About Hijinx
Hijinx is an inclusive theatre company. Founded in the early 1980s as a regular theatre company making shows to tour around Wales, it started working inclusively with adult actors with learning disabilities and/or autism at the turn of the millennium. Along with other projects, it runs the Hijinx Academy training courses around Wales. There, it works with over 60 actors who receive ongoing training in many performance disciplines to help them prepare for the rigours of rehearsing and performing on stage and screen. Hijinx also produces its own shows that tour internationally.
One of the main ways we do this is by putting the stories and voices of our actors at the centre of everything we do. It ensures our productions are representative of our actors’ lives and helps build more authentic stories and voices, which can also improve understanding of their lives.
Accessibility and representation in the stage and screen industries are lacking. From some research we did prior to our Clwstwr project, which involved (amongst other things) looking at other research done by the BFI and other organisations, we knew that the screen industry was lagging way behind the live performance industry in these areas. Back in 2019, only about 5% of people on screen were disabled, be that news and current affairs programmes, dramas, comedies or other. Also, there was little differentiation between people with a physical disability and people with a learning disability. We knew anecdotally that representation of people with a learning disability was even lower than for those with physical disabilities.
The lack of research and representation encouraged us to look into ways that we could develop things to help the industry improve and employ more people with learning disabilities and/or autism. We wondered if screen-based stories can be created in the same way that we approach our theatre work - i.e. by starting with a rough idea and developing that idea with our actors, so that their voices, authentic stories and ideas occur through the whole project. There must be a way of doing something similar when it comes to creating a TV show, short film, feature or game. That pondering led us to our Clwstwr project.
We applied for Clwstwr’s seed funding to research approaches companies might take
This was to see if we could come up with a unified set of approaches that could be disseminated amongst the screen industry through training. We recruited a researcher who talked to other inclusive theatre companies that had dabbled in film and TV, as well as screen companies that had worked inclusively on projects, to see how they approached things. We also ran focus group discussions with industry partners, with participants from a range of film and TV roles.
This showed us two things
The first, which was really nice in many ways, was that almost everyone our researcher spoke to said they do things in the way Hijinx does, because we take the best approach to it. The second thing it showed us was how hard it is to look at things in isolation in film and TV, particularly when it comes to inclusivity and accessibility, because there are so many moving parts to film and TV projects that overlap with one another. It's all very well trying to look at ways that you can develop a script inclusively and then cast inclusively, in that sense, but if the pre-production, post-production, marketing or any other element of it isn't inclusive as well, it starts falling apart and isn't genuinely inclusive.
That's where we got to at the end of our seed funding stage: we shouldn't just be looking at the creation of work, in terms of the script and so on, but we should be looking at the wider elements of the industry and how we can support those as well. We knew we had the right idea and that it was needed, but by the end of it, we realised that we needed to expand it much more than we thought. There was a real appetite for it as well. We finalised that first phase by identifying five key products we could go on to create.
The first potential product was communications training.
This would involve going into a production company and working with 10-12 of their staff on roleplay-based communications training. Our actors would be employed to portray somebody turning up on their first day of the shoot (for example). Then, we’d invite somebody from the production company’s team to be the other person in the scene, who had to welcome them to their first day on the set. It can be overwhelming for neurotypical people arriving on set, and it's even more so for some neurodiverse people.
This is something we’ve done in other sectors, such as with the NHS’ student doctors to help improve communications when dealing with learning disabled adults in the consulting room. We were taking those basic ideas and then tailoring them to the screen industries.
Second, we had an idea of a consultancy service
We would effectively be consultants on a project, programme or a film, acting as a sounding board to help that production company navigate their way through an inclusive production.
The third project we thought of was a creative enablers agency
If an actor is employed, the creative enabler would be somebody who accompanies them on set, during rehearsals and so on. They'd act as a support for that actor as they need it, be that going through lines or helping them understand what's happening next. They'd also communicate back to the crew and the director, to help keep everything running smoothly. We could create a list of people who would be trained up to be able to do that.
Our fourth idea was an online toolkit
This could be accessed at a later date after the training. Or, it could be done as a separate thing if you've got a big organisation with a widespread workforce that needs to train lots of people in different locations. We imagined it possibly including interactive film training, like what we would be aiming to do in the live roleplay training sessions but in a film. Participants could choose the most appropriate response at a particular point in the film and then see how that pans out.
Finally, there was an idea of an advocacy network
It would allow people from organisations to support our work and be vocal advocates for it. Advocates could appear at conferences like at the Edinburgh TV Festival and tell people about the work we're doing and how it can help change the landscape of representation.
We had more funding to explore our ideas, starting with communications training
Although we'd set out to dig into all five things, it was clear the communications training would be the most effective and most in-demand. So, we looked into getting it rolled out as a priority, with the others following afterwards.
We wanted to provide training for organisations of different sizes. This pushed us to think about ways to tailor our training to different sized organisations. For example, we wanted to be able to provide training in such a way that it's effective and financially viable for all, even if you only have a small production company. Equally, a bigger workforce with many departments might need a whole different way of approaching things, so we took time considering this.
We talked in more detail with the production companies
They were the ones that we had been chatting to in the first stage, plus a couple of other companies we'd established relationships with in the interim. In addition to the three organisations from the first stage (S4C, Triongl and Severn Screen), we had three others: Rondo Media, Bad Wolf and Screen Alliance Wales. This allowed us to look at different size organisations that create different kinds of work, including Welsh noir police thrillers, big-budget blockbusters and smaller scale productions.
COVID-19 forced us to change our plans for research and testing the training
We ran a couple of test communications training days, but we were sidelined somewhat by the COVID-19 pandemic. Because we work with adults with learning disabilities and autism, some of whom have underlying health conditions that make them clinically vulnerable, many of our actors had to shield at home during and even after the lockdowns. Things we'd hoped to do in person had to switch to online.
During the Seed stage, we’d hoped to use current projects to test out our ideas as we were developing them, but because the industry came to a halt during the pandemic, we instead looked at projects that we'd done in the very recent past and used those as case studies to see how things could be done. We also turned to films already in the public domain that have a storyline involving somebody with autism, for example, but where it hasn’t been told in an authentic way. For example, Music by Sia got a lot of negative press for its poor representation of autism. It was challenging to switch plans, but we made it work.
By the end of our project funding, the communication skills training was almost ready
We knew how it would work, what it would look like and how we could go about doing it. The other ideas were falling into place in the background, too; the creative enablers agency, the consultancy and the advocacy network were coming together, and the online toolkit felt easy enough for us to pick up afterwards.
Following Clwstwr, we received further funding from other organisations to roll out training. Clwstwr allowed us to develop the training to the point where we can start putting it out there, then Creative Wales will allow us to start doing it. We hope to offer the training to a whole range of production companies of different sizes, with subsidies or discounts depending on the size and shape of the company being trained.
We feel like we’re fulfilling our company aims with this work
Right back when we first started working inclusively, we wanted to change the arts landscape in terms of inclusivity, knowing that it would have a knock-on effect on how people are viewed in society as well. This project could have some really positive impacts on the industry itself and in the much wider context of everyday life.