As a girl gang ourselves, we at FreeBird get more and more bright eyed when learning of the increasing number of girl gangs who are bettering different aspects of the creative industry day by day. When we came across Lemonade Gang, we were instantly compelled to share with our FreeBirds the work they are doing for female freelancers across the UK. Their main focus being community, networking and opportunity they are empowering freelancing womxn across creative industries to “reach their potential and learn from each other” could their objectives align with ours anymore?! Founded by Priya Thanki, Hannah Rothwell and Zara Askari, powerful women who have a plethora of experience between them, freelancing managerial roles in the events and production industries. Starting as three friends discussing their hardships as womxn in the industry; whether that be voices left unheard, the lack of understanding around family planning or the struggle with discussing the intricacies with friends and family who are traditional full time workers, they understood that there needed to be a space to ask each other the questions they didn’t have the answers for that other female freelancers may already have. We asked some questions and they poured us a cup of their lemony knowledge and we were desperate to make sure all of you FreeBirds get a glass…

We are aware that Lemonade Gang only began this year and you already have over 3000 followers, and a community of creative freelancing womxn. Tell us how Lemonade Gang began and why you felt you wanted to create this space in 2020?

Lemonade Gang started as a small group of women who wanted to share insights and information about the events industry. All the women in the original group were based in London and all had long standing careers in events. The small community that we created was one which helped everyone within it. 

As the world started to come to a halt, we had more time than ever to have open conversations with each other and one thing that we kept looping back to was the lack of support for female freelancers 

We realised that we were on to something bigger than the events industry and that lots of women in creative industries felt just like us. We wanted to do something to give the community of female freelancers (Which, by the way, there are now more than ever!) have a voice and access to support.

On your website there is a space for freelancers to sign up and gain access to hundreds of freelancing, this is directly in line with FreeBirds values, however we aren’t naive, this must take a lot of time. Was initiative born as a result of freelancers being left behind in the wake of COVID? 

The main reason for setting up Lemonade Gang was to support womxn to further their careers. 

We are hungry for our community to succeed – We have a dedicated jobs board on our platform, and we upload freelance opportunities on a daily basis, we want our community to have access to as many opportunities as possible. We are also pushing companies to think about hiring females in the creative industry to create a more diverse playing field.

The jobs board wasn’t born out of  COVID-19 but it definitely helped people in a time where they may have lacked motivation. The jobs board is now one of our most popular sections on the platform and we have successfully matched lots of amazingly talented womxn with jobs we have posted. We have also found a lot of them have hired within the community which is exactly what we aimed for.

It sounds so cliché but we all love being freelancers and the idea of helping other womxn makes all the time we put into the community worth it. As founders, having community members being hired because of our platform and during this year of all years was completely inspirational. 

As I write these questions, it is ‘Equal Pay Day’, it seems the perfect time to bring awareness and ask you about your forum #paywhatyouoweme. Where you ask your lemonade gang to be anonymously honest about their rates of pay, how they identify, and also which industry. Can you describe to us your aims with this forum, and how it affects the community?

Secrecy around pricing creates several issues, not least that clients – and newer freelancers alike — have no guide for what a typical rate might be. This doesn’t help anybody.

Getting rid of the secrecy and encouraging both womxn and men to start talking about their pay is a major first step as very few freelancers talk about what they charge, either in public or private. 

The aim of this campaign was to create an open book regarding freelancers pay. Freelancers are often guided by clients on how to charge, allowing the client to decide what you’re worth rather than treating yourself like a business and determining your rate by the skill and service you supply. With an open book structure, you can further justify your rate as an industry standard and feel confident in your day rate. 

You recognise that the pay gap enlarges as women get older, and also specify to note down your ethnicity in the forum. Do you think the intersectional struggle of being a freelancer is recognised enough? 

Gender pay gap is something we feel strongly about because we have lived it. The experiences of getting older and the gap widening is sadly something we know because of experience.

After the Black Lives Matter protests, as a community we decided to have a table talk (which is our monthly catch up with everyone where we have a safe space to talk about chosen topics) During this talk, we got a lot of insight of how the freelancers felt about the lack of diversity and the way they were treated in their workplaces. We wanted to explore this further after the call and we emailed an easy five question form to 5000 creative companies to answer, it was asking how diverse their companies were. Not one company replied – their silence spoke volumes and I think it answers your question about recognition or should we say, lack of. 

