Research Project
Accessibility and Theater: Best Practices for the Teaching Artist
Faculty Mentor
Carrie J. Cole
What is your research?
My collaborators and I are researching how to create sensory friendly theater. This type of theater is used with persons with disabilities to make theater more accessible to them. We are focusing on bringing this type of theater to children, especially children with autism. Part of our project will be hopefully taking a show that we create to the local schools and showing it to their Special Education classrooms. We are currently in the very early stages of our research. We are using this time to find resources that can help us as we continue this journey. Specifically, I am working on finding resources on how sensory friendly theater can tie in with education. I am looking for resources on how this has been done, and how to explain what we are doing.
Why is it important?
We believe that theater should be accessible to everyone. Through this project, we are bringing theater to more people who have never been able to see theater. This is also a place in the theater world that is very new. There are not many resources out there, or theaters who are working with this type of theater. Hopefully though this project we are helping more people understand sensory friendly theater.
