Ep:16 Jamie Hale, Director of CRIPtic Arts - on dismantling hierarchies and pushing the margins

In this episode Michele Taylor talks to Jamie Hale - a disabled and neurodivergent creative coach, trainer, and access consultant working to build cultures rooted in access, equity, and disability justice.  His work sits at the intersection of lived experience and professional practice. He is the Artistic Director at CRIPtic Arts, leading strategic development, commissioning, talent development, and organisational growth.

From this episode:

"I think there’s sometimes presumed to be a divide between great art and community art and this sense that disabled-led work is on the outskirts, it’s community art, it’s very nice to let them make art and maybe they’ll make a nice little play at the end, rather than creating work for audiences to experience and enjoy at a high level, at a high quality. And I think that the assumption that disabled-led work is inherently community art undermines the value both of community art and of kind of mainstream disabled-led work."

Thank you Jamie for a brilliantly candid and fascinating chat.

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:                     Michèle Taylor

Respondent:                    Jamie Hale    

MICHÈLE            Welcome to the Ramps on the Moon podcast. I’m Michèle Taylor director for change at Ramps on the Moon and this is where I get curious about ableism in the arts. I chat with brilliant people who are challenging inequity to find out about their experiences, their ideas and their work in the cultural sector and beyond. This is season three and whether you are new here or returning, every episode stands alone. So jump in anywhere. And if you want to go deeper subscribe to our quarterly newsletter, The Shift at rampsonthemoon.co.uk for exclusive insights, resources and updates on the movement we are building. Together we can change the world. Welcome to this episode of the Ramps on the Moon podcast. And with me today I have Jamie Hale who is the artistic director of CRIPtic Arts. And what I want to do today is to find out all about Jamie, all about CRIPtic Arts. And I really am interested to know, in fact let’s start here Jamie, I’m really interested to know what are you excited about in terms of arts and disabled people right now? What is making you optimistic? What is exciting you? 

JAMIE   I think I’m excited by all the different pieces of work that I’ve seen springing up. And maybe that’s because last year we produced Liberty and so sifting through hundreds of applications for fantastic projects from fantastic artists, even if we could only take a few of them. And now we’ve got the applications open for CRIPtic’s 2026 programme. And again I’m inundated by brilliant ideas and brilliant artists. So I feel like there’s something really fizzing under the surface which there’s lots of work being played with and explored that is just waiting for the opportunity to be made. 

MICHÈLE            Brilliant. And for anybody who isn’t familiar with Liberty can you just us what it is? 

JAMIE   Liberty is a London-based disability arts festival. It’s a Mayor of London, Greater London Authority project. And it travels with Borough of Culture. So it was based in Wandsworth last year when we produced it. And I believe it’s on its way to Haringey next. 

MICHÈLE            And what sort of work were you seeing? Was it all fairly traditional? Or were you seeing groundbreaking work? What, what is it that you were seeing? 

JAMIE   It was incredibly broad in terms of genre, style, approach. And the thing that I’m always looking for and the thing that I was finding and the thing that really excites me is when disabled people are able to make work that isn’t about disability. And when people are given the permission and the space to tell the stories that they want. And these may well be stories with disabled people and disabled characters, people in the worlds but where the narrative isn’t the disability arc that we’re so often expected to live and then provide and serve up in the arts. And where the narrative- And when I say narrative I mean that very broadly, I mean that dance can have a narrative, music can have a narrative, that that is allowed to be something expansive and universal. I’m so tired of this sense that disability is shuttled off into its own corner as if we can’t possibly speak to universal themes. And so excited by the work being made that really does. 

MICHÈLE            And what I’m struck by in what you say is the way that you put so closely together the narratives that we’re allowed to tell on stage or in the marketplace or wherever it might happen to be and the narratives that we are expected to live. 

JAMIE   Yeah. 

