EP1: Welcome to Ramps on the Moon - an introduction! With Sarah Holmes, co-founder of Ramps on the Moon

Welcome to the Ramps on the Moon Podcast.

In this first episode, disability equality expert, Michèle Taylor invites Sarah Holmes into the recording studio to talk about how Ramps first started; from conception in 2015 to present day.

Meeting together for the first time in a London train station café they both knew something very positive and exciting was about to happen in the theatre industry.

Listen to their story of how they made things happen; the challenges, the learning and the joys - and whether they are, alongside many theatre partners, really 'changing the world'!

Sarah Holmes is an independent theatre consultant and was Chief Executive of the New Wolsey Theatre until June 2022; she was also the key founding partner of Ramps on the Moon. Sarah was awarded ‘Outstanding Contribution to British Theatre Award’ by UK Theatres in 2023.

Thank you for listening. For further information and to get in touch with us please visit our website HERE.

Ramps on the Moon Podcast is hosted by Michèle Taylor.

Michèle Taylor, is a disability equality trainer and consultant, and has been Director for Change for Ramps on the Moon since the Consortium was convened. For the 10 years, she has been supporting the partner theatres to embed disability equality and anti-ableism into their organisations and to realise their ambitions around elevating disabled people across the mainstream industry. In 2022 Michèle was honoured with an MBE For Services to Theatre and Disabled People.

This podcast is produced and managed by Podtalk.co.uk

Transcript

Interviewer(s):                 Michèle Taylor

Respondent(s):                 Sarah Holmes    

MICHÈLE:            Welcome to the Ramps on the Moon podcast.  I’m Michele Taylor.  If we don’t know each other yet, I hope we will soon.  I’m the Director for Change for Ramps.  A consortium of mainstream theatres putting deaf and disabled people into the heart of their work on and off stage.  Ramps on the Moon is giving the industry the valuable support it needs just to do it.  This includes making our award winning touring productions that reflects society back on itself and challenge audiences on what to expect.  How do we do this?  Listen to the podcast.  In this episode I’m going to be talking to Sarah Holmes, a founding member of the Ramps on the Moon consortium.  We’re going to be exploring what Ramps is, what we do, how we go about it.  The things we’re excited about and proud of in the Ramps on the Moon journey.  And we’ll also be giving you an idea of some of the other things that we’ll be talking about in this podcast, in later episodes.

                Sarah Holmes.

SARAH  Hello there Michele Taylor.

MICHÈLE:            How lovely to have you in the studio.  I’ve always wanted to say that.  In the studio.  Here we are in the studio.

SARAH  And what a studio.

MICHÈLE:            I know.

SARAH  They’re really hot these people aren’t they?

MICHÈLE:            Aren’t they just.  Aren’t they just.  Sarah Holmes, we’re here to introduce Ramps on the Moon.

SARAH  One of my favourite things in the world.

MICHÈLE:            Yes, mine too.  Mine too, for all sorts of reasons.  So where do we start?  Ramps on the Moon started, it was a twinkle in your eye, long before you and I met wasn’t it?

SARAH  Yes, although it was preceded by that Esmée Fairbairn funded project that we’d started at the Wolsey.

MICHÈLE:            Ooh, tell me about that.

SARAH  Well, we’d got a bit stuck in wondering why young, disabled kids were not joining our youth theatres, sort of all different programs we put together and actually realised we needed, we weren’t attractive, we needed to change ourselves to be much more interesting and accessible, this is going to, this is rambling a bit here.

MICHÈLE:            Ramble away, please.

SARAH  But I think we met because I wanted you to be the evaluator for that project.  That was the Thruppenny Opera.

MICHÈLE:            Yes, I think we first met when you were looking for an evaluator for the Thruppenny Opera.

SARAH  Yes, which was part of the Esmée project.

MICHÈLE:            Okay, of course.

SARAH  So we met because we definitely needed to evaluate cleverly and learn from what we were doing.  And we had been doing for a bit without really taking much account of how we were going to pick ourselves up and shake things around a bit, after we had done that.  So yes it was trying to find somebody to work with us to learn from what we were doing.

MICHÈLE:            And that’s exactly my memory that it was, it was about you were doing something quite instinctive, and you were very passionate about, that you knew was the right thing to do.  That you knew that you wanted to jump into, completely 100% wholeheartedly, but you wanted to be sure that that became strategic.  That the learning was kind of formalised and codified so that you could carry on doing it, and do it even better.

