Sensory Friendly Solutions

Make theatres and performances welcoming with Laura Caswell, Director of Education, Neptune Theatre

• Sensory Friendly Solutions • Season 1 • Episode 1

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In this episode of the 55+ Travelers: Arriving & Thriving  Audio Conference join Sensory Friendly Solutions Founder Christel Seeberger, and guest hosts Sophie Yang and Christopher Basmadjian, occupational therapy students, as they take a deep dive into the extensive expertise of Laura Caswell, Director of Education, Neptune Theatres.

Discover the joy in making a theatre location and its performances accessible and inviting to audiences of all ages from Laura Caswell, Neptune Theatre.  Get simple solutions that apply to any event or location.

Episode Guide
0:00 Welcome & Host Introductions

0:20 Welcome to Laura Caswell

1:05 About Neptune Theatre

1:54 Programs & Classes at Neptune Theatre

3:57 Song & Stories with Seniors

7:02 Improv for Anxiety

7:44 Other types of accessibility changes for performances

10:30 Barriers to providing accessibility

12:28 How Neptune Theatre listens to their audience needs

15:14 Small accommodations Neptune Theatres has made

15:43 Relaxed performances

17:50 Accessing the number of people at relaxed performances

19:35 Performances for seniors

22:14 Laura's advice to other theatre performances for the 55+ audience

25:05 Thank you, Laura Caswell!



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Sophie Yang: [00:00:00] Welcome to the 55+ Travelers Arriving and Thriving audio conference brought to you by Sensory Friendly Solutions. I'm your host, Sophie Yang. In this episode, you'll also hear the voices of co-host Christopher Basmadjian, my fellow occupational therapy student, as well as Sensory Friendly Solutions founder and CEO Christel Seeberger. Our guest today is Laura Caswell, director of Education at Neptune Theater since 2017. Neptune Theater is located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and has operated for over 58 years. In this episode, Laura will share key insights into offering relaxed performances Laura, would you like to introduce yourself?

 

Laura Caswell: [00:00:42] Yes, hello. My name is Laura Caswell. She/her. I'm here in Mi’kma’ki, which is Halifax, Nova Scotia. That is the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people Kjipuktuk. And I'm very happy to be here talking with you. I work for the Neptune Theatre, which is downtown Halifax on Argyle Street.

 

Sophie Yang: [00:01:02] It's great to have you here, Laura. Can you tell us a little bit about Neptune theatre?

 

Laura Caswell: [00:01:05] Neptune Theatre has been around, we're just about to have our 60th anniversary. It's a regional theatre in Canada. Back 60, obviously, years ago, the government got together and realised they needed to implement regional theaters across the country and this theatre was one of them and it was one of the first. What that means is we produce multiple productions every year in musicals and plays, concerts, cabarets, obviously in Covid times,that came to a little bit of a pause. But I'm also in charge here, at the Neptune Theatre, of the Theatre School, the School Tour, YPCo, which is our youth performance company, relaxed performances and some other outreach initiatives that we have here at the theatre.

 

Sophie Yang: [00:01:52] That sounds very interesting. Can you share with us a little bit more in detail about the programs and classes you offer?

 

Laura Caswell: [00:01:58] Totally. So this is my I'm in my 4th year in this position and I think the theatre school itself in that it has about over 37, 38 years old. And traditionally we offer summer classes, summer camps and seasonal classes, winter classes, fall classes, spring classes on weekends. Those are more recreational style. We have implemented some drop in classes such as dance and improvisation. We have gotten more into offering improv for adults and some other sort of intensive for adults, scene study, self tapes. Those kind of things. Our teen programs or our pre-professional programs are aimed at young teens or young adults. Many of those are just, we work on productions with our YPCo, TD YPCo program, youth performance company and our prep program, which is preparing students to audition for theatre schools across the country. That's unique because here in Nova Scotia, there's not an arts high school, per se, anywhere. So we need to sort of help our students get up to, I'll just use a term up to snuff with some of the provinces like Ontario or Alberta or Winnipeg or Manitoba. Pardon me. And so it's just a chance to inform them on what it means to audition for a post-secondary institution. And so those are like our classes. Again, the Theatre School department, the Education Department here also works on accessibility such as relaxed performances, trainings. We've just implemented through the help of Mental Health, Nova Scotia. We're announcing some Improv for Anxiety classes, which we're going to begin this summer and run ‘till the holidays. And those will be free to community members and we’re really excited about that. One thing that I'm sure we'll talk about today is combining our youth, some professional artists, and implementing songs and stories with seniors, which will be little presentations, we think, live in courtyards at some of the seniors residences is how we're going to start that program. We're pretty excited about that.