MICHÈLE            So if we’re not allowed to tell anything other than a disabled story, is that because we’re not allowed to live anything other than a life of disability? And we’re not allowed to experience those other universal themes. 

JAMIE   Well we’re not to quite an extent. We’re allowed to live lives of disability but if you’re disabled and on benefits and you want to marry, you risk losing a lot of your benefits and your independence. If you’re disabled and you want to work, we’ve all seen what’s happening to access to work. We’re being forced out of these parts of life that are seen as so universal. We’re not being allowed to live them. And the stories that we’re allowed to tell are very much the stories of tragedy and triumph. They’re nice, neat, round stories in which disability happens and maybe we adapt to it or maybe it comes to an end. And they’re not stories of the reality of life which is broad and bumpy and multidirectional. 

MICHÈLE            So what other stories would you like to see being told? And what other stories did you see being told in those pieces that were put in front of you for the Liberty Festival? 

JAMIE   It’s difficult because ultimately at Liberty I was so busy working that I barely got to see any of the work. So it’s quite difficult to speak to that question. But what I’m excited by is work that comes through a [unclear 00:05:15] lens, that can be about anything. I want to have your space pirates, I want to have your historical fiction, I want to have your wild dragon fantasy. I want all of these things to be able to be made by disabled people without someone saying, but we booked you as a disabled person because we thought you would talk about disability. Because that’s the thing, theatre seems to take more and more work by disabled people but so much of that is still our own narratives of disability. And I speak as a hypocrite because that’s what my show is. But what I want to do now is push theatre to take more work more widely. 

MICHÈLE            Who are you as an artist Jamie Hale? And what is CRIPtic Arts? Tell us about you and tell us about CRIPtic. 

JAMIE   I am a multi-disciplinary artist, which is a polite way of calling myself indecisive. I am also the artistic director at CRIPtic which I set up as a one night event in 2019. And then as an organisation in 2021. In my own work I do quite a bit of writing, quite a bit of directing, and some performance. At CRIPtic as the artistic director I do again quite a bit of directing but I also do a lot of budgets and funding applications. 

MICHÈLE            And which is your favourite bit? 

JAMIE   The directing. 

MICHÈLE            I’d have been very surprised if you’d have said the budget and the spreadsheets and the funding applications. 

JAMIE   Oh I don’t know though, everyone at CRIPtic knows that you can’t ask me to anything spreadsheet related because I will fall down a hole and spend two weeks designing the perfect spreadsheet because I actually spreadsheets and coding. 

MICHÈLE            Do you? 

JAMIE   Yeah. 

MICHÈLE            That’s an interesting mix isn’t it. 

JAMIE   It keeps me balanced. 

MICHÈLE            I think designing a spreadsheet can be, for me can be one of those displacement activities. Let’s get the spreadsheet designed perfectly and then I’ll think about the numbers that have to go in there. 

JAMIE   Oh definitely. 

MICHÈLE            Remind me, you launched CRIPtic as an organisation in which year? 

JAMIE   2021. 

MICHÈLE            2021. So CRIPtic is five years old this year. 

JAMIE   It is indeed. 

MICHÈLE            And you’ve had an enormous impact. You must be really proud of what you’ve achieved are you? 

JAMIE   I’m really proud of what everyone’s achieved. It’s so bizarre to think that five years ago it was myself and our head of programmes and producing, Caitlin, sat in my bedroom sticking post-its on my wardrobe. 

MICHÈLE            Is that literally what you did to set up the organisation? 

JAMIE   It is literally what we did. 

MICHÈLE            What was the impetus behind starting CRIPtic? It’s often an itch, a lack of satisfaction that drives someone to set up an organisation isn’t it. Is that the case with CRIPtic? And if so what was it? 

