When limitations serve as a source of inspiration

Which issues do you encounter in the music industry and cultural sector when it comes to inclusion and accessibility? 
Everywhere we came around the world, I noticed people acting weird when it came to an inclusive event. Accessibility is often considered to be a burden. It costs money, takes time, requires effort and nobody really knows how to do it. And if it is being considered a burden, not much is going to happen, even when there is more and more pressure from stakeholders like funders or governmental bodies. As long as cultural organisations struggle with this issue, politicians tend to be cautious about imposing extra demands regarding this topic, not realising they are excluding a huge group of people. 

The corona pandemic gave another reason to be easy on them as for many venues it was more a matter of staying alive than improving their services. The real issue here is that they still approach accessibility and inclusivity as a problem. Fully understandable, but now that the world is opening up again, there is a great opportunity to be inclusive straight from the start. However, we miss a systemic approach where people look at the benefits. Once we realise how accessibility can lead to artistic enrichment, when people see the beauty of a diverse audience and a diverse reflection on stage, solutions will arise much quicker.

Governance in the cultural sector operates even more from an ivory tower than many corporate companies do. They think they are protecting their artistic values while actually they are limiting themselves. Nobody will say: ‘No, we do not want inclusion.’ But when it comes to investing time and money into this, people come up with the weirdest excuses, mostly based on ignorance about the topic.

Additionally, many solutions for inclusion lead to a new form of segregation: think of a wheelchair stage where the wheelchair user is being separated from his group of friends. Leisure activities are a very good way to reduce the isolation many people with a disability are dealing with. So why separate these groups again? 

Recently Possibilize launched an international platform to promote accessibility called Revelland. Can you shed some light on the first milestones?
We realised that our events were not a long-term solution either. We put a lot of money into our festivals and the one-off shows are not sustainable for bands who are touring on a weekly basis. We decided to do research on ‘cheap brilliant solutions’ to add multisensory effects to live music. Thanks to huge support from the EU, we connected a panel of European top sense experts with three ambitious bands from Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands. Together they started to design immersive and inclusive shows. Unfortunately, doing a project around live music in time of corona pandemic is bound to fail but we managed to develop a series of tutorials based on the learnings from the bands (KRANKk, KNARS and Perhaps Contraption) on how create in new (other) ways. One of the bands did manage to get their show on stage and ten folded their gig fee, just because their artistic values increased massively. 

You saw a need to introduce a new term: Creative Accessibility. Can you explain what it means and elaborate on its necessity? 
We define Creative Accessibility as accessibility in such a way that multiple groups can benefit. By looking at solutions for one group, you create value for another group as well. The Belgium band KRANKk added dancers with Down Syndrome to their show. Not out of pity or generosity but simply because they could show an unlimited bunch of energy that was hard to match by the other professional dancers. That energy got transmitted to the audience, up to the last rows in the back. The same goes for adding sense stimulating elements. Hearing people like to smell and taste the music as well and this way, deaf and (...)

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Photography by Jessie Kamp and last picture from byWM.