The struggle is ensuring you get booked for work and do not get isolated for bringing up these issues when being hired. 

This is why it is important for us to work with companies to ensure they are made aware of the injustices facing women and ethnic minorities.

The more we are able to educate freelancers on their rights the more they can educate their loyal clients on how to make a change.

We need the support of businesses to make a greater change.

What all freelancers need to really understand is that they can choose who they work for and with and if you feel that a company does not represent your values, don’t work with them – and if you feel you need to make others aware of these businesses, do so. 

Community is the theme FreeBird has been working with the past two months, it is also a staple part of your mission, what can freelancers do to help each other? 

We would not be where we are without our community. It’s the most important part of our mission, structure and success.

We have many channels of communication in our community that allows freelancers to talk amongst themselves, collaborate and meet (when able) to discuss how they feel along with opportunities that they may want to share and work on collaboratively.

We have come out of an age where womxn need to be pitted against each other and have walked into an era of championing creativewomxn.  

Our main focus is community over competition and womxn supporting womxn. 

This is a mantra for us, and this can be completed in many ways through our community. 

Promoting their work on social media platforms, taking someone under your wing in a workplace, putting forward another womxn for a job you see that could be of interest to them. All of this focuses on pushing all of the womxn around you to succeed – we want to break the glass ceiling, but we don’t want to be there on our own when we reach the top.

We need to get away from the 21st century mentality of being the only womxn and we need to push to be an equal sex.

This all applies when working as freelancers and in some ways it’s even more important as you do not have the safety net of a HR team.

We would love for Lemonade Gang to give our Freebirds your 3 tips that will be your best friend as a female freelancer!

1.   Believe in yourself and your skills – you are talented, you know what you’re doing, do not talk yourself out of your own merit
2.   Ask questions and talk – freelancing can be pretty lonely but there are thousands of freelancers out there ready and willing to share information and support. 
3.     Write, distribute, sign contracts – We can’t stress enough how important this is. Not all clients will have a contract for freelancers so make sure you have a template so that both parties are aware of what will be supplied and what is expected.

JOIN LEMONADE GANG 

A totally FREE platform, sign up at the website below…

When you do there is an ‘invited by’ box, whack ‘FreeBird’ down there for us so they know we sent you!! (Women supporting women right?!)

Website: https://www.lemonadegang.co.uk 

Instagram/Twitter/Facebook: @lemonadegangldn

We chatted to Helen Murray about becoming a theatre photographer, the importance of community and building a clan, and on her recent photo series Our Empty Theatres— which took her behind the doors of theatres around the country, mid-lockdown.

Leeds Playhouse

The arts, according to Zadie Smith in her recent book Intimations, have always been considered “a sort of charming but basically useless playpen, in which adults get to behave like children – making up stories and drawing pictures and so on – though at least they provide some form of pleasure to serious people, doing actual jobs.” 

Writing in her usual tongue-in-cheek voice, back in the early months of lockdown (long before any of us knew where Barnard Castle was), Smith highlighted what would become a huge topic of public discussion— the changing place of art in our society, as a result of the pandemic. “Now there are essential workers,” she wrote, “whose task is vital and unrelenting – and there are the rest of us, all with a certain amount of time on our hands.” 

Sometimes it feels like that division— between ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’, necessity and luxury— has become a kind of tourniquet around the creative industries. The need to justify art, the ‘moral anxiety’ (as Smith puts it) around how we now spend our time, has wrought huge damage on theatre in the UK, and the ecosystem of individuals who make it up.

When she set out to shoot the photo series Our Empty Theatres, Helen Murray felt none of that moral anxiety.
“I just really needed, for my soul, to just… start taking photographs again”, she said as we chatted over Zoom. “Basically, all my jobs were cancelled, and I had a couple of weeks where I was just in panic mode […] I wanted to do something that responds to the lockdown, in a way, [and the fact that theatres] were closed, and what a huge momentous time in history that was. And so I was like, ‘Actually, it might be quite cool to document that.’”

The Lyric Hammersmith

What started as an attempt to capture theatres in the state they’d been left in at the end of March, however, turned into a rare example of how “photography, like theatre, has an incredible power to make you feel” (as she says in the introduction to the series). Over the course of two months, Murray photographed 22 theatres around the country, from Battersea to Liverpool. Having started with Soho Theatre, and the Bush Theatre, more and more venues quickly became involved, inviting her to roam their empty halls and explore their backstage areas.

