Shaping performance from unheard voices with Emma Bernard

Emma Bernard is a theatre maker, director and playwright whose work explores creativity, collaboration and the power of performance to connect people. Through devised theatre and socially engaged practice, she creates spaces where people from all backgrounds can discover their voice, confidence and creative potential.

In this episode, Emma discusses her journey from actor to director, the experiences that shaped her approach to making theatre, and the importance of trust, curiosity, and connection in the creative process. She reflects on creating supportive spaces where artists can experiment, collaborate, and discover new possibilities through performance.

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

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Transcript

Matt: Hello, and welcome to the Teach Inspire Create podcast. I'm Matt Mosley, chief Examiner for Art and Design at UAL Awarding Body. In this podcast, I speak to a fascinating range of people who work [00:00:15] all across the creative arts about how they have made their way into their roles, their impactful teaching experiences, and the people and things that inspire them.

Matt: Through these conversations, we hope to show you there are endless ways to belong in the creative world today. My guest [00:00:30] is Emma Bernard, a theater maker, director and playwright. In this episode, I'm gonna be talking to Emma about her journey through acting without attending drama school, about her transition into directing and writing, and about her amazing work at the moment, creating [00:00:45] performance pieces with people coming from unexpected starting points.

Matt: Hello, Emma.

Emma: Hi.

Matt: Thank you ever so much for joining us today on the Teach Inspire Create podcast. It's wonderful to have you.

Emma: Well, it's really lovely to be here. Thank you.

Matt: [00:01:00] So we like to go back to the beginning if we can. Was there a moment where performing arts or acting came onto your radar?

Emma: I could say that performing arts was always in my life because my mom was a dancer.

Emma: So as a [00:01:15] little girl, I knew that my mom had been on stage, and that was something that I thought was great. But in terms of school and education, I was not one of the people who did the school play. I was one of the naughty [00:01:30] ones who saw themselves as outside that. And so as a young kid, I expressed my creativity in great ways.

Emma: And I used to write things and I used to put on little plays as a young child and do all sorts of things like that. And secondary school was like a sort of cosh for me, it [00:01:45] suppressed me in so many ways, and it's partly to do with the era. It's partly to do with the school that I was at, and it's partly to do with what was going on in my life.

Matt: Yeah. 

Emma: As a teenager, education for me was something which stopped me being able to do things. Like I had to [00:02:00] sit still, I had to listen. I had to behave and follow rules, and that wasn't something that I didn't feel comfortable with. It just wasn't me and I couldn't do it very well. But we did have one teacher who turned up, we had an English teacher who suddenly turned up [00:02:15] out of the blue.

Emma: I went to an old fashioned grammar school. In Norfolk. Instead of wearing a gown, he just turned up in this kind of corduroy suit with a guitar. And we were like, wow, who is this guy? And he came in and his way of teaching English would be to say to us, right, we are not gonna sit here [00:02:30] today. What we're gonna do is we're gonna go out of school, we are gonna go to the auction up the road, and we're gonna find an object, and then we're gonna write about that.

Matt: Wow.

Emma: And I was like, we get to do stuff. I was so thrilled by this. And of course it turned out this was Roger Deakins, right. And Roger Deakins, who [00:02:45] turned out to be this amazing nature writer, filmmaker, all sorts of stuff. But at that moment, he was just trying to earn a living as an English teacher for two years.

Matt: Yeah.

Emma: And so the only two years that he was an English teacher, he was teaching me. And I feel like I'm luckiest person in the world. 

Matt: Yes. [00:03:00] Serendipitous that he should appear at that time.

Emma: It's really amazing. Yeah. So that was lucky.

Matt: And so then, was there a moment where you started to think that the performing arts might be somewhere you'd like to end up?

Emma: I found out about Norwich City College, which is like an FE college. [00:03:15] One of the A levels I could do is theater studies, which had only just started. One of the requirements for theater studies was that you had to be available for evening rehearsals. And because I lived in a village, I realized I have an excuse to move into Norwich as a 16-year-old

Emma: to live in the city. And then I [00:03:30] started doing it and as soon as I started doing it, pretty much I got into rehearsals for Marat/Sade, which they were doing production and I was like 16, 17 at the time. And I suddenly thought, oh, I can do this because I'm quite good at it and people are [00:03:45] complimenting my contribution rather than going, could you be quiet?

