A relaxed approach to theatre

Kirsty Hoyle is project manager of the Relaxed Performance Project, which has worked with nine theatres across the UK to put on performances that can be enjoyed by people with autism or learning disabilities and their families. She is now putting together a good practice guide with help from The Prince’s Foundation for Children & the Arts. Kirsty hopes that soon all theatres will feel confident about staging relaxed performances.

Why do we need relaxed performances?

If you are autistic or have learning difficulties and you need to get up and leave a performance because you have anxiety problems or you need to shout or talk about what is going on, or share your feelings it’s really difficult. You can’t easily go to the theatre or the cinema if you have someone in your family who has autism or a communication problem.

How does a relaxed performance differ from a regular show?

In relaxed performances you can eat and drink, you can have your iPad and iPhone on and you won’t be told off for talking. You can move around the auditorium, even go onto the stage. There may be changes to lighting and other effects.

How do you put together a relaxed performance?

Firstly, I go out and sell the idea to theatres. For example, the Royal Shakespeare Company put on a relaxed performance of Romeo and Juliet, and the National Theatre staged a relaxed performance of the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time in October last year.

It is important to programme the performances at times when families can come, as relaxed performances are about offering opportunities to families to enjoy theatre together.

Then there is training. I did a lot of work with box office staff at the National Theatre around terminology, so if a mother rings up and says her son has Asperger’s they know what she is talking about.

We create a visual story and send it out to the audience before the performance. A visual story tells them what to expect. There are pictures of the cast and the stage. It also contains information about the moments of the show that might create anxiety, such as the stuffed dead dog in Curious.

Closer to the performance I work with front of house staff and talk to them about the changes there will be, and the kind of behaviours to expect. There may be a severely disabled person vocalising and groaning. 

It’s great when you go to a relaxed performance and everyone is shouting and screaming and expressing their enjoyment and nobody gives a hoot.

I also meet the cast. We have a re-rehearsal, so we can look at lighting, entrance cues, walking through the audience, anything we want to take out or change. The actors tell us the relaxed performances really come alive for them.

What about the future?

We hope the shows will enable more families to enjoy their local theatres. All of the theatres we have worked with are doing more relaxed performances. I hope that when we release our evaluation many theatres will no longer need my assistance. Relaxed performances should not feel like a concession, but a regular part of a theatre’s schedule.

Stay up to date with the Relaxed Performance Project at: facebook.com/RelaxedPerformanceProjectTo find out about the work of The Prince’s Foundation for Children & the Arts visit: childrenandarts.org.uk 

Story published in Interested Women, June 25, 2013

Rethinking prostitution and its victims

Jack the Ripper's victims were real people; prostitutes are real people.

Fed up with ‘Jack the Ripper’ tours sensationalising the murder of innocent women, activists from London's Tower Hamlets put on an alternative tour to celebrate the victims’ lives and show how prostitution and violence blights women’s lives today.

Last year a group of women living and working in Tower Hamlets, East London were concerned about the high numbers of arrests of street-based prostitutes in the run-up to the Olympics.

They set up the Living in Freedom Together (LIFT) campaign, to press for more services and support to enable women to leave prostitution.

They are urging local residents to write to Tower Hamlets Council, asking them to ensure support is available to women who sell sex in brothels as well as street-based sex workers, given that the violence 

that takes place indoors is hidden.

They also want the authorities to take action against perpetrators - those who buy sex, pimp or traffic women - rather than prosecuting the victims, the prostitutes.

Tower Hamlets was home to the infamous Whitechapel murders. In the 1880s, five women were murdered, all of them prostitutes. The killer was never caught, but was nicknamed ‘Jack the Ripper’.

These days numerous ‘Jack the Ripper’ tours ply the streets of Tower Hamlets.  The tours go to the different murder sites of the women and describe their deaths. Visitors are warned to prepare themselves for ‘a terrifying experience’.

“They sensationalise Jack the Ripper and the murders of the women,” said LIFT member and Tower Hamlets resident Tessa Horvath,  so LIFT decided to stage alternative Jack the Ripper tours.

Charlotte Mallinson, who is researching the removal of self from the Whitechapel victims for a History MA at the University of Huddersfield, joined us on the LIFT tour I went on.

She has been on some of these ‘Jack the Ripper' tours as part of her research.

She said that on one tour the guide projected the image of one of the victims onto a wall.  The guide described the victim as an ‘eyesore’ and remarked that ‘he [the murderer] didn’t go for lookers did he’.

By contrast, Horvath explained,“This [LIFT] tour is designed to remind us that the women he murdered were real people – we want to tell you a bit about their lives and to celebrate them and commemorate their deaths.

"Rather than visiting the sites where they were murdered we will be visiting the places where they lived” said Horvath, as we set off.

But LIFT does not just dwell on the past.