 

Sophie Yang: [00:04:10] Can you tell us a little bit more about the plans for that kind of senior event?

 

Laura Caswell: [00:04:14] Yes, I can. So I, again, I've been in my position for four years and I've been wanting to implement performance aimed at senior audiences and specifically those seniors who might not be able to come to the theatre anymore. For a bit of back story, personally, I've worked a lot with Smile Theatre, which is a company out of Toronto. They’re an amazing company. They've been around for 35+ years themselves. And that company was built with the sort of TYA, the Theatre for Young Audience model.The same as school is, the reason that people do tours to schools is because not every school can come to you to see a show. So the idea behind Smile Theatre was to bring small productions, a couple of flats, a couple of chairs, a few speakers to residences so that you could bring the joy of live theater to everyone. And so I did a show with them a few times, one that I developed called Becoming Carol, which is about Carol Burnett. I was a performer and I wrote the show, collaborated on creating and putting that together. I got to do it probably about 150 times. That was for seniors, audiences across Ontario. Most of those are private residences. I think we did one or two sort of public performances. And it was just such an incredible experience that as soon as I got my job here and one of my roles was to be in charge of our school tour, I started to think about the fact that we could expand that programming and how could we bring that experience to more audiences.

 

Laura Caswell: [00:05:41] I had some ideas in the works cut due to Covid-19, but with that has come some gifts because we've now understood how we can do things on Zoom and work collaboratively that way and still initiate dialogues. And so we started to brainstorm here how we could do something like that. Smile has started doing something in the past few years and with Covid that they call Smile Serenade. So instead of a big show, it's more of a one on one or two on five mini show and conversation with people. And so I kind of took that idea and applied and got and I'm so grateful. Mental health Nova Scotia is also helping us bring this experience to people. So it's in the works. Like we're going to launch in August with our first residents, just as sort of our pilot. We will be coaching young adults, young students from our TD YPCo company. Some artists are going to coach them. They're going to put together a mini show with like fun themes like Welcome to the Sixties or something like that. And then they're going to have this interaction with safely, socially distanced, all of that with these seniors and present this little show, have a bit of dialogue and bring some joy and conversation to their day. That was a long winded answer, but I just wanted to tell you all the steps that have gone into bringing this forward.

 

Christopher Basmadjian: [00:07:01] Earlier you were mentioning that you had some relaxed performances and you work together with the Nova Scotia mental health group to organize anxiety reducing.

 

Laura Caswell: [00:07:10] Yeah, it's called Improv for Anxiety. We started that program before Covid-19. It's all a blur. I'm sure you all understand. An artist named Bill Wood who's local and he did the curriculum at the teaching, but inspired by some programs that have happened at Second City in Toronto, we thought we'd start to try and bring that here. Improv for Anxiety is sort of implementing the ideas behind improv and spontaneity and thinking on the spot and those things that might normally increase your anxiety and using them as tools to battle your anxiety and find coping strategies.

 

Christopher Basmadjian: [00:07:44] So you mentioned improv for Anxiety. You mentioned those relaxed performances. Are there any other accessibility type changes that you've made or other options that you have at your disposal in terms of your performances?

 

Laura Caswell: [00:07:54] Well, one thing for the seniors that I forgot to mention earlier is something else that we did. This isn't exactly accessibility and sort of the standard definition, but we initiated coffee and conversations for some of our Sunday matinees, and that was aimed at some of our seniors who come to the theater. Many of our subscribers are entering the seniors zone, if you will. Some of them have lost their partners or the people they used to come to the theater with. So it was a way of engaging those people so they can come to the show and afterwards have a little bit of a coffee and talk with people about their experience. So that was something that Neptune's been offering again prior to Covid-19. But we're hoping to bring something like that back. As far as accessibility, we've also done ASL performances. We're continuing to work to make our digital content and our social media as accessible as possible, although we're still in the process of go check it out, know we're still working on it, same as our website. There's also lots of talks within house about general work, wellness from an employee standpoint and accommodations and those things moving forward and how we can make this a safe workplace for everyone in an inclusive workspace. Putting that into some of our hiring. I do have someone working for me this summer at my camps, someone who is CP and an amazing person, but who maybe traditionally might not get to have had the chance to work for us. So, yeah, stepping stones. But we're trying to do the work.