Emma: Could you settle down? It was like, could you do a bit more of that? 

Matt: Yeah. Could you be louder?

Emma: Yes.

Matt: Could you give us more?

Emma: Yeah. Could you do more? I discovered it was exactly what I wanted to do and I got good at it, and I got picked out to go and do a [00:04:00] show in Edinburgh, The Fringe when I was 17.

Matt: What show was that?

Emma: And the show was called Cult and it was about youth culture.

Matt: Yeah.

Emma: And so I was the punk one.

Matt: Right.

Emma: So there was like a rock, slightly rockabilly one and a punk one and a hippie I think.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Emma: Completely absurd scenario. And we devised this show, but I got one really good review out of it and I went, right, that's it.

Emma: I'm moving to London. I'm an actor now.

Matt: Do you feel sort of naturally confident in it?

Emma: Oh, I think in the [00:04:30] same way that I was confident at being cheeky to teachers. I was confident. But that's not a real confidence. Right? That's not a real inner confidence. And that took me a long, long time to develop.

Emma: And actually, as an actor, I think [00:04:45] I was fine. I did okay. I did some nice jobs and stuff, but I never had real confidence in myself as an actor. I was not, maybe I hadn't learned enough of the kind of life skills about what real confidence is. I thought confidence was [00:05:00] bravado.

Matt: Right. 

Emma: And I think bravado is useful and it's like a really good tool and it can get you a certain way, but in the end, as an actor, you can be.

Emma: It's very hard to get a perspective on who you are when you are not working.. So when you, when you are working, you know [00:05:15] who you are.

Matt: You got the sort of persona. Yeah.

Emma: Yeah. You know what you are,

Matt: you're in work mode.

Emma: Yeah. So I think these days active training is much, much better. I mean, I didn't do active training.

Emma: So I skipped that bit, which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend. I think there's some very good [00:05:30] things that you can learn from drama school, and a lot of them are about things like resilience and true confidence and kind of knowing who you are as a performer and not blurring the line between your role and your life, which as a person who's not experienced, these things [00:05:45] can happen because you get swept away.

Matt: Yeah.

Emma: By being a performer. I'm not saying that everyone should go to drama school. It isn't for everybody, but some form of actor training, I think is very useful and mostly it's useful to learn who [00:06:00] you are and how to manage yourself in relation to the work that you do. For actors more than anyone else,

Emma: that kind of gets blurred into one thing, I think.

Matt: But you were learning on the job.

Emma: Yes, I started to build up a kind of portfolio of work, [00:06:15] which obviously built my confidence a little bit. It took me quite a while to get an agent.

Matt: Did you have at that time a preference over theater based work or film and television or, or were you primarily in one or the other?

Emma: So I really [00:06:30] preferred theater. For me, about doing film work was that it's momentary. For the performer, it's momentary, obviously, for the viewer. Is this forever? Right. That's interesting. Yeah.

Matt:  Right. That's interesting. I haven't thought about that.

Emma: So like much later [00:06:45] on in my career, like just when I was starting to direct, I was in Notting Hill.

Matt: Yeah.

Emma: Which is like a big famous Hollywood movie, right?

Matt: Yes. You were the -

Emma: I was the Fruitarian.

Matt: Fruitarian, absolutely. Yeah.

Emma: But the thing is that, that was two days work in [00:07:00] my life. It's two days work in my life, and it's more than 25 years ago that I did it. And yet I would say as an actor, that's the thing that people know about me.

Emma: That's the thing that people have seen.

Matt: It endures 'cause of the reputation of the fame of the film, I suppose. 

Emma: Yeah, of [00:07:15] course. Yeah. And because it's got famous people in it and because it's got a famous director and all of those things. But it's a weird, that relationship is really strange. It's something that you make in two days that becomes like a big part of your life.

