The Intersection of the Performing Arts and Ableism - Part 1

In part one of this episode, Mary sits down with her friend Christophe Desorbay about his experience as a artist, the ableism hard of hearing/Deaf performers on Broadway face, and more.

Christophe Desorbay is Franco-American producer and artist living in NYC. He currently works at Range Media Partners, finding the ways that theater can successfully interact with Film and & TV. Christophe is also a performer based in NYC, and thinks deeply about the ways that the industry can be more inclusive to disability. His regional theater credits include: West Side Story, Cinderella, Fiddler on the Roof, Guys & Dolls. TV/Film Credits include: ‘The Plot Against America’ and ‘Wig,’ now on HBO. He has also appeared in numerous ads and promotional materials, including Google Pixel, Daily Harvest, and The Book of Mormon. He has danced for JKDC, David Dorfman Dance, ELSCO Dance, and The Orsano Project as a company member. 

You can follow Christophe on social media here.

The Politics of Disability was named Best Interview Podcast at the Astoria Film Festival in both October 2022 and again in June 2023.

Transcript

[music playing as Mary speaks]

Mary: Hello everyone. Welcome to season two of The Politics of Disability. My name is Mary Fashik. I am the founder Upgrade Accessibility and your host. The road ahead is still a bumpy one and in fact, may be a bumpier one.  So, buckle up extra tight and let’s go.

[music playing]

Mary: Hello and thank you for joining me. I’m so excited to have you today. Please introduce yourself to the audience. 

Christophe: Hi Mary, my name is Christophe Desorbet. I use he/him/his pronouns and I am so excited to be here today.

Mary: Thank you for being here. Many in the deaf community and the hard of hearing community do not identify as disabled. Do you? Why or why not?

Christophe: All right. I guess diving deep right off the get go. What a great question. It's going to be a roundabout answer, but I will preface it by saying, yes, I do identify as disabled. But that has not always been the case. So a little more context about who I am: I am a hard of hearing person. I've worn hearing aids my entire life, since the age of four in both years. And right from the get go, I have to say that my hearing aids and my deafness were my biggest insecurities. And the way that society works, as I'm sure you've identified in your own ways, is that disability can be perceived as a shameful or embarrassing thing. And having that in mind, my wearing hearing aids was the thing that made me the most insecure about being a member of society.

So I used to do every single thing I could to hide my disability. And since wearing hearing aids, as you know, fairly small, I had the longest hair for most of my life to cover my hearing aids. And with that, I used to think that, “You know what, great. No one needs to know my secret.” It was a secret for a very long time, and “I'll just fit in with the rest of society. I don't need to have a disability. I can just fit in.” That's all that mattered to me. And as time went on, I realized that: that was not a sustainable way of living, and that I was only creating more shame and feelings of guilt, in a way, that just took a toll on me, emotionally and mentally. That I think the only way out was coming to terms with who I was, accepting that being hard of hearing is a disability and finding the good in it.

And I'm now 28 years old and, took me until I was maybe 24 or 25 to really come to terms with accepting that I had a disability.

Mary: On that note, I've been asking all of my guests about a defining moment in their disability journey. Because we all have one, right? So talk to me about yours.

Christophe: Of course. So, as I mentioned, it didn't take me until I was 24, 25 to truly come to terms with my own disability. But another moment that kind of took it to another level was the pandemic. And a little more context about myself: I wear several hats. But two of the hats I wear are active member of the theater industry. 

I've worked in theater for forever, and also being a dancer and performer. And on that note, something I used to do was take auditions or take dance classes, and with the pandemic, sadly went away very quickly. But there were alternatives because businesses are businesses and they need to make money. So, for example, the dance studios moved to an online platform. And that was the moment that really was defining to me in my own disability. Because taking a dance class–I live in New York City, first of all, in an apartment is impossible. [laughs]

Second of all, taking a dance class as a hard of hearing or deaf member on Zoom, at first was literally so depressing. Because, you know, there's the Zoom lag, you can't hear what the teacher is saying. You can't hear what the music is saying. And my hearing aids have a hard time picking up on the Zoom sound, I guess.

So, I just could not keep up. And I realized that if I was struggling with this, so were other members of the hard of hearing and deaf community, and also the disability community at large. Because as accessible, in some ways, Zoom and the online culture is, it also isn't to others. So that was an incredibly defining moment to me. And I realized that there needed to be other ways.

So, I tried to bring attention to that in posting dance videos that I had with a few of my friends and putting subtitles to them, giving alt text to it. And I actually had my friend, who is a choreographer, choreograph a bunch of dances. And I asked her to audio describe the movement, so that people that had low vision would be able to understand or process the dance videos in ways that I had never seen before.

So that was one of the two defining moments to me, in acceptance of my disability. The other one was: in theater, we're so used to going to the theater and seeing everything on stage. Big, beautiful, spectacular. But with the pandemic, everything unfortunately moved online as well. And in that I realized that there were no closed captions that people weren't thinking about this.

And all the same issues that I had encountered with not being able to dance during the pandemic I encountered with theater. So I decided to speak out to my colleagues, to my bosses, to several companies in the theater industry and be like, What are you doing about disability accommodations during the pandemic? So in doing that, I guess that was a very defining moment to me in coming to terms with my own disability.

Mary: That's amazing. I love that you did that. It's ironic that we have to create accessibility for ourselves.

Christophe: Yeah. It's always going to be the people that are oppressed, that don't have access to things, that have to speak out for themselves. Because people that don't deal with it, unfortunately, do not think about other accommodations.

Mary: They never do. Ever. I’ve mentioned this before. For me personally, people assume my speech is equated with my intelligence and that is so frustrating. What are common assumptions and/or misconceptions people have about those who are hard of hearing or deaf?

