Captioning live performances. Integrated, immersive, inclusive captions for the stage

Our project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC - UK) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC - UK). It brings together Red Earth Theatre (https://redearththeatre.com/), a company with an established commitment to research in inclusive integrated communication for young audiences (with a focus on d/Deaf audiences) and an interdisciplinary team of researchers to explore solutions for those audiences for whom, immersion in performance has been hindered by modes of accessibility that divide and distract attention. Building on Wilmington’s ‘Deaf like me’ report on engaging ‘hard-to-reach’ deaf audiences through theatre and on the Arts Council of England’s Creative Case for Diversity (2011), our presentation examines intersemiotic multimedial translation in the form of creative captions on two levels: first, in terms of their integration into creative processes, and secondly in terms of technological solutions meant to be easily replicable. Red Earth Theatre has an audience base consisting of children and families, D/deaf audiences, hearing audiences and those with a broad range of communication needs. Red Earth Theatre aim to use a ‘total communication’ approach in their work – including metaphor, symbol, costume, set, lighting, auditory, signed, oral, written – immersively within the theatrical aesthetics of the performance, but the work required to achieve this is expensive and demanding for small- and medium-scale theatre companies. Through a series of workshops and events with key stakeholders from the deaf community, locally and nationally, this project explored the development and use of cheap or freely available immersive technologies to support further development of integrated inclusiveness for deaf audiences in small scale touring productions. The project team developed and pioneered technologies with a view to further develop a model of accessible design for inclusive immersive theatre that is integrated in terms of both access and aesthetics from the beginning of the creative process as well as work towards transferability of its approach with theatre makers working in different spectra of disability and access (e.g. autism, visual impairment) and different producing venues.