It’s just after 8pm in Perth on a balmy Tuesday night, and I’m yelling at a building: “WHERE IS YOUR AUDIO DESCRIPTION?” I’m not alone – 20 or so people are part of this alfresco protest. There’s a general feeling of low-key jubilation; someone cackles; others whoop. Sometimes it’s just good to have a yell. Even better in a group. Best of all if your cause is righteous. “FONT TOO SMALL!”
We’re outside the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and the words we’re chanting belong to Hugo Flavelle, a 26-year-old local artist who uses a wheelchair and has vision in his left eye only. All of us are part of his free, roving performance work Let Me In, Let Me Out, running nightly as part of Perth festival’s closing week.
Over the next two hours we take a walking tour of four of Western Australia’s key cultural institutions – including the State Theatre Centre and the WA Museum Boola Bardip – and yell at their facades, led by Flavelle in his “Wonderchair”: a wheelchair kitted out with a rig of LED lights, a microphone, a subwoofer and an iPad controller. Hitched to the back is a portable projection rig on wheels that looks like a festive Dalek.
Let Me In, Let Me Out feels like a protest mixed with a street party and mobile rave. As Flavelle leads the procession from venue to venue, rainbow lighting rig flashing, he blasts electronic music – his own compositions. At each stop, he uses the mic to direct us, with assistance from his creative collaborators-cum-hype guys Roly Skender, Mark Haslam and Lincoln Mackinnon.
Of the four buildings on Tuesday night’s loop, AGWA is probably the one Flavelle visits least. His favourite part of the building is the massive elevator – a telling detail. The art is hard for him to enjoy: to start with, the size and height of the wall text means he can’t read it. On past visits he’s been offered decks of large-font text panels – but holding these, let alone turning the pages, is hard for him. He also has difficulty seeing the art works. Audio descriptions would circumvent this, but the gallery doesn’t offer them. I ask him if he’d visit the gallery more if he could read the wall text; “Yes,” he replies.
We’ve met to chat in one of Flavelle’s favourite buildings: the State Theatre Centre of WA. As an avid theatregoer, he appreciates the seating – “it’s great” – as opposed to His Majesty’s theatre, which he visits as part of his performance, projecting the text “I can’t see the show from the access rows” on to its facade. Getting in and out of His Majesty’s is hard for him due to the building’s heritage architecture, he says, whereas access to the State Theatre Centre’s two spaces is easier.
Flavelle has performed at the State Theatre Centre twice. The first time, in 2019, he was dismayed to discover the accessible artist bathrooms were full of cleaning equipment. It was easily and quickly fixed by staff, but in Let Me In, Let Me Out, Flavelle gently calls the centre out: “You’ve been great,” he projects above their entrance, “but there’s room for improvement.” And: “Happy to hear you’ve cleared the artist access toilet. Make space in dressing rooms. Make space for artists.”
These venues are by no means unique, and Flavelle says across cultural institutions there are issues with “the seating position for people using wheelchairs, the height of display cabinets and panels, accessing exhibition content (for example: audio description, guides for people with vision, hearing, or sensory issues) … [and] proper access to toilets.”
And Flavelle is just one person. One in five Australians identify as living with a disability. That’s a lot of people facing a lot of different barriers to attending our public cultural institutions.
Even if they get in the door, they may not feel as if they belong. At our second stop on Tuesday evening’s performance, WA Museum Boola Bardip, Flavelle projects on to the facade: “Where’s my history?” The following day, he tells me that when he looks at the historical exhibits and displays at the museum, “I can’t see anyone like me … It makes me feel invisible.”
David Doyle, the executive director of WA’s peak disability arts organisation, DADAA, says Australia’s culture sector has “a long way to go” on accessibility. Part of the issue, he says, is that a substantial part of our cultural infrastructure is heritage listed – such as His Majesty’s theatre, which opened in 1904 – or built prior to the 2010 federal code for building accessibility.
“There needs to be a massive investment in front of stage, back of stage, dressing rooms, to make these spaces accessible,” says Doyle.
Another problem is that the Disability Discrimination Act is outdated. “Legally, there’s not a lot of requirements for things that people have to do,” says access and inclusion consultant Morwenna Collett.
Good news may be on the way however: as part of its national cultural policy, the government delivered a new arts and disability strategy, including a code of practice for accessibility across sectors. Collett, who has lived experience of disability and is one of the consultants on the code, which will be released later this year, is hopeful it “will finally give us some more guidance about what organisations and individuals should be doing”.
In the meantime, Doyle says the visibility of artists with disabilities is important, and commends Perth festival for its longstanding commitment to this strand of practice.
“A lot of Perth festival audiences would have limited contact with people with disabilities,” he says, “and to sit for an hour or two with an artist with a disability, performing for you, is transformative – for every audience [member]. It makes them think. It changes their thinking. It [has] a massive influence towards inclusion at a really broad level.”
I ask a young couple who are part of Tuesday night’s audience – Bertie, a rugby player, and Vye – why they came, and Bertie says he discovered the show while looking for things to do in Perth. Vye says: “I’ve not seen an artist with a disability in my mainstream feed before. This is very cool. I think it’s breaking down the stigma a little bit.”
Ahead of opening night, Flavelle wrote to me: “I feel scared about telling my truth … I’m scared they won’t like me. All of the venues and all of the people. I’m scared they won’t let me in any more.” But he is grateful to the institutions for agreeing to be part of Let Me In, Let Me Out.
Perth festival’s artistic director, Anna Reece, who commissioned the project, says none of the institutions she approached on Flavelle’s behalf declined. “We expected some trepidation from some of them about not wanting to be blamed or shamed,” she says. “And that’s not the intent of the work. It’s a cheeky, but very genuine, provocation – and completely reasonable request.”
All the venues contributed to a statement (published on the festival’s website) that describes Let Me In, Let Me Out as “part of a shared commitment to engage in the critical issue of enabling access, choice, equity and inclusion … [and] contributes to broader conversations around access, care and responsibility, as we collectively work towards greater choice, fewer barriers and more equitable access for all.”
The morning after opening night, I ask Flavelle what the experience was like for him. “I felt nervous at the start, showing off my work, words, music,” he responds. “It got a little bit safer when I played the music. I got used to the audience. By the end I felt great. Relieved. As [the] audience clapped at my words, my confidence grew.”
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