honestly think that Gamelan is the most accessible melodic ensemble in the world. Anyone can play, regardless of disability or previous musical experience – we’ve had players without any upper-body strength, lying on yoga mats tapping their foot against a gong. And again, that one element is just as important as everything else in the musical piece.
And how has the choir component evolved over time?
When we first started the choir in 2000, we had a completely open-door policy – anyone could come along and sing just for the pleasure of it – and then about six years on, there was a group of quite talented singers who really wanted to go further in their musical endeavours. So we made the tough decision to hold auditions at that point. It was difficult having to turn some people away, and yet we weren’t entirely abandoning them as we still hosted “big choir nights” once a month for singers of all abilities. Also, the decision to hold auditions allowed us to push the boundaries further for disabled singers, giving them more challenging repertoire and opportunities to compete at festivals and perform on international stages. That’s something that we would not have been able to do otherwise.
It initially seems quite a tough, almost unkind decision – but I suppose the opposite side of the coin is that if you do have singers of that calibre, why would you not want to give them those opportunities?
Yes, exactly – if you’ve got a disability, why should you just settle for easy things when you’ve every right to take on more than that? One of the highlights, out of the whole history of the choir, was in 2017 when we took the choir to the European Choir Games in Riga, Latvia – we entered at one of the lowest levels, intending to go for the experience and have some fun.
This is a kind of ranked, competitive thing, like British brass banding?
Similar, but in this system if you get more than a certain number of marks then you get through to the next stage of the competition. So we did exactly that, and got into the Champions part of the competition – and we ended up getting the highest mark there, which put us into the Grand Prix of Nations, which was the highest level of the competition, performing against some of the best choirs in the world. At this stage I must have looked totally petrified, with a full audience and seven international judges sitting behind me – but after our performance we received a standing ovation and some of the most amazing comments from the judges as well.
You rehearse in a venue just off the Falls Road [a road in West Belfast often considered synonymous with the city’s Catholic community]. How easy is it to reach out across those notoriously entrenched community lines? Are those tensions ever an issue in your day-to-day work?
It’s never really been an issue and thankfully it is not something that we deal with on a daily basis. In fact we’re currently working with Belfast City Council on an accessible tourism project. So it’s not so much about making things less sectarian, and more about making the city more disability-friendly and welcoming in general.
A recent post on your organisation’s blog notes that ‘having a disability inherently makes your life political’, in the context of some questionable decisions by foreign leaders and MLAs [Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly]. Do you see yourselves as a political group as well as an arts-focused one?
I think over the last few years we’ve started to be a bit more vocal about disability politics, yes. In terms of arts in general in Northern Ireland, what we’re able to spend on the arts works out at about £5 per person, compared with something like £26 per person in the South of Ireland. And for a disabled person that £5 is going to be even less, or go less further.
I think it’s also worth talking about the medical model of disability contrasted with the social model – briefly, the latter starts from the view that I, as a disabled person, am disabled by society because my needs aren’t catered for, because people don’t consider them, or decide they’re not profitable, or whatever. So then when right-wing politicians start using or alluding to the medical model, and the idea that if you can’t survive in the world as it currently is then maybe you shouldn’t survive at all, then that starts to become a concern for all of us.
You seem to be mostly Belfast-based – do you have any plans to spread further afield in Northern Ireland? Derry is the next biggest city – I’m sure it could benefit from some Open Arts!
Historically Open Arts did projects all over Northern Ireland, including Derry, but with the heavy cuts to the arts in more recent years, there’s just no way we could afford to do that any more. We’re having to trim our sails rather than expanding, and sadly can’t afford to have another office alongside our Belfast one at the moment.
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