JAMIE   When I first set CRIPtic I had barely worked. It was a one-night Pit Party at the Barbican Centre. I had read some poems on stage there a few years before and had been encouraged to apply for Open Lab which is a residency programme at the Barbican where I turned some poems into a solo show. And at the end of my residency I said, “Well can I put together a night in the Pit of deaf and disabled performers?” And alarmingly they said yes. Make your solo show half of it. So with that to embolden me, I Googled and discovered the Arts Council and applied to the Arts Council for the money to do it. And despite my lack of track record, they said yes as well. And lo and behold we had the first CRIPtic Pit Party. So that was 2019 and it was a difficult year because I was in hospital at the time. So I was very seriously ill and was eventually allowed out for a few hours at a time to go to the Barbican and perform and then to come back onto the ward. 

MICHÈLE            Oh my goodness. 

JAMIE   It was a six month rather grim experience. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me doing the show. We put the show on under those conditions. There were some quite serious conversations about what do we do if Jamie dies during the process? And the answer was we get a film of my show made and screen that instead. 

[00:10:06]

So it was definitely risk and contingency planning up to the eyeballs. But it all turned out absolutely fine. And that was that, that was me having done CRIPtic. And then the pandemic hit. I had been on a training programme at Graeae and that closed down. At the same time I was thinking about how I’d had never found an opportunity in theatre that was really accessible for me. And the only way that I’d been able to put my show on was because I’d gotten the funding and done it myself in the way that worked for me. And then I thought, hang on, if I need that other people are going to need that too. And that’s where CRIPtic the organisation came from. This realisation that some people would need things that weren’t in place and how could a theatre organisation work with people who faced these barriers to access and make it accessible for people even where other organisations might not. And at the time I didn’t really know much about other organisations. So it wasn’t a sense that, oh you know, there are all these disability arts organisations not doing this, because actually the more I have built the CRIPtic, the more I have seen that all of these other organisations are doing this. But that I hadn’t found anything at the time. And I had just thought once I’ve built this for myself I need to build it for other people as well. 

MICHÈLE            You’ve been recognised in many, many different ways. CRIPtic as an organisation has been recognised since then in many different ways hasn’t it. What, what do you put that down to? What do you think your success is down to? 

JAMIE   I think we were doing the things people wanted at the time that people wanted those things. Our community’s work being all online for example is something that is rare enough that it’s valued. And I think our programmes, we’ve always really tried to tailor them to the individual and because we’re small we are quite able to do that. So I think that’s been part of it as well. But a bit part of it has been the partners we have had. We’ve got a really excellent partnership with the Barbican in particular where we have been back multiple times, has been the staff, we’ve got a fantastic staff team. Everybody is really dedicated, works really hard and is just really brilliant in terms of ideas. And then also just all of the connections and the support I have had. I have never felt like I’ve been left with a question and nobody to go to. I have always been able to speak to other people working in or running other organisations. And so I think we’ve just offered something that people want at the right time. 

MICHÈLE            How can other organisations take a bit of what you do and be better? 

JAMIE   I think there’s so much that we have to learn from other organisations but that when I look at the mainstream, because I don’t want disability arts to have to be seated outside the mainstream as the kind of special care area. I want CRIPtic to be in the mainstream demonstrating how to make accessible work to the rest of the mainstream. Then I think it’s, for me it’s about power actually. We’ve been doing a lot of work on accessible rehearsal processes recently. And the big thing has been dismantling hierarchies and ceding power, that for our most recent rehearsal process it wasn’t the director and producer that designed the schedule for example. It was the performers and director sat down in a group talking about what start time is most accessible, how long do we want the breaks to be, how long do we want lunch to be, what finish time is best, with a process where at any point anyone could interrupt it because they wanted the toilet, wanted a drink, they were too hot, they were too cold. That it was, you know, that we checked in a couple of times during the day and if someone was tired we rejigged for them to go home early. The entire process was built around how do we get the best from everybody but without the traditional power structure of the director leading the space. Even in the activities we did it would sometimes be a question of would people find it more useful to gloss another chunk of the text or revise the movement on that previous scene? Where’s your energy level at? And what I’m interested in the fact that I know we’re not the only people doing the work in that way but how can we quantify and write it up? And how can we create guidance for wider industry on how access can be embedded in the very ways that they work not just put in round the edges. 