Shannon Harvey, a Tower Hamlets resident who works for Against Violence and Abuse (AVA), a local charity working to end violence against women and girls, uses the historic stories to illustrate some of the concerns of women selling sex on the streets of Tower Hamlets today.

Mary Anne Nichols, the first of the Whitechapel murder victims, had five children when her marriage broke down after her husband had an affair.

At first, her husband gave her 5s a week, around £18 in today’s money, for support. It was not enough, so she turned to prostitution and became alcohol dependent.

But when her husband found she was earning her money through ‘illicit means’ he was no longer required to support her.

Harvey explains that today, too, alcohol and drug addiction makes some women more vulnerable to prostitution.

Or Elizabeth Stride, who was born in Gothenburg in 1843.  By 1865 she was working as a prostitute.

By 1869 Elizabeth was living in London and married John Thomas Stride, a ship’s carpenter. They ran a coffee shop together in Poplar. By March 1877 she had been admitted into the workhouse, suggesting that their marriage had broken down.

She told acquaintances that her husband had drowned in the sinking of the Princess Alice in the River 

Thames in 1878.  She said she had been kicked in the mouth by another of the victims as they both swam to safety, which had caused her to stutter. In fact, John Stride died of tuberculosis in Poplar and Stepney Sick Asylum in 1884.

From 1885 until her death she lived much of the time with a local dock labourer, Michael Kidney. She had laid an assault charge against him.

"Today it is extremely common for a woman in prostitution to be involved in an abusive and controlling relationship, often the partner acts as a pimp and the woman is coerced to sell sex to provide and support their partners drug and alcohol dependencies," said Harvey.

We learned about the lives of Katherine Eddowes, born in Wolverhampton in 1842, who friends described as ‘intelligent and scholarly, but possessed with a fierce temper’.  Another said she was a ‘very jolly woman, always singing.’

Mary Jane Kelly, born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1863, who, in 1879, at the age of 16, married a collier.  She turned to prostitution after he was killed in an explosion shortly afterwards.

And Annie Chapman, who was born in 1841 in Paddington, and married her maternal relative, John. They had three children. One child died at the age of 12 and one was severely disabled. Both Annie and John developed alcohol addiction and they separated in 1884.

Horvath and Harvey say while their tour highlights some of the circumstances that often surround involvement in prostitution such as poverty and drug use, focussing on these alone runs the risk of marginalising women who do not enter prostitution against this background.

They said that vulnerability comes in many guises, and quote a supporter of the LIFT campaign who said: 

“I wasn’t homeless, in poverty or on drugs. And I didn’t need the money – he did!

“But I was a vulnerable, trapped, traumatised person, frozen in time. I was 24. I had no family to turn to; traumatised from incest and other childhood sexual abuse.

“The man who pimped me was someone I thought was a friend. I was pimped, and no one knew there was a pimp making me stay out. I just didn’t have the words to explain what was happening to me. I was not a criminal, I was abused.

“Again. Everyone deserves protection from exploitation and abuse and you can’t necessarily tell when someone is being controlled.

"Choice didn’t come into it. What a stupid word! The only one with the choices was him.”

Story published on Women's Views on News, June 18, 2013

Protecting migrant women against violence

WVoN spoke to Feride Kumbasar, director of Imece, which supports refugees, asylum seekers and newly-arrived migrant women fleeing violence.

Imece is a women-only centre based in Islington, North London, set up to help women fleeing from all kinds of violence.

It offers a holistic approach, providing support on a wide range of practical issues to women from all ethnic groups, particularly those from Turkish, Kurdish and Turkish Cypriot communities.

“They have language issues, problems with immigration, their qualifications may not be recognised here.

“We make sure the resettlement process is easy for them.

"We offer specialist welfare rights advice, we support them to register with GPs or to get their children into school or nursery,” said Kumbasar.

Support is available for those who want to leave a violent relationship and establish a life for themselves.

“We undertake a risk assessment. Women fleeing from enforced marriage or honour-based violence is high risk, as the woman may be killed.

“The response might involve changing their names, changing their location.

“Everything needs to change. If they are a student they need to change their school.

“Honour killing is a huge issue in our community, which needs a complex form of support. It may need to involve the police, the education authority, the Home Office if it is [forced] marriage,” said Kumbasar.

A more ‘standard’ risk, involving violence but no death threats, might mean changing the locks on her flat or obtaining an injunction.

Some women are fleeing state violence, especially in Turkey.

Imece provides counselling and mental health support to help the women cope with their experiences.

Turkish, Kurdish and Turkish-Cypriot people have been coming to Britain for the last 60 years.

Turkish-Cypriots started arriving here after World War II to escape the civil war in Cyprus and in response to appeals by the British Government for labour.

A military coup in Turkey in 1980 led some to seek political asylum in the UK. Kurdish people have been migrating to the UK since the 1970s from Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.