SARAH  Yes, because it was, it was becoming something that you and I then talked about of changing the world, but there we were as a mainstream organisation, pulling in other mainstream theatres to work with us, to create something which was more inclusive and actually much more artistically exciting, and it wasn’t something that could just be that, that’s a project been and gone and done it, it needed to, at that point was there really, really is a massive job to do here.  And it’s an exciting job.  But we’re not going to be able to do it unless we really investigate what we’ve done and change practice and, yes stick a few rules around it actually.

MICHÈLE:            So I, my memory of that meeting, because you and I met, we’d never met before, we met at the cafe in St Pancreas.  I came down from Nottingham.

SARAH  You were very fierce.  And I was quite frightened, yes.

MICHÈLE:            Well I though you were quite fierce and I was quite frightened of you as well.  And here we are, eight years later.

SARAH  And you still scare me.

MICHÈLE:            So thinking about that meeting, I remember being really impacted by your ambition and your vision and your uncompromising vision and I also remember being really impacted by the fact that I think that was the first time I’d been approached from a mainstream, by a mainstream organisation that didn’t want to contract me or employ me just to tick a box, but that wanted to work with me to make this meaningful change.

SARAH  True.  That really, really was it.  I mean I’ve, and I’ve still, I’m quite sceptical about evaluation because I think it can often be something that you know, you have to do and there’s sort of formula of how you might go about doing that, and you do all of that and then you put it on a shelf, and you don’t necessarily help it, let it change your practice.

MICHÈLE:            Yes, and that’s really interesting because I’m a bit fan of evaluation, and actually I’m going to be picking this up in an episode later on.  Because we’re going to be talking about evaluation and telling the story of the change and the impact, so that will be really interesting.  I want to bring us right back, to concrete, the concrete vision of what you wanted from Ramps on the Moon.  What was it that, that you wanted to achieve through this initiative that became Ramps on the Moon?  What was your ambition?

SARAH  To have the joy of creating a different type of work, a different type of performance that was more inclusive.  The beginning of it was Thruppenny Opera production without a doubt.  I mean there was lots and lots of stuff around that but, but the very big visual thing was a very, very exciting production which added into the mix of creativity working with a company that were very diverse and, it made it just a much more joyous and entertaining and watchable piece of work.

MICHÈLE:            So tell us a bit more about that production.  Who made that show?  And what was some of the criteria, the perimeters that you put around that show?

SARAH  The show was made by the New Wolsey Theatre but, it was directed, it was co-directed by Pete Rowe the artistic director of the New Wolsey and Jenny Sealey the director of Graeae.  And it was a co-production with three or four other theatres which it really, to start with it was a peerier financial, the only way we can do this was to get more partners in there, became much more than that quite quickly because they too were getting excited about the artistic being of it.  It’s rules were, at least 50% of the company to be disabled.  And no criteria what sort of disability, not any kind of, and for it not, and for it to be normal that that was that mix car.  So there was no sort of chat in the program of, this person’s got this disability, or this person, they are just shit hot performers who are telling the story of the Thruppenny Opera.  And that was also accessible to an audience, a bigger audience it being more, with those bits of accessibility being integrated and embedded into the production.  Which is something that Graeae had been doing quite a lot and we were building on that together.  To make it very much a mainstream piece of work.  Playing on mainstream, main stages and yes, I think that’s probably all it’s criteria was.  We, we didn’t know so much at that point, it was quite extraordinary.  I think it had a three week rehearsal period and a massive piece of work.  It was really quite naive in what we could achieve, and quite gung-ho I think we were, we probably pushed very much rough shoulder the quite a lot of people just to get it there.  So you know I think we’ve come a long way from that early production.

MICHÈLE:            And I want to come back to that in a minute about how far, how far we’ve come since that production.  I remember very clearly, as somebody in the position of evaluating that tour and that whole process.  Because it wasn’t an artistic evaluation of the show, it was an evaluation of the process and the learning.  And I remember being very struck by the, the really close interrelation between the artistic product and the audience and the learning within those co-producing partners.  And those are the seeds for me.  Those along, along with the story telling and how what a richness and what an exciting dimension to story telling arrives when you start casting disabled and deaf people to perform in the show.  When you start employing and contracting disabled and deaf people to be the creatives, to be the people backstage and the, the lighting designers and the sound designers and in all of those really key roles.  And so it was those, those factors that for me are the things that, that you picked up in Ramps on the Moon and then I joyously was privileged to become a part of, that have developed over the last seven years.  So what, for you, are the, the key, the key elements of what Ramps on the Moon is now.  If somebody’s listened to this podcast, they’ve got no idea what Ramps on the Moon is.  How would you tell them in two short sentences?  What is Ramps on the Moon?

