Why your support matters?
It is essential that disabled people and their voices are represented on and off stage. The arts have a key role in sharing marginalised voices and ensuring that everyone in society is represented. However, disabled people continue to be marginalised in society, theatre and culture – with inequality in access, audience and participation numbers, and opportunities for training, employment and progression.
Our mission is to ignite artistic curiosity, pioneer radical theatre and place access at the heart of our creative process. We provide a diversity of platforms for new generations of artists through productions, training and new writing programmes.
What we do:
- We create world-class accessible theatre: our work reaches new audiences, including those with little access to the arts.
- We train and educate: nurturing talent to open up the arts for disabled artists at all levels and ages
- We make change: championing accessibility across the sector, exploring new creative processes and representing a greater diversity of voices on and off stage
Testimonial
We believe creativity is a human right and strive to make art truly accessible for everyone.
We are really proud of what we’ve achieved in 40 years, and of our ever-growing community of bold, talented Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists.
Did you know?
- Graeae has been pushing for change for disabled artists and audiences for over 40 years. We are often disabled artists’ gateway into the performing arts, and often disabled audiences’ first theatre experience. We don’t take this responsibility lightly, and fight tirelessly for our community then, now and always.
- We are one of the leading voices in the disability arts movement: as a company that has always been disabled-led, the sector looks to us for knowledge, guidance, experience, creative courage, and fresh-thinking.
- In the last 15 years alone, Graeae shows have reached over 100,000 audience members!
- We’ve worked with over 60,000 disabled people in workshops, a third of which were disabled children and young people.
- Our accessible shows Reasons to be Cheerful, Self-Raising and Solid Life of Sugar Water have won multiple awards and played to audiences across the UK.
- Artists who have taken part in our youth companies Ensemble and The Rolettes are now leading the way as directors, writers and actors.
- Graeae continues to lead the first ever leadership development programme for disabled artists, Beyond, with hundreds of disabled artists going on to work across the industry in creative and leadership positions.
- We don’t just work in the UK – we regularly connect with disabled artists internationally, for example in India, Pakistan and Japan.
- We created the first ever writing programme for disabled playwrights, which supported writers such as Jackie Hagan, Matilda Ibini, Nicky Werenowska, Tom Wentworth and Shahid Iqbal Khan among many others.
- We have showcased disabled excellence in all corners of the performing arts, from outdoor work and circus to opera, new writing, verbatim theatre and radio.
- Graeae’s ethos even runs through the architecture of our home in Bradbury Studios. The accessibility of our award-winning accessible HQ means disabled artists can make work barrier-free from the moment they enter our home.
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What Graeae means to me
