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In Touch - transcript BBC Radio 4 |
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15 March 2005 Listen to the In Touch for 15 March 2005 IN TOUCH TX: 15.03.05 2040-2100 PRESENTER: PETER WHITE PRODUCER: CHERYL GABRIEL WHITE Good evening. In a moment more news about that talking digital radio we mentioned last week, which has created such a stir. And there's also a distinctly Parisian flavour to today's programme - we've been to see a play which tells the extraordinary true story of a teenage blind resistance fighter who operated in Paris during World War II. A play which though written and performed by visually impaired actors has deliberately rejected the use of conventional audio description, we'll be finding out why in the programme. And I've been introduced to a technique which might overcome my fairly well known scepticism about tactile art. As I stood in front of one of Rodin's best known sculptures I was invited to relate it to my own body. CLIP That is clearly the nose and it's quite a big nose I would have said, in proportion to the head. Would you call that a big nose? A strong one. A strong nose, yes. WHITE Well we'll be returning to Rodin's work, including his iconic The Thinker, towards the end of today's programme. But first of all I think we had our biggest response ever to our action line last week after the item about a new digital radio which talks from the company Pure Digital. Clearly this is something which just about every blind and partially sighted person has been waiting and the interest has been added to by the news that the organisation Tapesense, which exists to help visually impaired people obtain a range of audio equipment, was considering offering the radio at a concession price. Well to find out more I'm joined from our Guildford studio by Fiona Brown, who's chief executive of the Persula Foundation, which runs Tapesense. Fiona, first of all, just what is the situation over the radio? BROWN Basically the Pure Digital Sonus 1xt is due in with Tapesense at the end of this week. We're extremely excited and we should have it available for sale for our Tapesense customers as from next week. WHITE The obvious question is what price - I think there's some difficulty for you over that, can you just explain what the situation is? BROWN Of course. The Persula Foundation is a registered charity and Tapesense was set up as a non-profit scheme. Now obviously on our side we understand that the radio is going to be available to the general public at £119.00. However, I can reveal that Tapesense will be offering the radio at a lower price for all of our customers. WHITE And that's as much as you can say at this stage? BROWN What I would suggest is that people obviously make contact with Tapesense. WHITE Now when you say "our customers" is this for any visually impaired person, what do you have to prove for instance? BROWN There are restrictions. Basically once a new customer comes to us they have to register with us, they can do this over the phone, so it's a very simple procedure. Once someone is registered, we've checked their verification, they can then order subsequent orders thereafter. WHITE And how soon is this going to be available to people - the radio? BROWN We hope to have them in by the end of this week, so they should be ready for our customers as from Monday. WHITE You're going to be swamped, are you able to cope? BROWN We certainly will be. What we've strictly said at the very beginning is that we will of course, due to the high demand, be able to sell one radio per household for the visually impaired, so family and friends will not be able to purchase the radio from us, it's just for our customers. WHITE Just to put Tapesense in perspective, what else does Tapesense do? BROWN We do a range of recordable media, from brand new audio tapes, CDRs, batteries, headphones, we also stock the Crown radio, so we've stocked the DAB radios before and other products for our customers. WHITE Well best of luck with the ringing phones. BROWN Thank you very much. WHITE Fiona Brown, thank you very much indeed. The number to ring is 020 7357 9298, that's 020 7357 9298 but that information will of course be on our action line which is on 0800 044 044. Now despite that report sadly not everything is accessible yet and it's not unusual to go to theatre productions which are not audio described. What is more unusual is to find a production written and performed by visually impaired people which has rejected the idea of conventional audio description. The play in question has been adapted from the autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, whose amazing story we featured on In Touch some 10 years ago. Blinded in an accident at the age of eight, he went on to become a key member of a group of French resistance fighters during the Second World War in occupied Paris. Intriguingly it was his blindness which provided him with his cover because the Nazis couldn't believe a blind man could be doing this work. Although eventually he was captured and spent time in Buchenwald concentration camp. Well Caroline Golding in her debut feature for us has been to the play, here's her report. CLIP FROM PLAY - RESISTANCE OSHODI I was reading quite a few texts, which were written by blind people or about blindness, and I came across the Jacques Lusseyran story and when I read it I was really enthralled by his experience of losing his sight and what a transformational experience that was for him at seven, eight years old. And how that informed his desire to basically take action against the