In this episode, Mariana interviewed Maria Oshodi whose work is experimental, intersectional, and pushes the artistic and aesthetic boundaries between experience, identity and place. She founded Britain’s leading performing arts company of visually impaired artists Extant and collaborates with other artists, freelancing on a number of independent arts projects.
You can listen to the episode with the audio player embedded below. There is also a transcription underneath.
Transcription of the podcast episode:
[MUSIC]
Mariana: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this new episode of the Darcy Podcast, the podcast on Disability, Accessibility, and Representation in the Creative Industries. My name is Mariana Lopez, and today I am delighted to welcome Maria Oshodi. Maria worked as a scriptwriter for theater from 1984 to 1992. Her plays including ‘The S-Bend’, ‘Blood, Sweat, and Fears’, ‘From Choices to Chocolates’, ‘Here Comes the Candle’, and ‘Hound’, which were produced by national touring companies and later published by Longmans, Methian, and John Murray. She wrote the screenplay ‘Mug’, which was produced by Warner Sisters as a short for Channel 4. After graduating with a first BA honors in Drama and English, she worked in arts management for BBC drama production, and in 1997 founded Extant, the first performing arts organization in the UK, managed for and by visually impaired professional arts practitioners. As the artistic director of the company, she has led Extant in pushing innovative artistic boundaries involving high production values, directing and producing groundbreaking touring theater productions, such as resistance, obscurity, sheer, the chairs, and flight paths. Maria also instigated the research, development, and production of site-specific experimental innovative haptic performance, exploring access, navigation, and technology, for example, in productions such as ‘The Question’ (2010), and ‘Flatland’ (2015). Maria also designed the development of theater training programs for emerging visually impaired artists, as well as designing awareness training programs for venues, education, and other institutions. Maria has also pioneered and led consultancy on integrated creative access within theater productions for visually impaired audiences. Extant was the first disability-led company to win an Arts and Business Diversity Award in 2007. And in 2008, Extant became a regularly funded organization of the Arts Council England, and in 2011 became a national portfolio organization. Maria also works as a freelance writer and arts consultant. So, Maria, thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing this morning?
Maria: I’m good. I’m quite cold. It’s a sub-zero at the moment, aren’t they? But, you know, I’ll be running around later on, so that’ll warm me up, I’m sure.
Mariana: Yeah. Just for the listeners, for context, we record the podcast a little bit before their release, so we’re recording this in January. So if you’re listening to this at another time of the year, that will explain why we’re so cold. Otherwise people will say, “Why are they so cold in April?” [both laughing] It’s really lovely to have you join us today. And I have heard that you were doing a PhD. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Maria: Yeah. So, I began in September 2023. It’s at Middlesex University, which is the university where I actually studied as an undergraduate.
Mariana: Oh, cool.
Maria: And I studied drama with English there, back in many, many, many, many years ago. And it was an interesting time for me, actually, because I was very new into, well, not so much new, but new into the level of sight loss that I’ve currently got. So I was still kind of learning the world in terms of getting around as a blind person. And then I’d worked in theatre prior to going to university, strangely. So I didn’t, a lot of things in my life have always been sort of the other way around. So I didn’t study and then, you know, kind of develop a career in the arts. It was the other way around. I was writing and actually doing quite well. And I had an agent and she was kind of pressing to raise my profile, as she kept on saying. And I decided, you know, well, I feel like I want to stop now. I’ve done enough of, said enough of what I want to say right now. And I wouldn’t mind actually studying the thing that I’m writing content for. I wouldn’t mind studying the arts of theatre. So I told her I was going to leave. And she was like, wide-eyed, we’d kind of wonder, why would you want to do that? But it was a really good move, I think, because I actually took some time out. I was still writing actually while I was at university, but I was writing less and I was studying more, obviously. And it built my confidence, I think. And even though at the time, access was low down on anyone’s agenda, basically I had to sort of provide for myself. That was the kind of message that I got at the university. You can come here, but you just sort of look after yourself. I did kind of, I learned a lot. And I came out with the first, actually. And obviously, in that time between then and now, I have set up the company of Extant. I’ve worked in various other places as well, but that’s been, I suppose, my number one achievement in terms of longevity, because the company is, I think, entering its 27th year now. And then I’ve come to the point where I’m going to be moving out of my role as artistic director in a couple of years’ time. And as part of that succession out of the company, I intend to leave a legacy behind. And that is not just in the work that we’ve done, the people we’ve worked with, but it’s also in some kind of academic record, I guess, of what we’ve done. And so that’s why I’ve embarked on the PhD.