She found meal deal wrappers discarded on disused tech tables, props half-packed into storage boxes, chairs strewn around in rehearsal rooms. “Shooting this series has been sobering”, Helen said on her website. “Being met with total silence. No background noise, no chitter chatter, no infectious laughs bellowing out of a rehearsal room, just complete silence.”

The Young Vic

Alongside these images, she started collecting quotes from theatre professionals, in response to the question “What do our empty theatres mean to you?”. In the end, she amassed over 200 responses— from hair and makeup artists, to fight directors, to marketing managers, writers, actors, and more.

As of this morning, 21 of the images are being released as Limited Edition prints, with only fifty of each image available. 10% of the profits of these prints will go towards The Theatrical Guild, the leading UK charity for backstage and front of house workers.

“What I feel most when I see these heart-stopping images isn’t sadness, strangely. I overwhelmingly feel hope. These spaces are waiting for us to return.”

– Playwright James Graham, in response to the photo series

“I was really fortunate to be in a lot of freelancer Zooms during lockdown. So you’re getting to have Zoom times with the Lighting Designers, and Set Designers, and Movement Directors, which you don’t really get to do [normally]— so you’re hearing people’s stories that you don’t really get to hear. So what I wanted to do, to amplify them, was to get their voices [in the series]. That was never what I set out to do, originally, but it was the natural progression of what the piece was, and became.”

An empty Wardrobe room, The Young Vic

There’s huge variety amongst the answers Helen received— from optimistically resolved (“the future is a decision. We can decide to go back to how things were or we decide to go back to a more diverse, more sustainable way of working” – Marty Moore, Production Manager) to grimly simple (“An empty theatre means no work” – Aimee Kember, Actor and Front of House). 

When I first saw the series, the response that leapt out at me, and resonated most clearly, was Pasty Ferran’s– “WASTED POTENTIAL”. Now, a few months later, I feel more affinity with Tim Crouch; “An empty theatre is like an empty church.” Neither should have to prove their worth to society, and both only really exist to be a kind of arena for human experience.

Ultimately, what the series proves to me is the obvious need for artists, and art-making, in this historical moment– and it’s a point proven by a wildly talented, freelance, artist. The task of representing these buildings was taken up by someone from outside their doors, and embraced by a huge community of professionals who have been physically and economically displaced by the pandemic. 
 

Sobering? Absolutely.

Originally from Derry, Northern Ireland, Helen moved to London in 2008. She’s worked full-time as a freelance photographer specialising in theatre since 2012, photographing over 250 shows throughout the UK. (Basically, if you’ve been to a major theatre in the UK within the last 8 years, chances are that Helen has photographed a show there.) In addition to live theatre, Helen also shoots commissioned editorial portraits, publicity images and film stills. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue, the Sunday Times and the Guardian. And you’ll know her most recent haunting work, the series Our Empty Theatres, which showed glimpses of 22 theatres around the UK, including Manchester Royal Exchange, the Liverpool Everyman, the Royal Court, the Young Vic, The Lyric Hammersmith, and many more.

Make sure to check out Our Empty Theatres, and the Limited Edition series of prints now available on Helen’s website. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram, to keep up to date with more of her work.

“I’ve learnt a lot through lockdown and I’ve got better and stronger at making the right decisions. Maybe it’s naive of me, but I’m a business and I’m very much a person that believes we’re all equal, so let’s try to understand and support each other during this time.” 

When you think about success what do you think of? Money? Career? A Family? The question often asked is can we actually have it all? We all know that being able to work in a field that brings us fulfilment is not only desirable, but something we expect comes with a serious amount of hard work and dedication. This is true of course, but it’s often even harder work when the industry is niche. Theatre is not only ever changing, it’s over-saturated, uncertain and inconclusive. One thing’s for sure, Louise Dearman is most certainly a woman who has reached success on all of the above. 

Louise needs no introduction. With a seriously impressive West End, National touring and International concert CV, a supportive fan base following on all her platforms and most recently her most important role yet, a Mother, Louise has repeatedly shown her commitment to it all. Additionally, Louise has managed to do all of this whilst ensuring she keeps life at its most real and most importantly, Louise isn’t afraid to call out problematic attitudes and behaviours which continue to plague parts of the entertainment industry. 