MICHÈLE            Yeah. Do you have any clues yet or is it too early to know how you might do that? How you might put those guidelines together? 

JAMIE   At the moment we’re hoping to put together some guidance and training from this early R&D and rehearsal process. But we’re also applying for funding for a big piece of research by practice that will look at how you do this work on a large scale professional rehearsal process. Because it’s that that we need to be able to persuade partners of, not just that it can be done in a small three person R&D but that it can be done on a large scale professional production. 

MICHÈLE            Do you think there will be resistance? 

JAMIE   Yes because I think the idea of completely dismantling the hierarchy is one that people are going to baulk at. And it’s interesting because I didn’t think that we were doing anything particularly odd or particularly special with this. I don’t have a professional background in drama or acting or theatre. CRIPtic is the only theatre organisation I have ever worked at. The only directors who aren’t myself that I’ve worked with have been people directing my solo show. 

MICHÈLE            Right. 

JAMIE   So I don’t know what normal is. I only know what normal is from what I’m told. And for what other people say about how other rooms work. So to me it felt quite normal to discuss how we wanted the structure to be, for people to stop when they needed to stop, to not work when exhausted, etc. And yet people were telling me that this is not normal from their experiences in wider industry. 

MICHÈLE            There’s something so refreshing isn’t there about coming to a process or an industry without all of that baggage of literally having been taught this is the way we do things. When so much of that way we do things is actually extraneous and it’s not necessary. 

JAMIE   It’s refreshing in some ways but it’s really quite challenging in others because-

MICHÈLE            Oh, in what ways is it challenging? 

JAMIE   It’s very difficult not knowing what people’s expectations of you are. 

MICHÈLE            Right. 

JAMIE   Particularly when I started out with directing, I didn’t know what the creative team were looking for from me. I didn’t know what the actors were looking for from me. This all felt new and unclear and uncertain. It’s meant that I often lack confidence as a director because I haven’t even really had the opportunity to watch other directors working. One of the things that I want to do is to try and go into some rehearsal rooms, even just for a day and see how a rehearsal room for a day operates with different directors. But there is something nice about coming to something fresh and just doing it your way because that’s the way you want to do it. 

MICHÈLE            Yeah I can really see that. And I can also see how- And maybe this wasn’t your experience, so but what I am imagining is that particularly if you’re talking about dismantling hierarchies and you’re talking about ceding power, if you are also going into that situation unsure of what people are expecting of you, I guess that can feel like quite shaky ground. Because if people are expecting you to take authority and take leadership of the room and then what you want to do is to share responsibility and cocreate the rehearsal space, I guess for some people that could feel quite undermining. 

JAMIE   I have only really been able to start doing the work on what a kind of cocreated space would look like once I have had enough experience directing to feel confident in taking the space as a director. 

MICHÈLE            Yeah, yes, I can really see that. 

JAMIE   It’s difficult because however much you’re ceding power, you’re also, you need to lead as the director. 

MICHÈLE            Yes. Yes.

[00:20:01]

JAMIE   But without the sense that you’re leading the space by consent and by mutual agreement of everyone within it rather than by hierarchy. Maybe it’s that you need to direct without leading perhaps. 

MICHÈLE            There’s a lot to think about there I think. Yeah. 

JAMIE   I’ve been doing a lot of writing about it all. 

MICHÈLE            Have you? 

JAMIE   Yeah. 

MICHÈLE            Is that how you process your thoughts, by writing? 

JAMIE   To some extent, it’s also because I want to publish some thoughts on our website that look at the work we’re doing and that we are reaching towards creating guidance. So kind of having things in writing about how we want to create space and how we want to work can be really valuable. 