Emma: In as your outward facing life. I am in that [00:07:30] film playing somebody who really is incredibly naive. I was still playing people who were incredibly naive. I would think I was in my early thirties when I did that film. I was playing somebody younger. I was always playing people who are younger and

Emma: more naive than me. And I [00:07:45] think there was a moment there where I went, do you know what? Actually, I don't think I want to pretend to be naive anymore.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, sure. 

Emma: But I want to be the full kind of human that I am and to express my opinions about things. So sometimes [00:08:00] that thing about getting typecast, which is definitely what happened to me,

Emma: can be a bit of a trap. Because then where you get to 35. 40. You can't just keep sort of talking like that,

Matt: But then do, then, do you break out of that sort of stereotyped [00:08:15] casting? Did you get away from that?

Emma: There were several things that happened around that time. So I had started directing. One of the reasons why I'd started directing was that my theater acting career had all been touring shows.

Emma: A lot of physical theater. So very [00:08:30] physically energetic. I was in a show called A Girl Skipping, which involved running around for an hour and a half on stage, and it was really incredibly intense. And during that time, I got diagnosed with Type one Diabetes. And that was a real [00:08:45] moment in my life where I went, okay.

Emma: Actually, to sustain being a performer in that way is very difficult. It's not impossible, but it takes a level of sort of -

Matt: Management in it. 

Emma: Yeah, the management of it. Because as a performer you have in general, [00:09:00] less autonomy, less agency in terms of deciding when and where and how you do things. And that's quite difficult when you're managing something like diabetes.

Emma: And then soon after that, I had children. I thought, okay, I want to have more agency about what I [00:09:15] do, and I also want to step up and be afuller creative person into - Not like I'm saying, acting's not creative. It is, but I wanted to have more authority.

Matt: Right.

Emma: In that sense.

Matt: Yes.

Emma: And to be, and when I say authority, what I mean is authorship in terms of [00:09:30] my work.

Emma: So I started looking for directing opportunities. My first one came because I was pregnant and it was a show I couldn't be in because I was pregnant. And they said to me, would you like to co-direct? And I went, well, I've never done any directing, but hey,

Matt: You didn't have any sort [00:09:45] of training in directing?

Matt: You just used your experience of being directed. 

Emma: Yes. Yeah,so experience of being directed as an actor, if you really take notice of what's going on in the room, you can quite quickly learn what [00:10:00] kind of director you would be and what works for you as an actor. Right? There are certain ways of directing which really, really don't work, and you think, well, I don't wanna be that kind of director.

Emma: I don't want to be the person who is an authoritarian in the room, for example, I want to be the person who [00:10:15] makes everyone feel safe.

Matt: Yeah.

Emma: That's because, because as an actor, that's what I really wanted. I wanted somebody who made me feel safe, who made me feel good, who made me feel confident, and observing that as an actor

Emma: really influenced the kind of director that I decided to [00:10:30] be.

Matt: Yeah.

Emma: That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be playful. I wanted to be fun. I wanted to be kind. I wanted to look at what people could possibly do and try and encourage them to do more of that rather than go, [00:10:45] right, this role has to be like this, and if you can't do that, you are gonna fail in my space.

Matt: Was there a project or a thing that you worked on as an actor where you felt like you were directed in that way?

Emma: In a good way?

Matt: Yeah.

Emma: I work, I mean, in the devising work that [00:11:00] I did, I was quite often working with directors and I worked with a director called Graham Miller who would make a space feel so safe and make the company feel so connected with each other, that all he had to do was light the blue [00:11:15] touch paper and the company would make things happen because he was excited by what everyone brought to the room.

Emma: Very diverse offers that people would bring into the room, and what he wasn't saying yeah, was that there is a structure and you have to fit into it. I've said like, as a teenager, [00:11:30] that didn't work and it still doesn't really work for me. 

Emma: Devising, I would say is a process [00:11:45] where you start without a script on the whole, so it's not a literary based process. It's not about playwriting as such. It's about playmaking and therefore characters can be invented in [00:12:00] the room. So you might say, oh, we're gonna devise a show about Victorian mental institutions, right?

Emma: Then you would do a whole lot of research about that, and you might even find some characters that you wanted to explore within that research, but ultimately what you wouldn't do is write down a script and say, you say this and you say that, or you be this character. Then you have some time in a room with your actors and they make offers, and whoever is leading that process either accepts the offer and goes with it, or they look for another [00:12:30] one.