Photo by 🇨🇭 Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

Having worked as an agent assistant myself for five years at leading London agency Global Artists, I’ve had first hand experience working both for and alongside Louise. We’ve shared some incredible moments together, witnessed changes and supported each other continuously. Louise was also one of the agency’s first ever clients, so she’s also grown up with the team, which I for one find rather charming. One thing’s for sure, Louise has always had many different strings to her bow. From starring in Wicked, to creating an album, to publishing a book – she’s always been creative in multiple ways and open for conversations around something new, which is exactly the reason we couldn’t wait to meet with her and discuss Growth. 

Louise’s outlook on musical theatre is incredibly positive and optimistic, and as she recalls the support she’s had from producers and other industry professionals as a new mum we understand her enthusiasm. As she explains, becoming a parent has had a significant impact on how she approaches her career and her choice of roles. Considerations on childcare, workload and scheduling have all taken a front seat in deciding who to work with and when. 

In the midst of a childcare crisis, Louise’s insight into returning to work in musical theatre after having a child is a welcome ray of positivity. Putting aside the pandemic for a second, because we can’t solve everything at once, her experience seems to be a great example of what to do (producers, pay attention!). Offering support with childcare and being flexible with schedules are vital elements to ensuring that, as Louise puts it no one “is made to feel guilty for being parents”. Similarly, the job-sharing system she encourages producers to consider could be a fantastic way to facilitate a more accessible industry, for new mothers as well as many other people who may not be able to work 8 shows a week– or 12, I’m looking at you Joseph.

It’s especially difficult at the moment to picture a time where theatre is back up and running as it was before. But what we should be planning for is a better return, where having a child does not mean deciding to abandon your passion or taking on a role which leaves you neither time nor energy to care for your baby. Let’s make best practice the industry standard, and emerge from this having grown.

image by Cherry Laithang supplied by Unspalsh

Wardrobe supervisors and dressers turning to fashion, jewellery and mask making. Carpenters unable to build sets crafting furniture instead. Actors projecting onto paint and canvas. The small business directory Not On The West End showcases more than anything that while a lockdown might take away our stages, nothing can strip the creativity and adaptability from theatre professionals. Previously the Wardrobe Deputy on 9 to 5: The Musical at the Savoy, Anna Saunders created Not On The West End to give a platform to the many side businesses run by UK theatre professionals.

It has been five months since theatres closed their doors. The £1.57bn emergency funding announced in July won’t be reaching venues until November at the earliest. Job losses continued to increase; in the month directly after our ‘rescue’ package was announced the number of layoffs and redundancies rose from 3000 to 5000, we can only imagine what this number has risen to now, and these figures do not even represent the numerous freelancers who have fallen through the gaps of government income support schemes, nor the casual staff on zero-hours contracts who might well keep their jobs but will receive no wages once furlough ends.

I used to argue with my ex-boyfriend about the arts. A staunch Tory, he would insist that sacrificing the creative industries was a small price to pay in order to protect the more ‘essential’ sectors. The longevity of that relationship aside, I couldn’t help but think back to those arguments recently as I watched a (socially distant) crowd huddle in the rain, shivering over hot chocolates in paper cups, so desperate as they were to experience a brief, bright 45-minutes of live music after months of anxiety and isolation, and so determined our technicians, producers and baristas were to provide it for them. Theatre is essential, as are the people who create it. Proposed schemes such as Seat Out to Help Out surely have to be realised in order to save our industry, and, as the creative performance protest due to happen on 26th September shows, we will certainly keep fighting to do just that. Not On The West End’s amazing advocacy for those who deserve some recognition and business support through this downtime is just another example of the solidarity and versatility within our community. We are makers, planners, builders and fixers, and we are resilient.

We spoke to Anna to learn more about Not On The West End and her views on what needs to happen to save our industry. 

Anna, please tell us more about the project – why you started, what it has meant to you so far? The commissions must be going through the roof. 

The project is a hub of small businesses, one being featured on the Instagram and the website each day, that are helmed by theatre professionals whose income has been affected by COVID. It’s a way to support the businesses of specifically theatre people and find loads of them in one place. It’s impossible to search for them as a group on etsy, but you can find all their etsys through Not On The West End. 

Before the idea was an idea there were things that my flatmates and I, all theatre types, had noticed happening in our community. The first was how many costume and wardrobe people had jumped into action to make PPE for the NHS. We did too, if you work in wardrobe there is always a problem solving attitude. Tech rehearsals do that to your brain. 