MICHÈLE            I heard you say Jamie ‘Pushing us to the margins isn’t going to stop us making great art.’ Can you talk a little bit more about that? What did you have in mind when you said that? 

JAMIE   I think there’s sometimes presumed to be a divide between great art and community art and this sense that disabled-led work is on the outskirts, it’s community art, it’s very nice to let them make art and maybe they’ll make a nice little play at the end, rather than creating work for audiences to experience and enjoy at a high level, at a high quality. And I think that the assumption that disabled-led work is inherently community art undermines the value both of community art and of kind of mainstream disabled-led work. Because actually working with and inside underrepresented communities to create work as and by and for a community is incredibly challenging. And creating really interesting exciting community work is very valuable and that work has something incredibly special that work that is made to be polished for audiences doesn’t necessarily have. And there’s a huge spectrum where there’s sort of pure community workshops in one place on the spectrum and professional productions in another place. I’m very much not imagining a binary here. But I think for me what I’m reaching towards is exceptional art, disabled artists where I want to be making work that audiences recognise as high quality theatre, as exceptional theatre. And it is made by disabled people. And in many ways that makes it even more exceptional because it recognises that it’s being made by people who have faced a huge amount of structural barriers in the making of it and have made it. But I think that that’s very different from community art where the primary purpose is to benefit the people making it. And at CRIPtic we do both. But I think tired of an assumption that we don’t make exceptional work as part of the mainstream. We’re staging work in mainstream venues, why are we not held to and judged by mainstream standards? 

MICHÈLE            Do you think that part of that is because in some cases and in some art forms the aesthetic does have to shift? The quality isn’t compromised but the aesthetic might have to shift. 

JAMIE   I think the aesthetic shifts constantly in art. And I think there’s a kind of exceptionalising of the way that it gets shifted by disabled people. I am currently developing a Romeo and Juliette where both main parts are played by wheelchair users. And that is a shift for audiences because they’re not used to seeing disabled people in lead romantic roles. It is a case of skilled actors being cast in major roles. I wish audiences were granted space to the openness to find this exciting rather than challenging or different. 

MICHÈLE            How do you think we can do that? Do you have any ideas? 

JAMIE   I think the more that we are able to position disability arts organisations as not as bridging a gap between community and mainstream, or not as being the bridge between disability arts and the mainstream, but as existing and a kind of quantum entanglement of both places at once simultaneously, such that we can simply be part of the mainstream. And I think you see that in some art forms in other ways. What comes to mind for me is for example Ballet Black who are very much a mainstream ballet company. And they’re a ballet company made up of people from the global majority. And yet I don’t think anyone could argue that they are not a mainstream success. And I would like to be able to be existing in a similar way for disability arts. 

MICHÈLE            That’s a really interesting comparison, really interesting. What’s in the future for CRIPtic Arts? You’ve mentioned Romeo and Juliette but thinking, thinking even longer term than that, what are you ambitions for CRIPtic Arts apart from the being disability equivalent of Ballet Black? 

JAMIE   I’m not sure if we’re quite aiming for that but I think, you know, an interesting, an interesting example of an organisation that is mainstream and yet also represents a particular community. My big goal at the moment is National Portfolio. CRIPtic is funded project by project which is a very stressful position to be in on an annual if not more frequent basis. And I would really like us to be a National Portfolio organisation with that slightly more reliable funding for that slightly longer period. I feel like we’re working at that level organisationally and it’s been a run of bad luck with the Portfolio being extended and extended that has made it impossible for us to apply. And it’s had a real effect on us and on our staff team and on how we operate. I would love us to have our own theatre down the line. I’d love our own performance space. I think the Graeae building is just fantastic, Bradbury Studios. But what I want is the performance space to partner with that, maybe a consortium of disabled-led arts organisations, sharing in a theatre rather than us having our own, I don’t think we could fill it. But my goal would be to have a physical space where certainly high quality rehearsal and ideally performance could take place. And to be part of more of a hub, CRIPtic primarily exists remotely at the moment. And we don’t have a physical space beyond a storage locker. So I’d really like to see that changing. I’d like to see our productions arm expanding. A lot of the work we do at the moment is development programmes. We’ve got our community workshops programme. We’ve got a programme for people building disabled-led organisations. A programme for emerging scriptwriters. A programme for staging early versions of work. And a programme for mid-career and sort of late career disabled creatives breaking into the mainstream. So we’ve got all of those but we really want to be producing a lot more work under our own steam and getting that work put on and staged. So I’d really like to see the production arm of CRIPtic growing in particular. 

