Disability arts group with radical plans

Founded in 1997, Extant is the UK’s leading performing arts company for visually impaired artists and theatre practitioners. It creates unique and innovative artistic experiences, placing visually impaired (VI) people at the centre of all we do – our touring productions, our artistic teams, our work in professional development and our access training for other organisations.

This summer we will move into our new home, Brixton House – the newly built cultural hub for South London, and celebrate 25 years of ground-breaking work. 

As chair of the board, I am particularly proud of the way that Extant has transformed itself during the pandemic. While Covid has had profound effects on us all, for VI people the challenges have been both specific and extreme. For example, how do you navigate using touch in a world that is fearful of other bodies? 

Over the last two years, we have produced two digital shows inspired by the experiences of visual impairment:  Flight Paths Online and the interactive Rathbone. We carefully moved our No Dramas improvisation workshops online and, as part of our Pathways programme, we developed bespoke training and mentoring  for VI people, supporting 16 writers and 15 directors to take their first steps in the industry.

Visually impaired people to take centre stage

Centring the creative experiences of VI people is a way of changing the world. We don’t just want VI people to be included: we want them to take centre stage. But we recognise there is more work to do. 

The challenges faced by the sector now are different from when Extant started out. A low paid, precarious working culture makes it harder to sustain a career. Brexit and the hostile environment make it harder to take part in cultural exchange. And the erosion of school, Higher Education and local authority services have damaged the infrastructure and social purpose that once supported the subsidised arts sector. 

As with Covid, challenges faced by VI people in this context are both extreme and specific. A 2021 report from the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations says the creative industry's working practices means disabled people are doubly disadvantaged as they are more likely to lack social capital, struggle with income insecurities and be unable to work long, unsociable hours. 

Likewise, Arts Council England’s Diversity Report from 2019-20 shows that disabled people make up just 11% of Chief Executives, 8% of Artistic Directors and only 6% of Chairs. No wonder there are currently only a handful of VI cultural leaders in the UK, from a population of 2 million VI people.  

Open up to people from marginalised communities

Meanwhile, training programmes and access courses designed to address these imbalances tend to replicate the systems that produced them. Organisations are encouraged to ‘open themselves up’ to people from marginalised communities, but there is little understanding of how they will listen to the experiences and wisdom these ‘marginalised’ people bring. At the same time, individuals are expected to learn how to navigate these systems, all the while representing their own ‘marginalised’ status. 

Clearly, it is not enough to train disabled people to work inside systems that discriminate against them. We must also ensure the systems change. In 2023, Extant will launching a new, ground-breaking programme developing new models of culture and leadership shaped by VI creatives. We hope it will be the change we want to see. 

In 2026 our founding director and CEO, Maria Oshodi, will step down. Instead of a standard recruitment process to fill her shoes, we will embark on a three-year project – EVOLVE – to turn ourselves inside out, invite new disabled leaders into the heart of the company, share what we have learnt so far, and together discover the shape of Extant’s leadership for the future. 

Radical and inclusive arts leadership

At its centre, EVOLVE is training for two VI artistic directors who will work with us for 15 months. They will be involved in all strategic and governance decisions, be supported to produce their own public, creative work, and undertake a bespoke journey of training and mentoring designed to meet their personal needs.

At the same time, we are partnering with Middlesex University to develop an MA programme in Radical and Inclusive Arts Leadership and to fund a PhD on the history of Extant in relation to inclusive and innovative arts practice. 

On the way, we will work with Performing Leadership Differently – a research collaboration between the arts organisation Something to Aim For and Dr Amit Rai at Queen Mary University of London – to evaluate the internal processes of EVOLVE. This will include the board and staff, artists and participants. We will support each other to listen, to act, to respond. We want to embed learning and openness deep into the culture of Extant, to create systems that make these values sustainable and meaningful in everything we do. 

The plans for EVOLVE come from years of thinking in different contexts – in creative productions, in community workshops, in board rooms and staff meetings. It is also inspired by Pathways, our flagship training programme (led at first by Hannah Quigley, and currently by Caroline Jeyaratnam-Joyner). 

If you are not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem

Personally, I have found this process of reflection transformative. Board members have to think strategically and the temptation is to reduce risk as much as possible by following well established patterns of behaviour. 

But what if we know that established patterns of behaviour aren’t the best way to support our communities? What if we listen to the people at the heart of our organisations, instead of to the pressures outside it?

Recognising the enormous privilege and responsibility that Extant has as the go-to organisation for expertise in creativity by and for people with visual impairment in the UK, EVOLVE is our plan to ‘open source' our knowledge and expertise, so that it can grow exponentially in the hands of other people. 

We want to create radical models of co-creative inclusion that can evolve across disciplines and sectors. We want to learn, and to evolve. We are excited to find out what happens next. 

Mary Paterson is the Chair of the Board at Extant.
 www.extant.org.uk
@extantltd | @MariaOshodi09