Skip to footer

Arts orgs adapt for visitors with special needs

Pittsburgh Ballet is a pioneer in opening the performing arts to people with sensory sensitivities, including bringing in special education teachers as volunteer ushers and encouraging audience members to do whatever helps them engage.

|
Kelly Perkovich/Courtesy of Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre
The Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre performed a sensory-friendly performance of 'Peter Pan' in February 2016.
  • By Donna Bryson

Children with autism clapped exuberantly as Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre dancers kicked and leapt to Tchaikovsky.

Pittsburgh Ballet is a pioneer in opening the performing arts to people with sensory sensitivities. Strategies include bringing in special education teachers as volunteer ushers and encouraging audience members to do whatever helps them engage. Christina Salgado, who oversees Pittsburgh accessibility initiatives, said the result can be a bonus for performers. “You could see the joy in the dancers’ faces” as the audience kept the beat during the Russian dance in “The Nutcracker” last season, Ms. Salgado said.

Lisa Goring, chief program and marketing officer of the research and advocacy group Autism Speaks, pointed to stagings of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” in New York and London, which had toned-down sound and light effects, as more evidence of theaters adapting. Ms. Goring has advised the audience diversity nonprofit Theatre Development Fund and since 2011, the fund’s Autism Theatre Initiative has presented Broadway performances including “Wicked” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”

Julie Marshall, who studied music at the University of Colorado, had looked forward to sharing live performances with her daughter, who was diagnosed with autism. But at one concert, an usher asked her family to move after another music lover complained about Sarah’s “conducting.” “Our kids are told what to do and how to behave so much in their lives,” Ms. Marshall said. “They rarely get to enjoy music and express who they are on their own terms.” 

Marshall started the nonprofit organization BrainSong in 2011 to organize visits by professional musicians to special education classes. BrainSong also produces concerts. Last year, BrainSong raised funds to subsidize tickets for the Boulder Ballet and the Boulder Philharmonic’s first performance of an autism-friendly “Nutcracker.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Arts orgs adapt for visitors with special needs
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2017/0321/Arts-orgs-adapt-for-visitors-with-special-needs
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe