Part one: 11am – 12pm

“Thank you for coming […] today we are doing an experiment. We have made a piece of work that isn’t a piece of theatre and we are in a gallery, with me standing in front of a screen where the film we have made will be shown. This is unlike a lot of our theatre… There is no spoken dialogue. There is a sound track but no linear story in the traditional sense. We had to think creatively about how to address access.”  – Mairi Taylor speaking at event –  full transcript of Q&A available below

This performance event created experimental and explorative access provision that layered over the film installation at the Fruitmarket.

As a non-narrative non- scripted work, creative access approaches for Orbits are unique to the work and are less obvious to navigate than with BOP’s stage plays.  There was no text to interpret.  The movement and ‘activity’ within the work was open to subjective interpretation and response – oftentimes driven as much by emotive, subjective responses as much as any ‘sense making’ of what seemed to be happening.  This work set out to display its beauty and power for the viewer but did not wish to dictate fixed meaning – it danced on the cusp of abstraction.  Providing audio description for the visuals and potential BSL interpretation of the sound world in this context required an equally non-prescriptive approach.

To this end we commissioned artist Juliana Capes, who has built part of her practice around verbal description of visuals arts, to respond to the work.  We chose to work with her rather than a theatre audio describer in the first instance of the creative access journey around Orbits to add another creative layer to the work.

“…for a long time,  we were moving away from language, and we wondered if  there would be text initially and some song in it. The  further we went we felt we wanted to move away from  language knowing that at some point we had to think about  audio description and have it, so it was a joy to hand the  process over to someone so skilled and able to offer a  type of language we would not be able to see or find. I  really enjoyed the texture of what you found in the  language, an incredible privilege to be part of.”  Rachel Drazek during Q&A

The process of making Orbits was one of layering from the very beginning and so we continued to take this approach for this event.  With the final edit and soundtrack of the film coming together the week before the opening we were able to make the film available to Juliana for a week or so before the event to watch, respond to and create a descriptive layer for the work.  This was not and could not be a recognisable or traditional form of audio description as we currently understand it in theatre practice.

What resulted was a poetic response in text, sung sounds and utterances that layered over the film as it played live.  To expand on the experiment we asked BSL interpreter Rachel Amey to interpret Julianna and elements of the original soundscape and its tone that felt resonant.   Juliana’s performance was also captioned to provide text support in the space.

Part two: 12pm – 12.30pm
The second part of this event was a Q&A for the event and the work in general with Rachel Drazek, Mairi Taylor and Juliana Capes taking questions.  This led to a discussion about the work and in particular the approach to access.

Rachel Drazek delivered a movement workshop for adults, and adults with accompanying young people.  The workshop investigated themes within the film Orbits – ageing, materiality, relationality. Using bodies in space and in movement with each other and materials, we will use gentle improvisation scores and playful moving time to explore change in shapes and ourselves.

Rachel worked alongside her 2 year old daughter throughout the session and we encouraged participants to bring children/family members if desired and so had a mixed group of professionals and others collaborating together in the space.