Emma: It's a very creative process. It can be an incredibly creative process for actors who are accustomed to being told where to stand or what to do. Or what to say. And that's not to say that that process is not valid. It's just, it’s a different process. [00:12:45] It's not, it doesn't come from the same tradition.

Emma: And I think for somebody like me who had a difficult relationship with education. If you think that theater is only about literature and it's only about playwrights that have [00:13:00] existed and reading books and stuff like that, and if that's not your thing, then devising can very much be your thing, because you're not reinventing the wheel.

Emma: But what you are doing is going, what is it about me and what I know and what interests me that I can bring into this [00:13:15] process? 

Matt: Very, very artistic, creative process, isn't it? Devising type work as well. There has to be a lot of trust from the director to the performer and vice versa. And between the performers.

Emma: Yeah, and there has to be a lot of leadership. Actually. [00:13:30] There's a sort of myth about devising, which is that it's a leaderless kind of process, and I think that's not true. I think that leadership is about facilitating a space where people can really be as creative as they possibly can be. But you have to [00:13:45] do that by leading that idea of the space, by making decisions as well.

Emma: You can't just sit around going, oh, this is fun. You have to go, Right. Ah, that's good. I like that. Let's do more of that. Yeah, let's take that direction. And that to me is what directing is. It's [00:14:00] noticing what is there and shaping it, rather than coming in and going. I've got this extraordinary vision. It's gotta be like this.

Matt: How fun it must be as an actor to be given the opportunity to devise. Was it a welcome break? To come off script [00:14:15] or work in those quite controlled environments to then be in this very free space where you can contribute in a different way?

Emma: Yeah, I think it's a welcome break as long as you trust the person who's taking charge of the room.

Matt: Right. Yeah. So it can be a bad experience.

Emma: It can be, [00:14:30] because I think it can get a bit, Lord of the Flies, everyone's trying to take charge of the material because nobody knows who's in charge. Once you've got a leader, you're kind of like, right, we can do anything because this leader is either gonna go, yes, more of that, or they're gonna go, [00:14:45] yeah, I like that, but I think we'll go in this direction.

Emma: And whichever way they go, you still feel like. Fine. I can just keep churning out material and they will help me to shape it as an actor.

Matt: You got a call to get the offer of directing. You'd never done that before. What was it like to have that first experience?

Emma: Well, I was in a devising company, a women's theater company called Scarlet Theater.

Emma: The director of that was a woman called Grania Burn, who is an amazing theater maker and teacher, and she was a performer with me. She was directing [00:15:15] this show, she said, do you want to co-direct and co-directing with somebody that you really trust, Of course, is a joy because what you learn from each other, right?

Emma: Sometimes being director can be kinda lonely because you're making decisions and you think, oh, is that the right decision? I'm the one to ask [00:15:30] because I'm the kind of person in the lead if you like. Whereas co-directing, you do have someone to ask. You go away and you go, what did you think of that?

Emma: Do you think that was all right? Or how do we approach the difficulty that this actor is having with this particular scene? How could we, [00:15:45] between us work out how to help them? And that's how I learned to be a director was by co-directing. From then I did some assisting for more established directors. I had a great turning point where I went to a workshop as an actor.

Emma: I'd been looking around for female role models [00:16:00] actually, and at the time, sort of, I suppose this was the late nineties, I was looking around for people who were older than me, more established than me who were female and there weren't that many around. 

Matt: Right. Yeah.

Emma: And there was this extraordinary woman called Jane Howell, who had been a director at the Royal Court in the [00:16:15] seventies, but a real outlier.

Emma: She ran an actors workshop. I thought she was extraordinary. And I wrote to her and I said, I think you're extraordinary. Thank you for that workshop. And I'm thinking about being a director, and she just wrote back to me and said, Be at my house at 5:00 [00:16:30] PM and I went round. 

Matt: And that’s direction, isn't it?

Emma: Yeah, absolutely did. And I went round, and she just talked. She spent a long, long time listening to me, talking to me, encouraging me, eventually asked me to assist her on something. And I felt very validated by the fact that I had [00:16:45] dared to write to her. And that's, I guess if I was giving advice to anyone, I'd say, do dare to ask.