Imece, which is Turkish for 'partnership', was formed in 1982.

Although Imece is a pan-London organisation it mainly works in Hackney, Haringey, Islington and Enfield, where most Turkish, Kurdish and Turkish Cypriot Londoners live.

Although London has the greatest concentration of Turkish and Kurdish people there are also significant clusters in Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool, but Turkish and Kurdish people can now be found in most parts of the UK, as they have fanned out across the country to set up businesses.

The Turkish and Kurdish community is now a lot different from what it was in the early days.

“At first people thought they would be here temporarily and set up organisations linked to political sects back home.  But the situation in Turkey has got worse and they have stayed here.

“Immigration legislation has changed a lot and doesn’t allow people to come to Britain as refugees any more, even from war zones. The doors are closed now.

“There are still some refugees but a lot of the newcomers are higher education students or men and women coming on spouse visas.

“That is when we have lots of forced marriage[s].  Families are forcing their young daughters to marry their first cousin in Turkey in order to bring them here.

“They don’t inform the young girl, some have boyfriends here, their families trick the girls telling them they are going on holiday.

“They come back as married women, and some of them end up knocking on our door,” said Kumbasar.

Imece researches the changing needs of its community so it can offer an improved response.  It also provides training to practitioners like social workers so they can better understand what the women are going through.

Although Imece was founded to support Turkish, Kurdish and Turkish Cypriot women it now receives funding from Islington Social Services to run an outreach project aimed at all Black and Ethnic Minority women.

Kumbasar believes that culturally specific organisations like hers are necessary to help the authorities in Britain to fully understand what is going on in some cases.

“A woman went to the police saying her ex husband contacted her saying he was coming back, so she had to leave.

“She said they were separated because of violence, but more importantly, last time they saw each other her husband was with a man.

“The police interpreted this as homophobia saying the woman assumed the man was going to abuse his son because he was gay.

“We talked to the women and she told us the husband was with a guy who was 12 or 13 years-old and that he had always been interested in boys this age.

“She told us the last time they met her husband had looked at the boy strangely and touched him in an inappropriate way,” said Kumbasar.

Imece was then able to support the woman and her family to move away from London.

This year Imece launched a campaign against child abuse in Turkish and Kurdish communities.

A recent conference attracted over 80 practitioners.

“There are some child-rearing practices which might be seen by European communities as child abuse.

“For example smacking and beating is used to discipline children in Turkey.

“It is not only the parents who have a right to beat the child, but neighbours also.  If they see a child misbehaving in the street they have a right to beat that child.

“On the one hand we fight within our communities against these practices as well as explaining to the practitioners that this is a traditional practice and it will take time to change it.  They need to work with the families rather than labelling them as abusers.

“Child abuse is a problem in all communities as we have seen with the Savile case, but in my community it is a hidden issue.  It is not being discussed.  It is as if it is not happening.

“We know that most of the children who are being abused are being abused by their own family members.

“In Turkey it is the practice for newly-married couples to go and live with the extended family members.

“In this situation, in a crowded household you increase the risk of sexual abuse. You don’t have the spare rooms for children to have their own bedrooms.

“This is our fear about the new bedroom tax.  They are asking vulnerable people to rent out their rooms to strangers, but they don’t know the language, they don’t know the system.

“They will not be able to vet lodgers and, if something goes wrong, they will not be able to report it to the authorities, so we suspect that this will lead to an increase in child abuse,” said Kumbasar.

Gender equality at heart of UN plans

UN panel proposes empowering women and girls as key development goal.

A panel of senior politicians and officials, set up to identify future development goals for the UN, has concluded that it should be possible to eradicate extreme poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy and preventable deaths by 2030.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon set up the UN High Level Panel on the Post 2015 development Agenda (HILP) to devise goals and targets for international development after 2015, when the Millenium Development Goals, agreed by the UN in 2000, run out.

The panel by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, President of Indonesia handed him their report last week.

The report argues that eradicating extreme poverty must also be linked to sustainable development - tackling poverty and protecting the environment should no longer be seen as separate issues.

Economies, it says, should be developed to create jobs and provide benefit to a wide range of people, there should be a focus on promoting peace and effective, open and accountable institutions, corruption, money laundering and tax avoidance must be challenged and governments should work together with their people, so that no-one is left behind.

The report proposes a set of 12 goals to bring this about.

Near the top is empowering women and girls to achieve gender equality, along with quality education, healthcare and food, sanitation and water.

The panel hopes that these goals, if implemented, will help reduce inequality, promote peace, address climate change, improve our cities, address the concerns of young people and enable sustainable consumption and production.

The report suggests that there should be a set of ‘universal goals’, along with targets for individual countries.

The panel also calls for a ‘data revolution’.

Technology should be used to enable people to connect with each other and tools like crowd sourcing used to ensure their voices are heard.

To read the full report, click here.