But there was a sting to the government’s PPE tsar making a self-congratulatory announcement that the PPE shortage was over, with no mention of the hundreds of costume professionals and home sewers who had made it happen. It was especially hurtful whilst there was also no sign of any help for the arts coming. 

Once scrubs were done, I noticed dozens of friends turn to selling face masks. It became a bleak joke when I got a facebook notification to guess which of my supremely talented friends had turned to making masks to make their rent. 

I have always done embroideries for friends as presents and at the start of lockdown I was sending them out to friends as little pick-me-up gifts – including one of Ariel from The Little Mermaid, appropriately singing ‘I want to be where the PEOPLE are!”. But I had always been of the ‘my hobby is not a hustle’ mentality. 

Four months into this and that mentality was no longer sustainable. I needed to do something. Anything to fill my days and make some money. Something needed to be done. 

I had the idea less than a month ago. Friday 7th August. It was a joke name. Not On The West End – like Not On The High Street, but we don’t have jobs anymore! I got the email address and I got the Instagram handle. 

Then I got scared. But convinced by a friend it wasn’t a crap idea I sent out six texts. All to friends, wardrobe people that I knew had a creative side hustle. I was thinking about doing this thing, would they be interested. 

Within the day I had ten people signed up. Now it’s about 160. 

I knew there were a couple of things that I needed to make sure everyone knew. 

1. Everyone featured is a theatre professional. 
2. I would not be taking a cut of sales or charging to be featured. 

From that point the ‘Not On The West End’ community kind of made itself.

How are you finding this emotionally? Like us, we know you miss your ‘normal’ work and we can only imagine you have been as strained as we have. Do you find yourself engaging with those who send in submissions and hearing their lockdown/missing theatre stories? 

Launch day was a particularly strange one for me. The first three businesses all came out on Friday 14th August, a week after the initial idea. Beth Cousins, the amazing woman behind The Sun and Moonflower, and who would usually be dressing at Pretty Woman, messaged me after only a couple of hours and told me she’d made a sale because of it.

I made a video, that I jokingly called Parish Notices, to go on the Instagram stories at 6.30 that evening, to say thank you for everyone’s support. Day one had been a success and I had businesses lined up to fill every day through to mid-November, but after posting the video I just sat down on my bedroom floor and balled my eyes out. 

Over the previous week I had received so many emails from people who were lost, unsure how to even describe themselves; are they a lighting designer or did they used to be a lighting designer? Do they work at Mamma Mia or did they used to work at Mamma Mia? But they were still fighting. It sounds cliché, because it is, but the show must go on spirit is a part of it. People were using their skills – related to their usual job or not (because I can’t imagine how a trumpeter would usually use macramé in their theatre life) – and making things happen.

It felt like a lot of pressure, to live up to the hopes and expectations of the people who suddenly seemed to be relying on me and my little website and my new Instagram. But the thing is, theatre is so often referred to as a community rather than an industry. There’s a reason for that. 

Theatre is part of my identity – if I have a night off from whatever show I’m on, it’s to go and see a show. I’ve done a morning laundry call, gone to see a matinee and then gone back to work a show. Talking to so many people over the last few weeks I know that I’m not alone. 

We all miss it. Like an ache. I imagine the feeling of standing in the wings at the Savoy and hearing Dolly’s voice start a performance of 9to5 and I get goose bumps and well up. Imagining the call for beginners or hearing an orchestra tune up or sitting in the dark in a crowd of people all brought together for the same reason. Theatre is special and needs to be protected.

Would you like to share any thoughts on what the theatre industry needs this year? We’re all frustrated and feel the Government have let us [the industry] down, but what needs to happen from your point of view to ensure all of us unemployed theatre workers have some positivity/glimmer of hope?

The three things we need from the government are a plan, some respect and insurance. 

We need a plan. More than anything. There seems to be nothing but gossip at the moment. The money promised needs to actually get out of the government bank account and to the places it’s needed. The much-hailed announcement of the £1.57 billion now seems like more of a plan to make a plan and a way to shut us up for a few weeks. That money also seems to be dependent of making as many people redundant as possible. This government cares about buildings but not people. 