MICHÈLE            Wow those are- I mean just picking out from what you’ve said, those are two significant ambitions, a building to house a hub of a group of disability arts organisations and to increase your producing arm, your production arm. I mean if anybody can make those happen you can Jamie. That would be- Jamie just grimaced. That would be, that would be really, really exciting. We’re nearing the end but what- I started off by asking you what’s exciting you, what’s bugging you, what’s really, really annoying you at the moment about disabled people and the arts and how we’re seen in the arts perhaps. But what’s really exercising you? 

JAMIE   Access to work is the big thing. And the cuts to access to work. And the impact that that’s having on the careers of disabled creatives. I think it is alarming in the extreme. So that would be the top thing that concerns me and I would say that Graeae in particular are doing some really focused work on it at the moment. And if this is an issue that’s bugging listeners, then they should look at how to get involved in Graeae’s work on it. 

[00:30:01]

And then I think also the thing that bugs me, and I talked about this a bit earlier, but is the expectation that disabled people will kind of create and sell our trauma as theatre and our like, this is how I became disabled, this is what it’s like to be disabled narratives, when we are so much more than that. And it kind of, it bores and exhausts me that we’re not allowed to be. 

MICHÈLE            I mean it sounds like that might be the answer to this question. But I’m going to ask it anyway in case it isn’t. If there’s one thing you want people to know about disabled people making art, what is it? 

JAMIE   That we have the potential to excel and the problem is the barriers that are being put in our way that if organisations would look honestly at those barriers and do everything they could to remove them, they would soon see disabled artists excelling everywhere. But that for as long as people see barriers as an unfortunate but inevitable fact of reality, then they aren’t removing them. And disabled people are continuing to have to work three times as hard just to do anything. I am so tired of places that say, oh you know we would love to take your work but we don’t have wheelchair access to the stage. It’s just- It’s 2026. 

MICHÈLE            That word inevitable I think is so important in all of this isn’t it. I always, whenever I’m talking about the medical and the social models of disability, I always talk about how inevitability is hard baked into the medical model of disability. And the social model just completely gets rid of this notion of inevitability. Things don’t have to be that way. Somebody made a decision to put that barrier in place. So-

JAMIE   Or to not act to remove that barrier. 

MICHÈLE            Yeah exactly, exactly right. So it’s not inevitable. And neither is it inevitable that just because I have particular conditions or impairments that making work or experiencing work should be difficult for me. It’s not inevitable. And yet we’ve got so lazy around assuming that that’s just the way it is haven’t we. I think anyway. 

JAMIE   We have. 

MICHÈLE            Jamie thank you so much for sharing with us a bit about yourself and what’s keeping you awake at night and what makes you happy. Thank you for sharing about CRIPtic Arts. Where can people find you? 

JAMIE   On our website cripticarts.org or CRIPtic Arts on social media. Just to be difficult we spell it CRIPtic. 

MICHÈLE            CRIPtic Arts. 

JAMIE   Yeah. 

MICHÈLE            Brilliant. Jamie thank you so much. Really appreciate your time this afternoon and for giving us an insight into your work and into perhaps how we can be understanding ways of removing barriers for disabled people to making work. And as it says on your website, creating an artistic landscape where disabled people flourish. I love that. I think that’s really great. Thank you Jamie very much.