Gavin Stride is the Director of Farnham Maltings, HOUSE, and caravan. He is a well respected theatre maker with 25 years of experience.

Today, Creative Minds asked Gavin: At the Creative Minds conference in March, people asked why many arts venues don’t seem to programme learning disabled art. What do you think the challenges might be for arts venues in programming more work by learning disabled artists?

Gavin said: Look, this isn’t just a challenge for learning disabled art. I sat in a well-resourced regional theatre watching a good production of a well known play recently and there were less than 80 people sitting in a 500 seat auditorium. And that is in a theatre with a marketing department and a large membership. Straight drama outside the West End is in crisis and many venues are just trying to keep the doors open. Nobody is sitting on a large programming budget thinking ‘what shall I spend this on’. Of course, there is an opportunity here: to reinvent what a provincial arts centre is for and how it feels. And that is a conversation that many of us are having. Everybody, including the disabled arts community, need to think hard about their responsibility to the audience, about how we improve our usefulness. So when Graeae made Reasons to be Cheerful or Mind the Gap creates Of Mice and Men they are helping the venue attract people past those who might be interested in disabled arts. This is not an argument for popularism at the expense of experiment. It’s possible to have both.