We need respect. We are being treated like theatre is our hobby, rather than a career that we trained for and excel at. We are being treated like we are stupid for wanting to have a career in theatre at all. Without theatres the West End is a ghost town. Without theatres every town and city across the country loses its heart – the places people experience their first panto, or play Tree Number 3 in the youth production of The Wizard of Oz, and see elite professionals on the same stage the next week. 

You can’t only save the big institutions and leave everything else to disappear because it won’t be long before there are not audiences starting their love of theatre in a 300 seater in their home town, and they won’t be able to travel to the next big town to see a big tour, and they won’t have the love for it built in. Theatre is a proper industry that should be respected, not just for the money it makes, but for the people it brings together. 

We need insurance. There is no point saying we can open back up if we can’t be insured. They need to be our insurance.  

We know the pain inflicted by the closure of venues and the loss of work. FreeBird aim to also promote the change that needs to occur within the theatre industry, post lockdown. What change would you like to see? The lack of support for Freelance staff has really got us thinking.

The thing we need to talk about and address as an industry is work-life balance. It would be difficult to address this without mentioning the current union negotiations. Sunday shows are being much discussed and demanded by producers. 

I don’t think that thought is being given to the lives of the people who work the performances when this is being put forward. Getting, most likely, only Monday evenings to see friends and family outside of the industry is a brutal change to a group of people who already give their jobs so much of their time and energy. 

When it is just some shows that do this, with double pay for Sunday shows, there will be people who can change their lifestyle, for a while, to do this. If the whole of theatre has two show Sundays we will be forcing experienced and talented people out of the industry for good. 

Before closures there were beginning to be rumblings of ways to make work-life balance in theatre, especially for parents, better, with much publicised job shares and companies giving over dressing rooms for nursing mothers. I think that when we return we need to make sure that this progress is not lost and is actually built upon going forward. Sunday shows as industry standard is the opposite of progress. 

If someone is out there and wants to submit- how can they reach you? 

All submissions should be sent to me via email – notonthewestend@gmail.com

What’s next for this project? Coronavirus is here to stay and so are all those creative makers and small brands- any new developments or next stages?

The next step is the Not On The West End virtual market, organised by Grace Cheetham, of Serotonin Series. Over the weekend of the 21st and 22nd November we will be hosting a special event. Participating businesses will be offering discounts, there will be a raffle (everyone loves a raffle!) and a few live streams to meet the theatre professionals who are behind the businesses and hear from them about their experiences. We are hoping it will be a great event for the community we are building up and give everyone a boost in sales before Christmas! 

Ultimately, we hope that this won’t have to be a long-term project – maybe something we can bring back each Christmas to show off our community. We want to get back into theatres and rehearsal rooms because that is what has brought us together. The love of our industry. Live theatre is not like anything else. It isn’t like films or tv. It isn’t like sport. It’s a group of creative and brilliant people coming together to unite an audience in a specific time and place and story, and then doing it all over again the next night. It’s fleeting and eternal and isn’t something that should be paused like it is now. 

Not On The West End is a coping mechanism, not a cure. We need theatres to be open and full and telling stories. You can find Not On The West End on Instagram and via their website. Keep up to date with FreeBird on all things arts, culture, events and theatre. Read our article with Stylist magazine.

We chatted to theatre maker Kerry Candeloro about the battle for accessibility off and on Broadway, how she came to work as a voice and dialect coach, and her work at Lincoln Centre Theater, New York Theater Workshop, and Moulin Rouge! The Musical.

Ever heard something complicated explained in a really simple way? It’s memorable, right?

“Education people talk a lot about the difference between equality and equity,” Chana Joffe-Walt says in a new five-part podcast series produced by Serial (yes, that Serial) and the New York Times. “Equality means everyone gets the same thing. Equity means everyone gets what they need.”

I was folding laundry when I heard that. Podcasts, I’ve found, are the only reason I get any housework done. It was a rainy Sunday, around a week after I’d caught up with my friend Kerry Candeloro. We’d talked about the differences in our experiences of the pandemic (herself in her hometown, Philadelphia, and myself in London). We re-traced some of the steps she’d taken since we’d first crossed paths (at a theatre in Highgate, North London), and how she eventually found her way to her current job at Moulin Rouge! The Musical. And we’d talked about her perspective on ableism and lack of physical accessibility in New York theatres, as a Disabled artist.

Hearing Chana’s words, I thought back on our conversation. Equity means everyone gets what they need.