Mariana: Oh, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful.
Maria: And just to say quickly that it is a PhD by public works. So if people are wondering, how is she doing a PhD in such a short amount of time? There are particular PhDs out there where if you are an artist or anyone who’s built up a body of work over a period of time, you can take that and use it as your research material and then work it into an academic context. So that’s what I’m doing.
Mariana: Oh, thank you so much for clarifying. Yeah, I was about to ask you how you were going to frame it, but that’s wonderful to see that you get recognition for such a wonderful career in creativity and creative accessibility. So that’s wonderful news. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. And you, Maria, and your work through Extant, I think it’s fair to say are beacons of creativity and accessibility in theatre. And I first encountered your work back, you might remember when I was based in Cambridge, and you very kindly invited me to experience Flatland. And I absolutely loved it. And every time someone asks me to mention what is one of my favourite experiences of integrated access, I always mention Flatland and I always talk to my students about it. And to me, it’s not just about embedded accessibility, but also that thinking beyond the visuals. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what was your journey? You told us a little bit about how you went from your career to then your studies and now recording that legacy through a PhD. But what was your journey to the creation of Extant?
Maria: That’s an interesting question. When I came out of university, I went to work for an arts agency called Shape London, which is an arts organisation that worked primarily with disabled people, but not just at the time. It was like with lots of different people who are considered on the margins. But it was led by a really strong director at the time called Maggie Woolley. And there were a lot of really interesting disabled artists working in the organisation. And it was a really great time to learn a lot about disability politics, about just the basics of project management. And just to get a sense of what was out there, going on out there artistically. And I was there for about four years and I wanted to leave. I had kind of felt like you always get to the point, don’t you, I guess, wherever you might be living somewhere or have a job or maybe even be in relationship with somebody and think, “You know, yeah, I’m for a change.” [both laughing] Anyway, I was offered a part in a show actually. And I thought, “I’d like to go on a little, I’d like to do this. I’d like to have a little sabbatical, do this tour and then come back to Shape if I can.” And I was told that wasn’t going to be possible. And I was like, “Oh, okay. So what do I do? Do I stay or do I go?” And I thought, “Oh, for hell, I’m going to go.” So I left and I joined this show, this theatre show. And it was actually quite one of those seminal moments because the experience of being in this production was not a happy one. It was really difficult for me as a visually impaired person, though the company was a disability-led theatre company. So it wasn’t for the obvious reasons. And I came out of that experience thinking, “Whoa, if that is what can happen within a disability-led theatre company where the people are quite aware and feel the way I do, then what is it like?” So I gathered together some visually impaired artists. I knew they were all very unhappy about their careers and what the opportunities were that were available to them. And there were these micro grants that were available from the Arts Council at the time to help get little projects off the ground. Because I’d done all that project management work in Shape, I applied for one of these and got a little bit of money to pay for us to get together, to talk, to say what is it we wanted. Everybody just wanted work and to be famous and to be interesting. And what I wanted was to do more of the stuff that I had started to do university, which was around physical theatre, which I found was really interesting for bodies. Because physical theatre and the training of it, it’s got a real able-bodied, centered approach. And when I took part in some of the intensive work around physical theatre while I was an undergraduate, it was very challenging. Because like I said, access was not anywhere on the agenda. But I still felt very inspired because a lot of my theatre making before then had all been about writing scripts and text leading the process. But this was a very different way in. And I was really intrigued about how a disabled body, a body that has certain parameters, can nevertheless work in interesting ways and tell stories in a way that’s authentic to that body without it having to change. A lot of the theatre I’d seen that visually impaired people had been doing before then was all just trying to pretend to be sighted. And the more you could appear sighted, the better it was. And I thought, how can we, because I was very influenced by identity politics at the time, how can we be ourselves but still try and make good art?
Mariana: Very, very interesting.
Maria: That’s how it began. Very small, very small beginnings. It took us quite a long time. That was in 1997. It wasn’t until 2004 that we did our first touring production.