occupying army in Paris during the 1940s and form his own resistance group. And I found that was very inspiring, very dramatic and I thought there were seeds there for an interesting drama to be created. GOLDING Maria Oshodi is the author and producer of Resistance and the founder of the Extant Theatre Company. Maria is blind and the cast members are also visually impaired. I wondered where the idea of abandoning conventional audio description had come from. OSHODI Well I suppose it's something that Extant's been working on for quite a while. One strand of our research has been around accessing visually impaired performers to more physical forms of theatre practice and the other has been how to access that to a visually impaired audience without necessarily using technical methods because we wanted to try and give visually impaired audience as much of a live experience of theatre as possible and not have a barrier of sort of headphones or anything getting in the way. And so in a sense the production of Resistance has automatically come out of all of that research that we've been doing over the past five or six years. CLIP FROM PLAY - RESISTANCE GOLDING The play's director is Eileen Dillon, who's sighted. I asked her how she approached the new project. DILLON Our starting point is the artistic vision and so how we then access that or how we make that available to a visually impaired audience almost comes afterwards. GOLDING As a drama student myself I was particularly interested to find out what theatrical devices they had discovered and developed for the piece. DILLON What we do is we'll actually give sounds to the actors creating tableaux and the sounds have got to be part - artistically have integrity to what they're actually doing. So, for example, two resistance members run on the stage, they duck down, they stand up, they turn round and we just give them words like "shh", "clear", "down", "side". So those sorts of words are actually describing the picture that's happening, so it's part of the play rather than something separate stuck on the side. CLIP FROM PLAY - RESISTANCE DILLON There are things that we've developed for the performer, the actor, on one side of the stage there's an action, for example, slaps the face, the face that he's slapping isn't in physical contact with him, it's on the other side of the stage. So you have one actor going to do a slap and the actor on the other side of the stage responds and you have, what I call, a split image. MUSIC FROM PLAY - RESISTANCE GOLDING Working with such visual images on stage I wondered how they got around the access issue when it came to the dance elements. DILLON We use dance as a symbol or a metaphor for the sudden expanse and sort of explosion of activity in the resistance group at that point in the play. And so it's almost that the dialogue that's happening is expressing the energy and the action for what was happening in the plot at that time. But what we've done is we've used dance and music there just to sort of reinforce it, so it's almost like the dance is there not as entertainment, it's there as a driving energy, as we see it. CLIP FROM PLAY - RESISTANCE CHARLES What we've tried to use is otherwise to allow access to the play. GOLDING Iain Charles is one of the cast and I asked him which of the techniques he thought was particularly effective. CHARLES Very bright lights which give off a certain amount of heat, which people can feel and also noises. And certain things we've originally put in for a sighted audience, as the process has developed we've gone back to look at these things and added just some sounds or the occasional word, just to allow that extra bit of access for the different levels of visual impairment. So it's been very interesting and very intriguing. GOLDING Gerard McDermott is another actor. I asked him how easy it was to incorporate the audio description into the piece. MCDERMOTT It's been effortless really because everything is described in a way, the characters become narrators, two actors playing Jacques - the younger Jacques and the older Jacques - and they often go in and out of dialogue, so that myself playing the SS interrogator, we go in and out of dialogue with each other but then there are longer passages where it takes the form of narration. CLIP FROM PLAY - RESISTANCE GOLDING The production might be viewed by some as some as controversial but Maria Oshodi is clear in her intentions of what she's trying to achieve. OSHODI We are a visually impaired theatre company and this is what we're attempting to do and if some of it has to be out on a limb then it has to be out on a limb, and that's fine. I'm not trying to ape here some mainstream non-disabled company and just trying to make everything look the same as non-disabled counterparts, this is about us being different and how we use that in a way that's kind of got some integrity to it but also [indistinct word] is allowed to be obvious as well. WHITE Maria Oshodi ending that report by Caroline Golding. The play is called Resistance and it's on tour until May, we obviously can't mention all the dates and venues but it is on tonight at the Huntingdon Art Theatre in Worcester, at Hemel Hempstead tomorrow and over the weekend, on Friday and Saturday, at the Custard Factory in Birmingham. And there are also productions in Truro, Liverpool, Manchester and Leicester - just to name a few. All the details on our action line on 0800 044 044. And staying with our Paris theme and on the looser on principle that there's nothing a blind person can't aspire to, there's no reason why we can't appreciate good art, it's