 

Christopher Basmadjian: [00:09:23] We took a look at your website and we saw other accessibility options that you guys offer, like wheelchair seating, hearing assistive devices and something called the Access 2 program. Could you talk about those?

 

Laura Caswell: [00:09:34] Yeah. The wheelchair seating. Yes. The audio, I'm going to just say right now, I think that's something that we need to keep working on. And the final one is bringing a helper with you. There is no charge for that extra seat. So we want to make sure that everyone can come to the theater and that if the price of a second ticket was a barrier, that that wouldn't be the case. And we definitely noticed those being used at the relaxed performances and perhaps more than other shows when we were doing this. But I know personally we're interested in doing audio description and things like that down the line. It might not be in this current 2021-2022 season, but it is something on our radar that we want to work towards as well.

 

Sophie Yang: [00:10:17] I feel like hearing you speak about all of those examples Neptune theatre really takes into consideration to be inclusive to everyone so that everyone can enjoy those shows and attend those classes. Can you name some barriers that might make it difficult to keep that accessibility to everyone?

 

Laura Caswell: [00:10:36] It's kind of a two in one. It’s funding, money in the budget, again, especially after the hard hit of no direct ticket revenues for almost two years. And with that, the personnel and the support to make these things happen, to make them happen properly, to be able to hire the proper consultants, to make sure that we're doing it properly. And therefore, the time I think the biggest challenge in theater in general, and I know many companies are making strides, is to make these things. And I'm not saying that we don't do that here at Neptune sometimes too. What I'm trying to say is making things not an afterthought. How are these things part of the programming, especially one more time when we're trying to reinvent, we're trying to restart and we don't have much to jump from. If you're picturing a diving board, I mean, I guess you need to go way down to spring high. Here's hoping because it is a big challenge and you have to prioritize. And sometimes not everybody wins in this space that we're in. I would say that definitely a barrier [is] communication and making sure people know about it. And that's one reason we're happy that we're linking up with Sensory Friendly Solutions and other groups. Also downtown Halifax, A is not easy for parking and B is terrible for accessible parking. And we know it. And the hills, the hills are hard. And another barrier that we have at Neptune in general is just sort of that, for so long, these spaces weren't welcoming to some people that it's hard to just to say: and now it is! To just shift that perspective and to shift everyone in-house's perspective. It takes time and education and patience and mistakes, things that people aren’t always good at.

 

Sophie Yang: [00:12:20] Education and communication is important to know things about, like what people need or how to make things more accessible to all. What are some ways that Neptune theater uses to really know what your audience needs to make things more inclusive? How do you get all their feedback?

 

Laura Caswell: [00:12:37] We do surveys and I know our general manager and our development manager and our artistic director. So Lisa is the general manager. Leslie is our development and Jeremy Webb is artistic director. They make a conscious effort when there's audiences here as much as possible to engage directly with audiences, especially on those special nights. Myself and Julia Topple do that for our relaxed performances as well. And that's when we're talking directly to the people attending and engaging with them on their way in and out and literally asking the questions. Digital surveys are a thing, the phone lines, people call, people email for sure. We were exploring with our relaxed performances, different ways to try and get feedback. But we found that in general on the way out, people weren't interested. I find you generally really have to get them in the safety of their home. People just don't have the real space in their time or their mind to do that on the way out of the theater in general, in my experience. We had this idea about dropping marbles into a cup with what you thought or something. But it's just again now with Covid, you can’t do that. The other thing, we have had lots of conversations and sort of, I think we could do more of sort of digital but roundtables or reaching out. I know I've been to so many webinars or discussions within my community here. When I say community, I mean Halifax or Nova Scotia or Canada. Just listening about some of these topics. But I think going forward, hopefully there will also be more like, I think I alluded to before, community consultations and first voice discussions when we're making some of these decisions. I will admit I know that this will be a slow process for us, but that's what I would hope and envision in the future.