Mariana: Thank you so much for that. And I recently experienced your online piece, ‘Flight Paths’, which, if I understood correctly, was an adaptation of a stage version of the production. And I really loved the interactivity and how you integrated past and present to tell the story. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about both versions and what inspired you in their creation. How long did you say we have, Maria? [both laughing]
Maria: I’m going to keep this really short. I tend to sort of just ramble on. So ‘Flight Paths’ was made in, it took about six years to develop it, from about 2013 to 2019. And we did it in collaboration with Upswing, who are a contemporary circus company, and New Earth, who are a Southeast Asian British Theatre Company. And we all met, our three artistic directors met at something called Sustain Theatre, which was bringing people who were from black and minority backgrounds, who led theatre companies together. And I got on with Kumiko and Vicky, and we thought maybe we can work together. And Kumiko had this idea about the Biwa hōshi, who were blind Japanese medieval storytellers and musicians who travelled around the land. And in a production prior to that, we had been developing in sort of accessible circus, like aerial work. We were working with blind aerialists, and we were trying to find ways of making that work, introducing audio description for the performer to deliver whilst they were in movement, you know, moving. That hadn’t been done before we first generated that in the show that we created called ‘Sheer’ in 2012. So we were bringing some of those ideas all together, and we started working on some research and development projects. There was a blind viola player called Takashi, who we knew. There was a Nigerian blind opera singer called Victoria Oruwari, and then there was Mili Cavallo, who was the blind aerialist. And the one thing that these three performers had in common, apart from being blind and very talented, was that they all had come from different countries to live and work in the UK. So we found this connection between the Japanese itinerant, these storytellers, these blind storytellers that had to move around Japan to make a living, and these contemporary blind artists that all had to move to the UK to earn a living. So we then started to develop this idea of a show. A little bit later in the process, we found out that there was often, as is the way, with female contributions in our world, it’s often buried under the misogynistic kind of setup or patriarchal setup. So we didn’t know that there were the female equivalents in Japan as well, called the Goze. So we switched our attention to them because they seemed really interesting, the way they worked. And we developed this show then based on the Goze women. After about six years of development, two of our performers said that they didn’t want to be in the show and didn’t want to tour it. Particularly, they just didn’t want to tour. They were the musicians in the theater. They weren’t wedged to the theater as was one of the performers. So we had to let them go, but I didn’t want to let them go completely. So I thought, well, what I’ll do is I’ll film them. We’ll film their contributions and we’ll have their contributions as kind of projections in the show. And we’d heard about an Australian blind aerialist. And so we invited her to come to work with the other blind female aerialists. So we had two female performers on stage representing. And so the whole kind of framework of the Goze women kind of fitted really well. So that’s a show that we developed. It was very intricate. We always seem to do this. [Mariana laughing] Have these really ambitious, intricate briefs for the shows that we create and then wonder why it’s such a hard time developing them. But we did develop something quite special. We took the idea of aerial work onto another level. We created technology that matched the intention, which was to have the performers’ voices coming from their bodies where their bodies were actually situated in space rather than from out of the speaker somewhere to the left or right. Because me as a visually impaired audience member, as well as theatre maker, I will just look automatically to where the sound sources and that’s not where the performers are. So we created this kind of way of tracking the performers in space to make the sound. And so when it came to the description and amplifying it from their bodies, the visually impaired audience could really, really track what was happening, what was being said, what the movements were and where it was coming from. So that was just one thing. There were loads of other things as well, but that was just one thing. So that was when we toured that as the physical show around the UK. And then often it’s the case you put all this work into something and it’s done and that’s it, the last show and we’re all looking at each other like, “Oh God, we made it and what next?” And I saw a grant offer for some money to take the assets of something that had been created and turn it into a digital version. And I thought, “Ooh, I’m just…” Because one of the things we had managed to shoehorn into the original plan was the idea of animation. And I thought, “I wonder if we could use animation in a digital version to act as a sort of thing that welded all these elements together?” And we’ve got the film of the piece that was on tour. We managed to film it with a binaural microphone in the audience. So you probably know that that’s a kind of a microphone that’s shaped like a human head. So the recording is very much as you would hear something yourself if you were… It’s like 360, not just around, but up and above and everything. So we had all of that filmed material. And so we got this commission and we got it just at the beginning of 2020. [Mariana laughing] We’ll know what happened then. It’s the perfect time for us to start working on a digital piece. So that’s what we made. And Flight Paths, we were going to call it Flight Paths Digital, but we just ended up calling it Flight Paths again and that went out. And it reached so many more people. It’s been shown in film festivals around the world. It’s won awards. As far as I can tell, I think it’s the only really accessible interactive online artistic theatre experience for visually impaired people’s accesses at its heart. I’ve done some research, I can’t find anything else really.