Matt: Yeah. Reach out and ask the question.

Emma: Reach out. Because when people write to me and say: Oh, can I come and work on one of your shows? I go, yeah, because I love the fact that they've reached out and [00:17:00] they're enthusiastic enough to do that. They're keen enough and we can sit and feel scared and not write those letters or not write those emails because of the fear of rejection.

Emma: But the likelihood is that the person who receives that is going to feel [00:17:15] validated themselves by that.

Matt: Well, the person that you're writing to more often than not wants to sustain the thing that they love. That is by letting new people in,more the merrier, isn't it? In terms of directing, what was it like [00:17:30] as an experience coming off the stage into the sort of the direction chair as it were?

Emma: Yes. It's different. I imagined as a performer that I wouldn't like it in the same way that I imagined. I would never want to be a teacher. Right?

Matt: Sure. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Emma: So I imagined like I wanna be in charge. I wanna have fun. And actually what I didn't realize is that when you're a performer, you've got one body to use one kind of voice, one whatever, and you can vary that and you can play with it, but it's one.

Emma: And as a director, you've suddenly got [00:18:00] all these other amazing humans to work with. And so, in terms of realizing your ideas, you've got this great big palette of people to work with, and that other people are such a joy. They're such a joy because they're not you. And so that was a [00:18:15] revelation to me how exciting it was to help other people get to performances that I couldn't possibly do myself.

Matt: Yeah,

Emma: the responsibility of preparation. I think it was a fairly natural transition from being, maybe I was on the inside of [00:18:30] being an actor thinking, oh, I would've done it like this. You probably had all those thoughts going on. So the actual transition into the creative process was not that difficult.

Emma: As a director, I realized that I had to be able to be honest about [00:18:45] when I didn't know what to do and when I didn't know things. And I think this again goes back to being a teenager. I would look at teachers and go, you are pretending. You are pretending you know what you do. And I know that you're pretending.

Emma: And we all know you're pretending. And now I thought, okay, so I [00:19:00] can't be that director. I can't be the director who is in the room going, I know what I'm doing when I really don't. And so I decided that I would trust because I, as an actor, I thought, well, I was very trustworthy and I was a good

Emma: collaborator. I would trust my actors and say, [00:19:15] okay, don't worry. I'm not gonna run outta the room, but at this point I am not sure what to do. What do you think?

Matt: That's interesting, isn't it? 'cause I suppose as the director, you are looked to being that person in control that does have the answers. But then actually [00:19:30] it sounds as though there's something really positive and yeah, being a bit vulnerable within it and saying, I don't actually have the answer to this.

Matt: Let's work this out together.

Emma: Yeah. I think a part of that is also valuing the input that just because you have a job title doesn't mean that you know [00:19:45] everything, right?

Matt: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Emma: There's a general kind of theme within the work that I've done, which is about realizing that there's less separation between me and the people I'm working with.

Emma: A really clear example of that is that I was asked by the Young Vic to work with a group of women who had been sex workers who were leaving sex work, who had decided as a group that they wanted to make a a theater show. And because I was part of the Young Vic Directors scheme, I was slightly older. I was a woman.

Emma: They thought, okay, we'll ask Emma to do that because she might have the kind of confidence to work with this group of women. And I got into a room with them and there was something, some kind of ridiculous idea in my mind that they were like, that their lives were so alien to me that what they had lived through and what they’d [00:20:30]experienced was so different from my life.

Emma: What did we have in common? And I remember being in the middle of  a warmup exercise of these group of women. And one of them said to me, Emma, just, just wondering, did you go to Diss grammar school in Norfolk? And I went, [00:20:45] yeah, I did. And she said, yeah, I was in the year below you. And then I went, okay.

Emma: So this kind of illusion of like,difference. And it was like huge. It was a huge moment to me. Of course this person went to [00:21:00] the same school as me. Why am I thinking that somehow these are different people from me and they are my people and they're my people and they've had a whole different experience of life from me, but so I could have had that experience of life.