[00:10:20]

SARAH  Story telling is the key.  It is an approach to story telling which is not traditional in that it’s got a bigger element of experience and personnel and being who are making that creative production.  And it is, I think that, go back to the story telling thing, it’s also about that, the best story telling is when the audience can see themselves on the stage, portrayed on the stage.  And there was not a lot of product, particularly in the mainstream, that was, was achieving that.  Was actually having a type of actor on the stage that somebody could identify with, and let’s just talk about an obvious one, somebody who, who might be deaf very rarely would see a deaf actor, not pretending to be not deaf.  So I think that it was that element of it as well, knowing that, and the very essence of it came from, the very start of it came from young, disabled people and realising that they were so squashed and pushed downwards in their ambitions that they could never think to be part of the theatre industry because they saw no example of anybody else like them in the mainstream.  Yes there was quite a lot of disabled led work, really good work, but it wasn’t reaching a bigger audience.  So I suppose it’s a reach, the reach.  Yes I think that’s about what I want to say.  Yes that was about 15 million paragraphs.

MICHÈLE:            That’s okay.  I didn’t expect you just to come up with two sentences.  And one of the things I remember, again from that earliest conversation that we had, the first time that we met, and I think it’s true to say that each of us came away from that meeting, about an hour I think that we had with each other the first time we met, thinking, “I can work with that woman.”

SARAH  More than that, “I’m going to be challenged by that woman.”  Because I, you know, I’m not, I might appear to be quite confident, but I actually aren’t and I really, and I can talk such nonsense that I could see that that wasn’t going to be just totally just taken as read, that you would challenge me and my, my thinking and ergo my actions.

MICHÈLE:            And I love that too, because I think challenge is also something really, really crucial to Ramps on the Moon.  So it’s about the audience, it’s about the artistic product, it’s about the story telling, it’s about the vision for changing the world and I know all those conversations that you and I have had, I say all those conversations but it’s probably variations of one conversation isn’t it, let’s be honest over the last eight years.

SARAH  Are you getting bored with that Michele?

MICHÈLE:            Never.  Never ever.  But what, we talk, we sit and we talk about changing the world and, I was going to say I don’t want to talk for you, but I’m about to talk for you, that I think both of us passionately believe in the power of theatre and the value of theatre for it’s own sake, but equally in the value and the power of theatre for what it reflects back to society, so we’ve always talked about Ramps as being about changing the world.

SARAH  Yes, and making it available to the ordinary person.  And there’s an awful lot of theatre that I find intimidated, intimidating that I don’t necessarily belong to that, that story and then you can pull it out to loads of other people as well, and so to make work that is, that is genuinely for the general public as opposed to a, an educated, knowledgeable theatre aficionados.

MICHÈLE:            That’s really interesting.  Yes.  And we always as well use the word ‘normalise’, that we wanted to normalise the presence and the visibility of disabled and deaf people in mainstream theatre.  And for me that’s, that’s always been about, as a disabled person myself, I mean you talk about not seeing, disabled people not seeing themselves on stage.  And I remember, and I’m somebody whose gone to the theatre a lot in my 60 years of being on this planet, and I remember not all of that, all that long ago actually going to production at my local theatre, Nottingham Playhouse, and it was The Madness of King George and it was just before the interval when I suddenly turned to the person next to me, who I was with, they weren’t a complete stranger.  I turned to the person next to me and said, oh my goodness, that person, that person on stage is disabled.  And it took me aback how significant the impact was of that on me, but I’d been talking about this for years, but suddenly I was actually feeling it, really feeling it as though it was the first time.  And so that’s really significant for me.

SARAH  But that’s a clever, clever production.

MICHÈLE:            Oh yes, it was yes.

SARAH  For you who actually understands, knows disability inside out from lived experience, can actually sit there and watch something and not realise that that’s what it was.  It happened to me when I watched a children’s show recently about a super grandmother.  And I sat through the whole thing and thought what an amazing woman this grandmother was, oh I’m a grandmother.  It kind of, it just normalises.

MICHÈLE:            Yes, and then what becomes interesting is that I know I’ve been saying for the last, probably 12 months or so.  So we’re, we’re coming up to seven and a bit years of Ramps on the Moon, of the Arts Council funding that we’ve had.  And I know that for the last 12 months or so I’ve been, I’ve been just moving away from this word ‘normalise’ because I don’t think it’s aspirational enough anymore.  Seven years ago it was really aspirational, and I don’t think it is anymore.  That I, I think, of course there will always still be audience members who, who don’t expect to see disabled or deaf people on stage or neurodivergent people on stage, but I think we’ve come, we’ve come so far, there’s still a long way to go, but I think we’ve come so far that we don’t need to talk about normalising anymore, we can talk about elevating and celebrating the talent of disabled and deaf people.