just that personally it's something I've always found rather difficult to do. But an experience at the weekend just may have changed that stubborn old heart of mine. Join me as two art enthusiasts try to show me how to appreciate tactile art at its very best. ACTUALITY - MUSEE RODIN WHITE We're standing in the Rodin Museum in Paris and this is somewhere that I came three or four years ago, almost by accident, I has on holiday here, came in here, discovered that they went to an awful lot of trouble to actually make the museum accessible and I resolved that if I was in Paris again I would bring a microphone. So that's what I've done. With me is Clemence Goldberger of the museum. Can I ask you first a bit more about the museum generally, what's its history? GOLDBERGER The museum is settled in the Hotel Biron, it's a beautiful mansion from the 18th Century. There are about 250 sculptures displayed here. So Rodin settled in here in the very beginning of the 20th Century, almost at the end of his life. And he used this hotel to show his work. WHITE What about the problem of preserving the sculptures, because obviously presumably it's perfectly reasonable that you have to be careful about that aspect of it? GOLDBERGER Yes, that's why we choose to give bronze to be touched because the marble is a very soft stone and all the grease you have on your hand would make spots on it. Then the clay and the plaster are too fragile to be touched because imagine what would happen if it was broken. We reserve this type of visit to people who are blind because we know that touching for them is fundamental. WHITE And you do - you also have, I think, you've gone to some trouble to have information for people to put the sculptures into context, you've got Braille and tape. GOLDBERGER Yes, that's very helpful of course because there is a large opening right now to be able to welcome any kind of public in the museum. TAPE GUIDE OF MUSEUM The first floor rooms will enable you to understand the genesis of several great works, including the Gates of Hell, the Burghers of Calais, Victor Hugo and Balzac, whose monumental versions are in the garden. WHITE Okay, well Alexander Francois is also with us and you've devised this system, can you just tell me a little bit more about the system before I try it myself? FRANCOIS When you touch a bronze you can touch with your two hands but without a ring touch. WHITE Alright, well I have no ring on. So that's okay. FRANCOIS And you touch first like you want. WHITE Okay. GOLDBERGER Discover the sculpture by yourself. What are you touching? WHITE Well I'm touching - at the moment I'm touching the top of the head, the skull, I guess that would be, and that is clearly the nose with the two nostrils and it's quite a big nose I would have said, in proportion to the head. Would you call that a big nose? Quite a big nose. GOLDBERGER A strong one. WHITE A strong nose, yes and a straight one. And it's very precise with those - I'm just touching my own nose actually and those little indentations at the side of the nose are very clear. GOLDBERGER That's very good because the reference to your own body it's very important to understand the difference of the shape in the body that's on the sculpture. The central part being the nose, it becomes your reference point, like you see for the whole body your shoulder line will become your reference line. WHITE In a way you're addressing the thing that has always worried me about touch as a way of appreciating a piece of art because you can only feel one thing at a time, whereas you can see the whole and I've always worried that, as you've said, as soon as you touch it and move on you've forgotten it, you've forgotten what ... GOLDBERGER The whole process is about memory. WHITE So you're saying if you have one point in your mind then you can relate everything else back to that point. GOLDBERGER That's very well expressed. Thank you for helping us. TAPE GUIDE OF MUSEUM Fertile thoughts are slowly forming in his mind, he's not a dreamer but a creator, it is a statue of myself. WHITE Now this is the sculpture that everybody's heard of, even if they don't know anything about sculpture, with Rodin, isn't it, Clemence perhaps you could just describe this for me to start with. GOLDBERGER Okay so The Thinker is a man sitting on a rock, he has one hand on his knee. I mean his right hand is holding his chin and his back is bent over. And he's thinking deeply. WHITE So that's his - those are his shoulders and he's leaning ... FRANCOIS Yes you have another process. Feel first head, shoulders but you must keep your hand off one of the shoulders and with the other hand you make the movement of the arm. WHITE That is so clear actually. You were saying about the arms because one arm goes out, curving slightly to the right, but in front of him and it's on the knee and the other one, if I can find it, yeah, is bent up and he's cupping his chin - is that right? - he's cupping his chin in his hand. It's changed my perspective, I must admit and I'm not just saying that, it's a new way of touching for me. And if you're in Paris I'm assured that if you just turn up at the Museum of Rodin they will make sure you have a guide with whom to go round, although it probably would be better if you telephoned in advance. That is it for today, just to remind you again that our action line is on 0800 044 044. From me Peter White, my producer Cheryl Gabriel and the team, a bien tot. Visit the In Touch Message Board Back to the In Touch page The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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