AUTHOR: MARIA CHRONOPOULOU | PHOTOGRAPHY: VASILIS KOUROUPIS
– Christos, are you an actor?
Christos. – I’m an actor and a theatrologist, and I have always been involved in theatre in different ways, as an assistant director, performer and actor. With the theatrical group “Emis”—meaning “We” in English—to which I belong, we always try to open our work to as many people as possible. The performances we gave in Athens were with voluntary contributions and they went very well. This was in 2013, when the results of the crisis were beginning to be visible and it was the period when we were all in a (state of) depression and feeling frozen. Later, we started to go to prisons to present our work, and a workshop with the imprisoned women in Thebes emerged. There I felt how important it was for someone to be able to come to the theatre and I realized that whatever you do, it is good to reach out to more people than the usual theatregoer audience.
– Did you have any other personal motivations?
C. – A motivation is that I was born and raised in a village in Paphos, Cyprus, a refugee village. Since I was 5, I have been saying that I want to make theatre—after the first performance in kindergarten—but I managed to see a performance when I was 16-17. I was looking for a theatre workshop, a theatre, but there was nothing. So, in a sense, I can say that I know what it is like to want to have access to something, to want to be trained, or to attend something and not to be able to do so. Then, I began to process the idea of a space structured from the beginning, so that it would be open to everyone. My main concern, namely, was that everyone could participate in the theatre and generally in cultural activities. In the end, after research, I ended up starting what today is Liminal, without any specific space, but with the provision of accessibility services, which is the priority, in any case. We started with some workshops and by providing our services in performances, while this year we also made our first production.
– Which are the services you provide in order for a cultural space to be accessible, and what parameters do you take into account in a performance?
C. – The services we provide are acoustic description, interpretation in Greek sign language, surtitling and we take care of the space, so that the event will take place. This requires everything, from where the interpreter will be located and the setting of lights, to the co-direction of the audio describer with the director. Also, where the surtitle will be placed and how the soundscape will be described by the audio describer in the pauses that the actors make, since one day an actor can make a pause of 3 seconds and another day a pause of 10. So the audio describer must have watched the performance many times and they might have been working 5 months on all of the above.
– Katerina, in which way are you connected to Liminal?
Katerina. – I finished at the Department of Physical Education and Sports Science with a major in Adaptive Sports, and I have been working for many years with people with disabilities, both with children and with adults. I have collaborated with Child Protection Institutions, by organizing volunteers who engage with these people or by taking care of children with disabilities at home. I have worked with different ages and different disabilities. Always through my work, what concerns me is accessibility and inclusion. Because you do not only work with the disabled person, trying to develop some of their skills, but also with the rest of the people, in general, so that the person can be supported in society. Therefore, through my work, (on one hand) I try to combine community education, familiarizing people with disabilities so that they do not fear the disabled and that the latter can be more readily accepted, and on the other hand I seek to empower people with disabilities, so that they can exist equally in society.
– Do you think there is a shift in the contemporary perception of disability?
K. – There is a shift towards the social model approach. Previously, the medical model was predominant, according to which the person with a disability is at the centre, they are the ones who have the problem, and we have to cure them and everything comes from them. The social model puts the society and the system at the centre. And it says that it’s not the disabled person, but the society that cannot provide what is necessary, so that this individual has equal access to life, like anyone else. So it automatically changes the whole point of view and the whole organization. But in the mindset of people, there is still the medical model, from which the conviction is that the disabled person is unfortunate. While basically, the blame is due to the fact that there is no organized support framework that can provide a personal assistant, so that this person will be able to study, giving them equal access to work, education and social life.
C. – What we are dealing with very often is that if there is accessibility to the performance, the latter will be only for the deaf or just for the blind. And we always explain that accessibility exists so that everyone can come. There is a worry that someone who does not need accessibility services will be bothered by an interpreter or a surtitle. In addition, some theatre professionals do not easily understand that they are not doing someone a favour and that it is their obligation to offer the accessibility services, because it is a human right to participate in cultural and social events in general. We have a lot of work to do in order to consolidate the social model of disability.
– Katerina, you mentioned before that with the teams that you had worked one of the things you were doing is that they were not afraid of the disabled. Do you think that someone can be afraid of a person with a disability?
K. – It is something that happens because of unfamiliarity. Because you do not know something, there is a fear. As long as there is no infrastructure in the country for people with disabilities to have access to the pavement, the bakery, the supermarket, the others are less in touch with the wheelchair, so they are surprised and do not know how to react. They do not know how to approach a disabled person, if they will say or do something that will offend them. Many thoughts and feelings can be traced from ignorance.
– Recently, I saw the play “Tribes” by Nina Raine in the theatre, which—among other things—is about the life of a deaf child in a family. And what made me think (this play) is that it was the child that had to adapt to a situation that it might be difficult for it, and not the others, to another type of situation. I was impressed by the effort that this person is making to adapt daily.
K. – This is what all people with disabilities are doing. They try to adapt to something that is not made for them, and what you have grasped is really very intense as an experience. And the terminology on this subject is constantly changing. Previously, there was the term integration. Namely, there is already something and I want to be integrated in it. Now, we are talking about inclusion, where everything is included without the need to integrate something into something else. But this presupposes that this should be reciprocal. Then, we no longer speak about integration or incorporation, since we all try together as a whole, but about something inclusive.
– Is this what Liminal means?
C. – The word Liminal is a Latin ritual term that could be translated as a threshold, or as “in between.” We use it because we recommend this transition. To go through this liminal stage, the intermediate stage, so that we get to a point that we wish to be completely unnecessary for society. Art and Culture create such an almost metaphysical space. That is, in the theatre there is another dimension where restrictions such as space, time and physical conditions do not exist. And this is what we are trying to create, this transitional stage called Liminal, where there are no restrictions.