Mariana: Yeah, I didn’t see the live show sadly, but I had a kind of had a play around with the digital experience the other day and I really, really loved it. And my students don’t know this yet, but it has been included in a new module on disability of accessibility. So they will be experiencing it too.
Maria: Excellent! Right.
Mariana: But I thought it was a really lovely way of kind of bringing an interactive element to a show. And it was really interesting to hear how you had all those assets prepared. Even if at the time you didn’t know you were going to use them is really interesting.
Maria: Exactly! And some of the things that I just … like head, the binaural head or, you know, we didn’t have it, you know, … often this is the way when you make anything, it’s just so all your ends, everything’s been poured into making the thing itself. You never think about afterwards. The only thing that exists afterwards is afterwards, you know, [both laughing] you don’t plan and prepare for that. Then you’re just left with a pile of bits, you know, that’s how it feels.
Mariana: Yeah. And sometimes it happens, I imagine, in different fields as well, that you kind of, you’re so tired when you reach the end of something that you think, “Oh no, I don’t want to do that.” And then, you know, years later you say, “Oh no, we could have really used…”
Maria: Yes. Yes. Particularly if you see other people who are probably maybe better resourced or whatever, really exploiting, you know, what then you think, “Gosh, you know, we’ve got things that are just as good, but we know it’s just don’t have the energy or the resources to do anything with it.”
Mariana: Oh, that’s great. And I also came across another really intriguing piece you worked on called A Trail of Two Cities. Would you mind sharing a little bit about this piece with us?
Maria: Yeah, I mean, that’s different to my Extant work. A Trail of Two Cities, it’s actually my own personal piece of work that I’ve been developing for a while, I think it’s been 10 years actually, because it’s 2014 I had the idea. And, you know, it’s got to some sort of R&D stage, but a lot of my R&D pieces of work happen to be because, you know, they end up being so elaborate that people can’t tell the difference between that where they can, … but, you know. They’re quite sophisticated R&Ds to put it that way. So this is based on something that I wanted to do, which was a kind of comparative, sort of poetic journey, I guess, between myself and a friend of mine called Lynn Manning, who is an African American, who was an African American poet and performer, writer, athlete, just complete, you know, polymath. And he lived in Los Angeles, I live in London, and I first met him at the, there’s a blinding theatre festival that takes place in Zagreb every couple of years. I met him in 2003, where he performed his one man show, Wait, which is an absolutely phenomenal piece. And we toured, after seeing that, I thought, well, I’ll bring that here to the UK on tour. So we brought it here to UK in 2005. And then he brought it back again, under his own steam, he was invited by producer to show at the Edinburgh Festival, it won awards when it was there. It’s a really great piece. And then in 2014, there was an opportunity to go to this sort of, I think it’s a British Council cultural Exchange Award. And so I applied for it, I got it. And I went and spent two weeks in LA, hanging out with Lynn, just seeing how he works and lives as a visually impaired person in that city. And it was really intriguing because I was born and grew up in London, and I know it like the back of my hand, and it feels very, very accessible as a city because of all its fantastic transport links for, you know, for everybody, but particularly for blind people. In LA, complete that it was the reverse, you know, there’s hardly any public transport. There’s a bit of a metro, quite a few buses, and the buses are great, actually, the buses are great in the way, I’ve never seen this anywhere that I’ve been in the world, but they make announcements on the outside of the buses. So when you’re standing at the bus stop, the bus will arrive and it will say, Hollywood Boulevard, actually tells you where it’s going. It’s really so that the work hey, that’s, you know, you haven’t got much what you’ve got is really good. Anyway, I was just intrigued about this city that I could see that he knew so well, that seems so alien to me. And how, but how it was a city that was evolving, changing as London is, and how sometimes he would get lost because he had the old city in his head as I have sometimes than the old London in my head. And we don’t because we don’t see anymore, he lost his sight in his 20s, I lost my sight in my 20s. We don’t know that the city has changed. So we’re kind of living in these old relationships with our