Emma: It's not impossible, is it? We started from the same place. [00:21:15] We did some different stuff and we've come back together in this rehearsal room, and that for me was the lesson that I've taken with me every day since then in terms of my attitude to who I'm working with. So the companies I've worked with, for example, like Streetwise Opera or Cardboard [00:21:30] Citizens, people who work with the people who have experience of homelessness, who have maybe lived through addictions, who are

Emma: dealing with all kinds of life experiences. I have to keep reminding myself that I could have, [00:21:45] and that what I'm doing is going right. You are a human. I'm a human. What bit of theater can we make together? How can we do this? And how can I make you feel safe in this space so that you can be safe enough to be as creative as you possibly can be, because that's what I needed [00:22:00] as a young person.

Matt: I wanted to touch on your socially engaged kind of aspect of your work. [00:22:15] You mentioned Streetwise Opera. Could you give a brief overview of what Streetwise Opera is?

Emma: Yeah. Streetwise Opera is a company that works with people who have lived experiences of homelessness or who are in danger of homelessness [00:22:30] and uses music and creativity and theater to help people move forward with their lives or to support them or facilitate 'em to move forward with their lives.

Emma: It's quite a unique organisation. There's a guy called Matt [00:22:45] Peacock who was an opera writer and also a volunteer in a homeless center. There was an anecdote, some politician I think said, homeless people are the people that you step over when you come out of the opera house. And some of the people in the hostel where this [00:23:00]guy was volunteering were saying, we should do something about that.

Emma: And somebody flippantly said, well, we should make an opera. We should go to the Royal Opera House. And Matt, who is just like an extraordinary individual, who now runs a company called Arts and Homelessness International, who is extraordinary man, [00:23:15] made that happen. But it's an incredibly audacious idea that you bring together in, like what's considered to be the highest, most elite art form with the people who are considered to be the lowest in society.

Emma: And both of those things are wrong. It is just an art form and they are just people. [00:23:30] But actually the bringing together of those two worlds is audacious and audacity is something that I really, really like. So that's what Streetwise does under the leadership of Martin Constantine now, still making amazing work running workshops [00:23:45] in homeless centers and day centers across the country every day of the week, all year round.

Emma: This idea that, and people can come and they can drop in, and sometimes you will have someone who sits in the corner for six weeks [00:24:00] who doesn't say anything and at a certain point will move into the circle and maybe join in singing or do a little bit of exercise or whatever. It's proactive, but it's also not exclusive.

Emma: You don't have to prove anything to get in there. You [00:24:15] just join in when you are ready and it creates a world. And again, it's that thing about creating an atmosphere. Which is safe enough, friendly enough, encouraging enough, and it's a way of building community for people who have lost community.

Emma: And I think [00:24:30] a lot of my work as a director and a maker in the last, oh, I dunno, 20 years, I suppose, is to do with offering people who feel like they've already failed. They've already messed it up, the chance to have another go.

Matt: [00:24:45] Yeah. Obviously engaging, facilitating, directing people who are maybe coming from so far away from the usual starting point.

Matt: Do you have strategies or is there a certain approach that you take when you first [00:25:00] meet that person?

Emma: I mean, I think what I do is I provide a kind of welcoming, accepting approach. One thing that was always a streetwise policy, and it’s quite a [00:25:15] useful policy to take through that sort of work is that you are focusing on the art that you are making together, and you are treating the person as an artist, as a creative.

Emma: So what you're not saying is, oh, I'm really interested in the fact that you've had this terrible life so far. [00:25:30]People do share things, but we are not psychotherapists, we are not social workers. We are not the police, we are not any of the people who have interviewed them in the past. Our interest is in them as creative individuals, so everyone is treated as an artist.

Emma: Everyone's [00:25:45] artistic input is valued. We work in an atmosphere of co-creations and it's like devising, we are making this together.

Matt: Mm-hmm. Right.

Emma: For some people. There's this idea that creativity is something that some people are really good at and some people are bad at, [00:26:00] and that's how it is, and I don't think that's how the world actually works.