Kerry’s lived experience of disability and chronic illness intersects with live performance in a bunch of different ways, but most obviously in the public domain– the domain where artists and audience members navigate physical access to, and mobility within, a huge variety of spaces. In her years working as an off-Broadway House Manager, as well as a freelance voice and dialect coach, she’s witnessed countless instances of theatres failing individuals in very public ways; from an audience member being unable to access a disabled bathroom because the doorway wasn’t wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair, to seeing “a well-known Disabled actor be carried up and down the stairs of a theatre where they were headlining because there was no accessible dressing room” (both stories from Kerry’s Instagram, where she’s collated some of these examples).

Kerry leading a coaching session 

“The real privilege isn’t just being able-bodied”, she says, in response to those experiences, “it is the assumption that you automatically have access to any space you wish to physically enter. It is assuming that you can get into/move around any building independently and without ‘being a burden’.”

Beyond the issue of literal access, Kerry also draws attention to the place of disabled people within cultural discourse– from Tik Tok, to the Tony’s. While high-profile productions such as Deaf West’s Broadway revival of Spring Awakening, and the more recent Public Theatre production of Teenage Dick (which crossed the Atlantic at the end of 2019, with a run at the Donmar Warehouse) go against the grain, big-budget productions continue to overlook disabled actors when portraying their own experiences (consider the casting of disabled characters in shows such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, or even last year’s Tony-winner The Ferryman). Pop culture depictions of disability tend to iconise and de-humanise people, isolating them within ‘inspiration porn’ discourse– most recently seen rearing its ugly head in the discussion around the revelation of Chadwick Boseman’s cancer diagnosis (for a great explainer on ‘inspiration porn’, check out Stella Young’s seminal Ted Talk on the topic).

If there’s any reason for hope, for optimism about a more equitable future for disabled and chronically ill people within theatre, it lives in Kerry’s insistence on communication and action. As Kerry mentions, recent movements like the Black Theatre Coalition and We See You White American Theater (who recently published their 31-page list of demands to organisations regarding increased representation and inclusivity) underline this notion— the untapped potential for collective power when individuals all speak with one voice.

That voice is saying ‘this is not good enough’. That voice comes out in hashtags, and scratch nights, and zoom calls; in awards ceremony speeches, in full-company meetings, in Front of House bars. That voice insists that artists are not commodities, and audience members are not buyers. That voice is refusing to accept symbolic gestures, or tokenism, from any so-called ‘gatekeepers’ of the performing arts.

That voice is sounding remarkably like Kerry’s.

Her first year working on the Director’s Lab programme at Lincoln Centre Theater

Kerry is a graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualised Study, where she studied speech pathology, theatre, and sociolinguistics– developing the concentration “Vocal Transformations: Speech as Identity in Theatre and Society”. Throughout her degree, she produced shows and workshops with Gallatin Theatre Troupe, as well as helping to develop original work at Manhattan Repertory Theatre, at the New York International Fringe Festival, and at Dixon Place. She worked as the Digital Assistant for Academy Award winning costume designer Ann Roth on the film The Post (directed by Steven Spielberg) and on the Broadway production of The Prom, as well as the recent revivals of Carousel, Three Tall Women, and The Iceman Cometh. At Lincoln Centre Theater, she works alongside Dramaturg Anne Cattaneo, helping to run the Directors Lab, a developmental program that nurtures stage directors from around the country and around the world. Alongside this, she continues to work as a freelance voice and dialect coach, across the New York theatre scene. And she’s also worked extremely hard as one of the head House Managers at the Off-Broadway powerhouse that is New York Theatre Workshop, and, before lockdown went into effect, as the House Seat and Guest Services Coordinator for Moulin Rouge! The Musical at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on Broadway. She is an electric force in every room, and a wonderfully articulate advocate for disability rights– particularly within a performing arts context. She’s arguably the most widely-read person I know when it comes to play texts, and her romcom reviews are the highlight of my Instagram feed.

Check out Kerry’s Instagram (@kerry_can) for more of her insightful thoughts about theatre and disability, for her knock-out Rom Com reviews— and for her recent take on Midnight Sun (she read it so you don’t have to). 

Kerry’s other recommendations:

• the Netflix documentary Crip Camp (2020), featuring the phenomenal Judy Heumann
• the activist and writer Imani Barbarin (and her website Crutches and Spice)
• to caption your videos!