environment. And so I was kind of really … I suggested that we might do something together and he said, yeah, so I came back to the UK, started to look for some money, we started to send each other a few ideas, bits of work. Also, I was going to involve my friend at the time, Terry Braun, who’s a filmmaker and he’s from LA, we’ve got all these grand ideas. And then unfortunately, Lynn passed away in 2015. And I was thinking, well, that’s, you know, I can’t really do anything with a project now. But then I thought, actually, maybe there is a way that I can. So I began to do all my own research around Lynn, what there was of Lynn in terms of his archive. And so I would create the same thing, but based on what I could glean from what I could gather from him. But it really be a kind of a reflective… I mean, I think anything you write, whatever it is, whatever, from whoever’s perspective, it’s always about the writer. So if I was writing the script, if Lynn was going to be present in it, it would ultimately be about what was going on with me. So I wrote this sort of draft of the script, which included Lynn still as a present living person. But really, it was a whole exploration about being an artist, being a disabled artist, how you… And then so the next… That was great. We had a script, we had all this material, but Lynn’s not here. So what do we do? And it so happened on one of my trips to LA, I met one of his colleagues who had also written a play about Lynn, he was such an awesome figure, and found an actor who looked and sounded very similar to Lynn. So I got this actor to record their lines on video. They just filmed this in LA, sent me all their lines. And then we sort of mounted it, this presentation of the R&D where I was in dialogue with Lynn on screen as if it was a live video link up. And it kind of worked! There was a lot in it about remembered vision. There’s a lot in it about film, actually, because when I could see and when Lynn could see, we both knew each other’s city through old films. I don’t know if you’ve been to America because it’s such an overly represented country on film. You feel like when you go there for the first time, you’ve been there before. And he felt that about London. I felt like that, because he just knew it from Sherlock Holmes and stuff like this. And I knew it from Charlie’s Angles. It’s like this really interesting thing on film and image, and remembered vision, and place, and place changing without you knowing, and yet you’re still having this kind of identity of a city inside you. So that’s kind of what it’s about. But it’s something that is still not complete. And I got some great feedback. I did it, presented it at UCL. They’ve got an amazing space called PEARL. I think it stands for a Pedestrian, Environmental and Accessibility Research Laboratory in Dagenham. And it’s a fabulous space. It’s massive, real state of the art. They have lots of stations built in there for testing out different types of environment, and transport systems, and street lighting, and stuff. And so that’s where I presented. So yes, you should never ask me a question because you see I just go on and on. [both laughing]
Mariana: No, it’s really, really interesting. I watched the video that is online, and I didn’t realize that this is an R&D process. As you said yourself, it feels very complete. So I wondered if it was the finished version. So that’s really interesting to know the background.
Maria: Yeah, I would love to. I will! I will finish that project. And whether that becomes… And it’s interesting because when something comes to an end, and you try different means of getting it going again, and things don’t happen, and there’s a lot of artists out there, and anybody, academics as well, when you apply for funding, you don’t get it. You think, “Oh, what’s wrong? Why not? What am I going to do now?” And actually, sometimes, life takes you on a slightly different journey, and you then come out the other end, and you think, “Oh, actually, I see the reason why I wasn’t right. It wasn’t right for me to do that.” And now, maybe it is right. So yeah, I think it is.
Mariana: Yeah. And it’s really interesting to hear you speak about the timeframes as well, because one often looks at other people’s work and says, “Oh, that’s the completed thing.” And you don’t often think that that person spent years developing. You just kind of see the end thing.
Maria: Exactly.
Mariana: And as you say, it’s important for us to all reflect that sometimes things take time and development, and sometimes doing them further along actually ends up being better in one way. Yeah, absolutely. Though it doesn’t feel like it at the time. Yeah, absolutely. And I was wondering, what have been your strongest sources of inspiration throughout your theatre career?
Maria: Being blind, I think.
Mariana: Okay.