Emma: I think what it is, is, yeah, some people have a natural confidence or aptitude for playing the piano or whatever it might be. But in the end, if somebody says to you, right Matt, [00:26:15] I think, I think you can learn to play the piano. Shall we do this together? That's how we approach it. And it's not about treating people as children, it's just meeting people where they are in terms of their experience and their confidence.

Emma: And very often what happens is people [00:26:30] say, I'm rubbish at this and I won't be able to do it. And then they reveal the most extraordinary imagination or the most extraordinary physical aptitude, or the most amazing voice. Which doesn't sound like a trained opera voice, but sounds like a real human [00:26:45] being.

Matt: Utterly transformative as well, isn't it? I love the idea of giving people the opportunity to add this additional thing to their identity in that moment. I'm gonna engage in this performative experience, and therefore I shall be a performer. I am a [00:27:00] performer.

Emma: Yeah. And I think that is an extraordinary boost. 

Emma: In Streetwise, we've seen this happen quite a few times where somebody has been entirely separated from their family, hasn't had contact with their family for a long time, where they are. In a show at the [00:27:15] Almeda Theater with a whole load of very experienced singers and which has a big kind of publicity thing around it, and they are part of it, and they make the brave move to invite a family member that they haven't seen who comes along and sees their dad, brother, whatever, in this entirely different life.

Emma: You can't underestimate how -

Matt: That's so powerful.

Emma: ife changing something like that is.

Matt: Yeah, healing, you know, way beyond just the performance, isn’t it? 

Emma: Yeah. That's about your life. That's about you as a human. And when art is at its best, it is about making us feel that we can be a more complex, more connected human being.

Matt: Yeah.

Emma: It's not just about, you do a bit of acting and then you [00:28:00] go home and do your normal stuff. It is part of your body, it's part of your mind, your heart, all the time.

Matt: Can we talk a little bit about what you're working on at the moment?

Emma: Oh.

Matt: I particularly was really interested about your work with visually impaired people.

Emma: So yeah, at the moment I [00:28:15] am working with a group called High Spirits, run by an arts and health company, Cohere Arts in Suffolk. I think we have up to about 15 participants at the moment who have a range of visual impairment. Quite a few of them [00:28:30] who don't, who can't see anything at all. And then people who have different kinds of eye conditions, which means that some can get around with a guide dog, some can get around with a cane, but their perception of the world, the way they use the world, obviously, is different from people who are using their vision to get around.[00:28:45]

Emma: So the drama group, I knew very little about vision impairment. When I first started working with this group, I guess I applied the thing that I applied to all things, which is, right, who are you and what is your world like? And started running drama sessions. I had to [00:29:00] learn incredibly fast. My tendency when I'm working is to do a lot of wave my arms around and

Emma: pointing and saying things like over there and stuff like that, which is entirely irrelevant to somebody who can't see you. So having to be [00:29:15] more verbal in terms of my direction has been a really interesting thing. I wrote a play for this group, and that's the first time I've ever sat down and written a play from scratch.

Emma: So I've written a lot of text for things. I've written song lyrics, I've done all of that kind of stuff. But I'd [00:29:30]never sat down and gone, I'm a playwright. I'm gonna write you a play. But I decided that there wasn't really a piece of material out there that was appropriate for 12 visually impaired actors.

Matt: Yeah. Which is so interesting, isn't it? The arts in the [00:29:45] more traditional kind of mechanisms of it, isn't as accessible as it likes to think it is.

Emma: I mean, people have done it and people have attempted to do it, but in terms of the canon of work, of plays that are out there, published plays.

Emma: And members of the group, talk to me quite a bit about this [00:30:00] idea that as a disabled person, you can very easily become infantilized by processes. So there's this kind of idea that all disabled people are nice and kind. And they don't swear. And they don't behave badly, right? And so that, which is, where did that come from in sort of popular [00:30:15] culture like films and stuff

Emma: historically in plays, the blind person is either really good and long suffering. Or they're really evil and sinister. Right? And there's nothing in between. There's no sort of real person -

Matt: Normality. 

Emma: Yeah, no normality. And so [00:30:30] we made a piece, which is actually not about visual impairment at all. It's about historical sexism.