 

Christel Seeberger: [00:14:25] Can I jump in with a question? Laura, I'd love for you to describe a little bit about maybe your relaxed performances or the conversations and coffee with seniors, which I just brought a little tear to my eye. Just, if you could describe some of the changes that you sort of had to think about beforehand, what sort of came to mind as to how to offer those engagements differently or what did, you know, what did you think about beforehand? What did you actually change? And maybe what you know, I suspect from the ongoing engagement that you've described, that there's an ongoing evolution of things you learn about and then sort of change the next time. I'd love to hear more about just some of those very specific details.

 

Laura Caswell: [00:15:11] Totally. I mean, I'm just going to speak really quickly about small accommodations that we have made, even just on our registration's. We have our pronouns on registration's now. We have the space to put accommodations. And I think in general, we are allowing space for people to communicate that kind of thing, whereas before it was assumed that you were, quote unquote, “normal” as you registered. So, I mean, that's just a simple, simple shift in thinking. “What can we do for you? How can we make this a barrier-free experience” is something that we're always trying to work on. But as far as relaxed performances or sensory friendly performances, I think within my first year here, someone from Autism Nova Scotia, Yvonne, came to me and said, “this is the thing that people are doing. Maybe you'd want to do it at Neptune”. And I was like, oh, I didn't know it was a thing. I didn't know. I went to the senior management team and they're like, Yeah, great, go for it. And I realized, oh, me. Oh, OK, I'll do it then. So I kind of inherited the role of sensory-friendly, relaxed performance producer here. But I say that with joy because I have really found that really interesting. And so one thing that happened pretty quickly was Charlottetown Festival. They hosted a relaxed performance training, myself and Julia, who was my assistant there. And we gained all this knowledge about creating a visual story, creating a social story, creating all the signage, having extra staff, making sure there was space between the seats so that you could get in and out.

 

Laura Caswell: [00:16:38] We don't to applause at our relaxed performances. We do sort of jazz hands in the air. Preshow announcement, kind of telling people about things to expect like a death or a loud noise or things like that so they're ready for it. And there's more. But those things. And then I also got selected and which is great through application to go and do the access activator training I did. That was like the last cool thing I did before Covid-19, and that was in Toronto and it was hosted through the British Council and Tangled Arts, who do amazing work. So that was like 40 of us from across the country sitting around at room in Toronto, together, sharing lunch. That's why I say like before Covid-19. Not just lunch, having like big discussions and presentations about all of this accessibility in general, but with a focus on relaxed performance. And I received so many resources, both like in the moment, but also just PDF links to files. And I'm still playing catch up from that, I admit, because as soon as I got back, it was Covid-19 and everything kind of fell by the wayside. But anyway, to answer your question, those are sort of the things I learned about.

 

Laura Caswell: [00:17:43] So we've gotten really great at those visual stories. And we have members from Autism Nova Scotia come here. So one thing we found is when you have a relaxed performance, you don't really want to go: “so why are you here?”, you know, “did you pick this night?” and those kind of things. So we use people on staff of Autism Nova Scotia to sort of assess approximately how many people were there for those shows specifically. I mean, I got some people have come to the relaxed performances and the actors, obviously, they have to shift some of their performance a bit, tone back some screaming or loud moments. And anybody who goes into it is not who is not sure they come out, they're like, whoa, that was amazing and so cool, because all of a sudden you're back to the authenticity of the story, right? It's not the thunderous applause feeding your ego. All of a sudden you're like it's about energy and presence and it's really, really, really interesting. Finally, I will say I've enjoyed watching people at the theatre who like because of their way of functioning, get up and dance and scream during a fun number. And it's yeah, it's really it's kind of amazing that we're back to a space where that's OK or can be OK because it's really kind of fun.

 

Christel Seeberger: [00:19:04] Just really connecting the joy, the joy of theatre. Thinking about your, I think it was coffee and conversations that you do specifically for seniors. And you said maybe seniors who used to this used to be a shared something that they would share, right, with a partner or someone else and maybe no longer able to do that. And this is a way to just bring people together again and share the joy. Is there anything with regards to that thinking of the older adults, more mature adults, anything that you've done differently to make the performance or what you do afterwards just more welcoming for them?