Maria: Yeah. That’s like, I know some people might really, you know, kind of, I’m just thinking about Lin now, because he feels very present after that bit of a conversation. And I know he would just be riling at that. [Marina laughing] But I think for me, it has, because he and I approached theatre in very different ways. He was very, very much into text and writing. And whereas I’ve become a much more embodied practitioner, and so that whole thing of being in my body, what it means to be a blind person moving through this world, and, you know, all the social stigma and hierarchies and all the prejudices and exclusions, rejections, but also all the really interesting and sensually kind of alternative ways into the world, the kinesthetic kind of appreciation of moving through space in time, you know, rather than through this visual… It’s really interesting, one of the projects we did years ago called The Question, which is one of our precursors to our haptic stuff, you know, the Flat Land that you came to see. We took this book by two philosophers. One was blind and one sighted. It’s got two titles, but the one I was working with was called On Blindness by Martin Milligan and John McGee. Sorry, Brian McGee. And that book was so interesting because it was one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read really. It’s like philosophy and vision impairment, but politics as well. And it looked at the fact that if you do see, you have your five senses available to you, what that tells us the world we equate with reality, but that’s only because of the five senses that we happen to have. And if we had other sets of senses or more, the world would look very different to us. And that was one of the things that really, really inspired me because I think that that’s the case with us on all levels in terms of our personal lives and the way that this dominance of ocular centrality works in our culture. It’s like that’s all that matters. That’s all there is. It is reality and it’s not! And I think that that opportunity of being blind and being able to work through the world in another way, a way that’s slightly off radar, has been a very big inspiration.
Mariana: Well, thank you very much. That’s a really, really insightful kind of way of looking at it. It kind of contextualises a lot of the work you’ve been talking about. And is there a piece you’ve written, directed and/or produced that is particularly special for you, that has a special place in your heart?
Maria: I think there’s two pieces, one from a long time ago and one very recently. One recently is a show that we toured last year. It was the final one that I’m going to be directing for Extant. And it was the Superpower Panto, which was our first family show that we had produced. And it was a pantomime that we toured in the spring, ironically. And we toured it around the UK and it was a fabulous, it’s like an original story. And it was all about Sally Sense, who was visually impaired, she was blind. And she helped her mum, who was a cleaner at an observatory where there were two astronomers, Yin and Yang. And then there was the brat pack, this horrible bunch of toffee-nosed kids who came on this space camp during the holidays. And they met Sally Sense while she was cleaning there. And so there’s a whole story about disability and class that we told in this, but it was all pantomime around me and lots of songs and jokes and an audience interaction. And we toured that to visually impaired, well, lots of different theaters, but also we took it to visually impaired schools and mainstream schools as well. We gave free shows to the schools and then people paid to come and see the show when we were in venues. And it was such a great, uplifting, fun piece. And I sent out a great message as one bit where we were playing at the Joseph Clark School last year and all these visually impaired kids were standing up going, “I’m visually impaired, I’m visually impaired, I’m visually impaired.” And we built all the access in, so it’s all delivered live. And we described everything. I made sure everything was… It was great. So that was fun. And then there was something I just remember we did a long time ago and it was in another R&D, but I wrote… I didn’t even write it actually. I was working with a friend of mine and we were both co-directing. But I took a paragraph from a book and it was written… I think it was a quote or something from Richard Feynman, who’s a physicist, talking about dark matter and how it’s invisible to the visual observation, but it’s there. And we created this stage piece to do with… It’s quite complicated. It’s to do with integers, which are sets of numbers that intersect and correspond. And we marked out the stage for blind… all the performers on the stage, I think there were four of us, who were all completely blind to walk in these patterns that every time we walked around in these circles, we just avoided each other. But we were all linked by the patterns that we were creating. And that with the text on top of it, It was actually a really… Because we had at one point this other completely, totally blind performer walking them between us. He walked between us to come to the front of the stage to deliver the text. And it was just… I don’t know, the way that we worked it out, we choreographed it. It was very accessible for us as visually impaired performers, but also the message in it was intriguing. It was one of those moments when it feels like form and content come together perfectly.
Mariana: Oh, that’s a great example. Those are things to catch up with for me. And my last question is really a more general one and is, what are your hopes for the future of accessibility in the creative industries?
Maria: That there’s more of it, that it involves disabled people delivering and being consulted with about its production. And that it is creatively embarked on, that it’s not always just some auxiliary thing that’s stuck on as an afterthought.
Mariana: Yeah.
Maria: Yeah.
Mariana: Yeah, thank you very much. And thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. And I think you know this already, but I came across your work when I first started developing the Enhanced Audio Description frameworks. And I was really inspired by your approach to integrated access. And it had such a huge influence in my thinking about disability and accessibility. So thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you so much for sharing all your experiences and what is fascinating career in theatre. Thank you so much.
Maria: Thank you, Marianna. Take care. Thank you so much.
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Mariana: Thank you so much, everyone, for tuning in for this episode. We’ll be back next month with a new guest and new conversations on accessibility, disability and representation. Thank you very much.
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