Exploring Access for Autistic Student-Actors

In this research I, an autistic actor-trainer who was once an autistic student-actor, will investigate the access issues faced by autistic students in drama schools. The question of how to provide equitable, accessible training for neurodivergent actors has recently begun to be addressed. Work has been published investigating the issues for dyslexic actors when working with text (Leveroy, 2015; Whitfield, 2019). Daron Oram has also published work on the experience of actors with dyslexia and dyspraxia learning psychophysical voice training methods (Oram, 2018). However, the experiences and needs of autistic student-actors remain largely unaddressed.

There has recently been a rise of higher education programmes designed specifically for actors with autism and/or learning disabilities. Disability-led arts organisations Graeae, Access All Areas and Mind the Gap have all partnered with universities or conservatoires to deliver this specific training, and as a result some literature exists on the complexities of this (Gee and Hargrave, 2011). However, this work mostly focuses on the ethics involved in working with learning disabled artists and focuses primarily on intellectual disability rather than autism. Although there is often co-occurrence of intellectual disability and autism, they are separate conditions. While these programmes are a valuable offering of training provision for neurodivergent actors, the question remains of how mainstream BA acting programmes could be made more accessible to autistic students. In 2016, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the National Theatre of Scotland and the National Autistic Society ran The Limitless Pilot (2018) which investigated the barriers to professional practice facing autistic artists, considering the barriers to accessing higher education in the arts but not the access issues present within the training itself. There is also some general literature available on the difficulties autistic students face when accessing higher education, focusing primarily on difficulties with transition (Sefotho et al, 2021), social issues (Gurbuz et al, 2018) and academic work (Van Hees et al, 2015).

Therefore, within this research, I will investigate what issues autistic students face within actor training programmes, and consider how practice and pedagogy, and the training environment could be adapted to be more accessible. The intended result is to identify the main issues autistic students face, and to propose what adaptations could be made. This research will address an important gap in knowledge within the field, as demonstrated above, and intends to produce information on how the learning experiences of autistic student-actors can be improved. The resulting knowledge on what changes could be made will potentially also have benefits for non-autistic students.