 

Laura Caswell: [00:19:45] Most of those people come to the Sunday matinee. So I think there's an inherent welcoming. Everyone, from an usher to a bartender will know what that day will be. I have to share that like. One thing I ended up doing last year, Halifax Chamber hosted a dementia friendly training that ran for six, eight weeks, one hour every Wednesday. It was really interesting and it was interesting to think it was all about what kind of signage to use and not use and how different floor surfaces and things can be confusing for people and strategies for dealing with someone who is, quote unquote “difficult”. But maybe it's due to something you're not aware of. I need to go back to those notes and implement that a bit because we're just starting to program again here. So that was a really cool thing if anyone else is thinking of doing a different dementia friendly training. But I don't know if we have any specific strategies for that. I find an amazing link between relaxed performances and, at the dementia friendly they loved our visual stories. I shared that within that group and they thought this is exactly what you want to be sharing, not just to people who need it for accessibility or relaxed performances. So like it overlaps. I also love that a lot of it overlaps with Covid-19. All of a sudden the idea of extra signage and clear communication is like, yeah, we all need it. And people from the accessibility world are like, that's all we've been asking for years. The people who hear a lot from our senior audiences is box office. So I think that would be maybe one day you should talk to a box office attendant on your podcast, because that's the people who really engage with these folks, the people who don't use the Internet, the people who don't follow us on Facebook. The box office is the one who I would think has the most one on one interaction with our more senior audience. 

 

Christel Seeberger: [00:21:39] Thank you, Laura. Lovely. I want to say tidbits, but not that just minimizes the, just all of the strategies of what you've learned and how you've learned to implement it and and iterate it and just keep making it things, including more people always and understanding that there's just that overlap. I think just that it helps everyone. You think you're helping one person with maybe overcome one type of barrier to enjoying theater. But at the end of the day, you're really helping many people.

 

Laura Caswell: [00:22:13] Here's hoping.

 

Sophie Yang: [00:22:14] What advice would you give to other places with theater performances who want to start or even continue having more awareness on the sensory needs of the audience, especially for adults 55 and over, experiencing these kind of sensory changes.

 

Laura Caswell: [00:22:28] It seems overwhelming off the top. But the good thing is that you don't have to start from scratch because there's so many resources and there's so many different ways that people have been doing this stuff over the last, well for many years, some people for decades. You know, if you just get on your Google machine for a couple hours, you will find great ideas, resources, templates, and you don't have it. You suddenly don't have to start from scratch or be an expert. But the main thing I've learned in all of this and all of the discussions about inclusivity, please, please consult with members of said community and not just organizations representing said community. Get those first voice experiences. Do environmental audits with people from that group who are living that experience of your space, of your shows. Put in that effort. It will take a bit of time. It will take a bit of money. But unless you do that, it's not quite the same. I came up with a slogan the other day, I'm sure I'm not the first one to say it, but I'm feeling these days like if transparency is not authentic, you can see right through it. And that's kind of ironic, right? You have to do these things from an authentic place and truly be trying to make it right for the people or it won't work. You'll get terrible feedback and you will make mistakes. You will make mistakes, but create a space where everyone knows you're going to make mistakes and learn from them as opposed to trying to be like, I've got it all figured out and present, press play. That's not the way to do it.

 

Sophie Yang: [00:24:03] It's important to conduct research, to learn more, but it's even more important to listen to the voices, to go through and hear about their lived experience of what it's like.

 

Laura Caswell: [00:24:12] That’s one thing and this is from someone who I mean, I'm undiagnosed, but I'm pretty sure of ADHD and I'm always going like one hundred million miles a minute. All of this stuff takes so much time and I don't mean even hours. I mean taking an accessible experience where you have to greet people or get to greet people individually and get everyone to their seats safely. It takes time and patience, space to listen. To make these things happen, you have to allow the time and the sort of breathing space for it to happen, which is for someone like me, can be very lovely.

 

Christel Seeberger: [00:24:50] Absolutely lovely, as always, Laura

 

Laura Caswell: [00:24:53] Thanks. You too.

 

Christel Seeberger: [00:24:54] Thank you for your exceptional generosity with us. It evolves over time 

 

Laura Caswell: [00:24:59] It will be a really interesting journey, I hope, for next at least a decade. I think we can make some big changes, which I'm very excited about.

 

Christopher Basmadjian: [00:25:06] Thank you once again, Laura Caswell, director of Education at Neptune Theatre, for sharing your wealth of experience and knowledge, making the theater space and performances enjoyed by audiences of all ages and in particular for older patrons. Please also listen to our audio conference episode with Sarah Nematallah of Xenia concerts about opening up music and culture to audiences across the lifespan. You can find more resources about making tourist attractions, events and locations sensory friendly, at sensoryfriendly.net

 


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