Accessing the arts: Innovating audience feedback methods for neurodivergent and disabled audiences

This project is based on a research partnership between the CERC Health Equity and Community Wellbeing and Xenia Concerts. Xenia concerts provide family-friendly, accessible programming to the broader neurodiversity community, the disability community (including Deaf-friendly performances with musical ASL), the dementia community, and older adults with low income. The partnership involved the CERC hiring a student intern through TMU to work for Xenia for 3 months to support the organization and work collaboratively with Xenia. As part of a broad investigation into the social factors that affect health and wellbeing, the student, Danielle Licorish, explored access to the arts in the contexts of disability and neurodiversity. The student supported Xenia concerts in researching the design and evaluation of accessible concerts by designing and implementing innovative methods for collecting feedback directly from disabled and neurodivergent children and youth. Supervised by the CERC’s postdoctoral fellow in arts, healing and wellbeing and Xenia’s director, Rory McLeod, the student intern drafted a report of key findings from the piloting of the new methods over Xenia’s July programming. The aims over time are to improve programming and share insights with artists and arts organizations to improve accessibility more widely. Currently, Esthar Taha from TMU is working on developing the literature review, and the team is preparing to analyze the cumulative data from Xenia’s feedback, including surveys from previous years and data from the pilot study. This research will aid Xenia in developing new forms of audience surveys to engage continuously and meaningfully with their diverse audiences. It will also assist in developing research questions related to Adaptive Concerts and accessible arts programming for future and broader research.

As Ontario and other regions work towards improving accessibility, this research could aid Xenia and similar organizations in improving their accessibility in line with legislation like AODA and towards meaningfully including a wider diversity of people in arts and cultural engagement. Furthermore, with increasing recognition of the importance of arts for individual and community health and wellbeing, this research will provide insight into ways that arts can become more accessible to disabled and neurodiverse communities who are often marginalized. The research is framed by moves towards open access ‘as a creative, long-term process’ of ‘embodied learning’ (Papalia, 2018), focusing on increasing the agency of marginalized people; important for holistic wellbeing. Because the audiences served by Xenia and others offering adaptive concerts may not find traditional paper/online text-based surveys accessible (Wilson et al, 2013), it is important to explore new methods to gather audience feedback so that future adaptive concerts and related research can be guided by those with lived experience of disability and neurodiversity, including children and youth (Jones et al, 2021).