SARAH  I completely agree with you.  I think it is normal now.  Not in the whole of theatre, of course it’s not.  But there’s enough for it to be normal, to see somebody or to be, watch a production and there is an element of some sort of disability somewhere and it not be a thing.  It’s not a noticeable action in there, it’s just part of.  But actually those, that talent is still being ignored.  And, or worse employed but not given the environment in which they can do their best work, because of the, the ableist society or the ethos of an organisation that has all sorts of barriers up that they don’t even realise they’ve got.

MICHÈLE:            And that’s the key isn’t it?  That’s the key, that it’s, it’s more than just saying, “Yes we’ll cast disabled people, we’ll employ disabled people, we’ll contract disabled people.”  It’s, it’s about, “We’ll do that and we’ll make sure that they can actually function and achieve and do the kind of outstanding work that we need them to do and that we’re employing them for, because we see talent in them.”

SARAH  And that has a massive impact of every aspect of an organisation.  Because it then becomes normalised or expected or other bits of the organisation seeing the barriers that they’ve got in place that doesn’t make it easy for somebody to do their best work as a technician or someone in the marketing team or somebody in the catering team that there are, that becomes institutionally expected.

MICHÈLE:            Yes.  And, and you know about that because you were chief exec at New Wolsey until very recently.

SARAH  Yes.

MICHÈLE:            So you know about that, that kind of organisational change, and again it’s something we’re going to, we’re going to pick up on in a later episode, so that’s, that will be really interesting to, to really start to interrogate what it is that creates that institutional kind of culture around anti-ableism and disability equality, which we’re also going to talk about in a later episode so, there’s so much richness coming up.  I want to ask you, Sarah.  Sarah Holmes.  You’ve been such, you continue to be such an important driver and person for Ramps on the Moon.  What are you proudest of?

[00:20:07]

SARAH  That I’m, I suspect it’s probably the amount of people it’s impacted.  And it’s, it’s a pretty grim world at the moment, I mean this country’s in some terrible place and it’s pretty fantastic when you see somebody have a kind of a lightbulb moment of, of joy or challenge or interest and something that they can grasp and run with, without it having a whole heap of negatives whys and nots and hows and how it’s not going to go.  And I think that’s, if you can keep that spirit going, because change, if you’d look at all the reasons and all the things in the way of making change, you could stop easily.  You wouldn’t get out from under the duvet.  But if you look at it as just, as an exciting challenge and an, and an essential, it lightens one.

MICHÈLE:            It lightens one.

SARAH  It makes you feel lighter.  You know, so all that stuff on your shoulders pulling you down, it makes you have a bit of a [intake of breath] moment.

MICHÈLE:            And what’s the most exciting thing you’ve seen on stage as part of the Ramps journey?

SARAH  Well, I’m always going to think about the ones I’ve been closest involved with, and that was the Thruppenny Opera and Tommy.  And both of them in different ways had many, many moments within the productions of pure joy.

MICHÈLE:            And here we are, as I say, seven and a bit years into Ramps on the Moon.  Is this where you thought we would be as an industry?  Is this where you thought you would be as an individual?  Is this where you thought the New Wolsey would be?  What has taken you by surprise?

SARAH  Michele you are talking to a woman who does not have much thought beyond today about what tomorrow’s going to be or, so I don’t think I would have had this is what I anticipated it to be because I do have this kind of ridiculous method of working where, or being that I really don’t have an aspiration, “I’m going to achieve this.”  Or, “This is going to look like this.”  It is that wonderful interview question, “What does success look like or where do you want to be in five years time?”  I’ve never been good at, at answering those questions.

MICHÈLE:            So do you think we’ve changed the world?

SARAH  Yes.  I think there’s a heck of a lot more of the world that, it changed the world.  Yes we are changing the world, we haven’t changed it.  You never change it for, totally.  But we are changing the world.

MICHÈLE:            Thank you for listening.  You can contact me through the link in the show notes.  Or through our website RampsontheMoon.co.uk.  Ramps on the Moon is funded by Arts Council England and is made up of six mainstream theatres; Birmingham Rep, Leeds Playhouse, Nottingham Playhouse, the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich, Sheffield Theatres and Theatre Royal Stratford East and our associated, Wiltshire Creative and the Regional Theatre Young Director Scheme.  This podcast is the copyright of Ramps on the Moon.  Ramps on the Moon cannot be held responsible for any mistakes or omissions.  This podcast is made for entertainment purposes.  And finally, we’d like to thank our friends at podtalk.co.uk for producing this podcast.

[Audio ends: 00:23:52]