Emma: It's set in the 1970s in a radio station in Suffolk. It's about women being excluded from the workplace and assumptions about who they are and [00:30:45] what they're gonna be. And I suppose in some tangential way, that's also about the assumptions that we make about people who are visually impaired and what they can and can't do.

Emma: Right?

Matt: Well, I was lucky enough to see it, and I have to say I enjoyed it as much as any theater I've ever seen. It was a really wonderful piece of [00:31:00] work. And at no point did you think the visual impairment aspect of whatever is relevant. It's a fantastic piece of theater. Great performers performing greatly.

Matt: I wanted to ask, did you find working [00:31:15] in Streetwise Opera and working with High Spirits, that the same sorts of challenges come up with direction and directing people as they do in sort of “more professional environments”? Is it a very similar experience in many ways?

Emma: Yeah, it [00:31:30] is. I think that once you acknowledge the fact that

Emma: the people that you're working with are vulnerable and need support, and so do you. Everybody does. That's the starting point. The starting point is not to patronize people. The starting point is just to make [00:31:45] people feel good about themselves really, and to have fun with each other and to build community.

Emma: I think that's the same whoever you are working with, but in terms of the challenges. You have to be sensitive, right? You have to be sensitive to [00:32:00] things that are difficult for people, difficult experiences they might have had in the past, which are blocking them. You can't make all of that difficulty go away overnight.

Emma: You can just accept them where they are and support them where they are and acknowledge when something is difficult and say, it's all right for this to be difficult, the fact that you are finding this difficult now doesn't mean that you won't be able to do it. 

Matt: Together we'll find a way through it together.

Emma: Yeah, we'll find a way through. This other person in the room can help with that maybe. So the person that you are acting opposite [00:32:30] can help you go through those lines rather than thinking that you can solve every problem from a leadership point of view, you work out who else can help you lead in the room, all sorts of different levels of support and just, I think just really being aware

Emma: of what people have got to offer in the room is important. In Streetwise, we signpost people. If somebody is having a real problem or a real crisis or really needs advice with their housing and not with their lines or their acting, you signpost them and you make sure that support structures are around because we are not there to solve all of the problems of the world, right, as artists.

Emma: But what we are there to do is to help people feel better about what they're doing in the world.

Matt: And I think that speaks to what you were saying earlier about accepting that you don't have to [00:33:15] have all the answers to everything, that you can lean on the expertise of others to solve problems and to find solutions.

Emma: That's about trust.

Matt: Thanks ever so much, Emma, at the end of the episode. What we like to do is to offer people some sort of creative prompt. Do you have anything in mind that people can do, whether it's as a performer or a director?

Emma: Oh gosh. I suppose one of the things I guess that I've learned and that I would suggest looking at is [00:33:45]questioning your own assumptions about yourself as an artist and seeing how they

Emma: reflect on the assumptions you might be making about other people as artists. So if you want to facilitate, have a little look at how you might be judging or [00:34:00] have judged yourself in the past, thinking, telling yourself that you can't do things or that you won't be good at that because you tried it once and it didn't work.

Emma: That actually developing a kind of overview of [00:34:15] your own path into creativity so far. And that includes primary school, that includes kind of everything that you've ever done and the things that were tricky and remember what that difficult feeling was like. The feeling that you thought, I'm embarrassed, I've [00:34:30] failed, I'm not as good at this as I wanted to be.

Emma: And then transfer that into the kind of empathy that you can have for the people that you might be working with. And think about what you would say to yourself as an encouragement and say that. [00:34:45]

Matt: Amazing. That's wonderful. Just doing a bit of a self-audit about that can remove barriers for yourself and barriers for other people at the same time, so that's a win-win.

Emma: Yeah.

Matt: Thank you, Emma. That's wonderful. Thanks very much.

Emma: My total pleasure. Thank you. [00:35:00]

Matt: A massive thank you to Emma. Fantastic to hear about all her experiences learning on the job. If you are someone who's thinking that they'd like to give it a go, this is your green light to do so. So jump in. If you want to know more about Emma's work, we will [00:35:15] include links to her website in the podcast episode description.

Matt: As always, really hope you've enjoyed this podcast and you're subscribing and sharing with your friends. Thanks for listening, and until next time, bye-bye.