Christophe: Yeah, well, first of all, I want to say that I'm so sorry to hear that. And that is incredibly frustrating, I'm sure. And that's also very not true. It is my complete privilege to be speaking with you. I feel like I'm in such high company. And people are very quick to judge, unfortunately. And they need to spend more time seeing beyond what they think they know.

And anyone listening to this podcast or any of your other podcasts or your Instagram page, they will very quickly realize that you very likely outsmart everyone. So common misconceptions about the deaf and hard of hearing community. So, I can only speak from personal experience here. Because being hard of hearing is a spectrum, that I also think that people's understanding of disability and disability accommodation is also a spectrum.

So common misconceptions. One is that speaking louder or in a more expressive or explicit way is helpful, but that is not the solution. [laughs] And sometimes that comes across as offensive, unfortunately. And I think that happens because people oftentimes forget that people that, when they aren’t deaf or hard of hearing, they oftentimes forget about that period. So, when they have it at the forefront of their mind, they're trying to over-accommodate by being expressive or speaking louder.

And that just does not work. Another thing that I found is that people, again, forget that you are deaf or hard of hearing and that you process sound and speech differently. So for example, I'll be in a conversation with someone. And the way that I personally process sound is that: If I miss something in a sentence, I'm trying to put together the vowels or the sound and the speech patterns to try to inform what the sentence or the words that they were saying were.

And by the time that I've figured that out, they've already moved farther along down the conversation. So I'm constantly trying to catch up in a conversation. And by the time that they've finished saying what they want to say, they'll be like, “So what did you think?” And I'm like, “I missed all of that.” And in that, sometimes people are like, “You don't care or you're not paying attention to me or your mind is elsewhere,” when that's not true.

And in fact, I'm trying to over-accommodate their speaking by trying to hear what they're saying. And I think that is a misconception of people that are not deaf or hard of hearing. Because they forget that we are constantly trying to understand things, but it's always happening in delayed time.

Mary: Is it true that over-enunciating doesn’t help?

Christophe: Yes and no. I mean, to me sometimes it does help. I'll ask, “What did you say? Like, can you please repeat that once, twice, three more times?” So it can help. I don't think it's a given and I don't think it's the solution.

One of the things you and I have in common is that we love theater and we love Broadway. Let’s discuss the ableism you’ve faced and that exists in theater and Broadway. 

Alright, that's a big topic. First, what is your favorite show?

Mary: Sunday in the Park with George.

Christophe: Ooo, that's a very good one. So maybe let's start there. Sunday in the Park with George. While it may be your favorite musical, I've seen it a few times, but I personally struggle with it because it is such a wordy musical. And the fact that it is so wordy means that, per what I was just saying, I'm constantly trying to play catch up with what was being said. And the same can be said about Hamilton.

But that said, I do think that there is accessibility in both of those musicals because they're both so popular that you are able to enjoy it in other ways. You can enjoy it by reading the lyrics. You can enjoy it by listening to the soundtrack time and time again. But, generally, I think that the theater industry and Broadway in particular is incredibly ableist.

First, we have to start with there being a huge lack of accessible accommodations, and that's across the disability spectrum. Listen, if you require assistive devices or mobility devices or if you're in a wheelchair, getting into a Broadway theater is not convenient. If anything, it is a loophole, and that is because of the way that they are structurally built and at the time they were built. They do not have the accessible accommodations. So if you're in a wheelchair, for example, and you have to go to a theater, they might say, “Oh yeah, the entrance is at the restaurant on the other street and will take you through a back alley.” And to me that is so frustrating because, while that is an accommodation, it is not allowing that individual to accessibly participate in the act of going to Broadway like everyone else.

So that, I hope, is a clear enough example to show that Broadway is ableist. Another thing is, for me personally, if I go to a theater and I say, “Hey, I'm hard of hearing,” they’ll be like, “Okay, well here are these, like, assistive listening devices.” And I'm like, “Well, that's not going to help because I wear hearing aids, and I’m not taking my hearing aids out to put in something else, when I'm already trying to play catch up with my own hearing aids to process sounds. I'm not about to use another device to figure out how I can hear this show.” And if someone would ask me, “What is an accommodation that you would need?” I'd say subtitles.

And funnily enough, there is that offering in the Broadway community, and it's the Gallup Pro. And what that is, is if you go on airplane mode on your phone…You have to have a phone. So that's an inaccessible device right there. You have to have a phone, and you connect to Bluetooth and it’ll, hopefully–and I say hopefully because it doesn't always work–catch what the performer is saying and display it on your device.

But as I'm sure you've experienced, you know, it's like subtitles or closed captions, it's often delayed. So you're not experiencing the show in real time and you're also playing catch up. So that, again, to me is a very ableist structure. And while the system in place is an attempt at accommodation, it still has a long ways to go.

And then also, if we're going to be talking about how ablest it is, Broadway and the theater community at large, or experiencing theater rather, at large, is incredibly expensive. And that is an inaccessible tool because to enjoy Broadway theater, you have to pay a lot of money. And, you know, in the disability community, when, you know, the health insurance system isn't necessarily in our favor, the money that we would otherwise be spending to go see theater actually has to go to our own medical assistive, whatever devices it is.

So I think that it is also ableist in that way. And while we say it's economically inaccessible, I think there is another layer of economic inaccessibility that speaks to disability specifically in the theater industry.

Mary: I agree.

Mary: Oh no, we aren’t done yet. Come back for part two to find out where this goes.

[music playing while Mary speaks] Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Politics of Disability Podcast. As you navigate your journey, remember: disability is political; disability is messy; disability is not palatable--nor does it have to be.

[music playing]