The New Wolsey Theatre and Hearing Care Centre Launches Partnership Promoting Captioned Performances
For many people a visit to the theatre can prove to be a difficult experience, as they may not be able to hear or follow what’s happening live on stage.
Two well-known, local organisations have today pledged to tackle this problem head on and have launched a brand new partnership.
Suffolk hearing care specialists, The Hearing Care Centre and The New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich are working closely together to raise awareness about new the facilities the theatre has to offer deaf, deafened and hard-of-hearing audiences.
The New Wolsey Theatre has always aimed to make their venue and artistic programme as accessible as possible to the broadest audiences. But now the theatre is able to offer a range of services including Captioned, British Sign Language (BSL), Interpreted and Audio Described performances.
Captioning is a great way for anyone who finds it difficult to hear the actors speaking, to enjoy coming to the theatre. Similar to television subtitling, Captioned Performances enable patrons to follow all the action as the words spoken by the performers are displayed on a captioned unit including the name of the character who is speaking or singing and descriptions of any sound effects.
As well as the captioning unit the theatre also offers an Infra Red Hearing System in the auditorium for patrons who would like hearing enhancement.
Karen Finch, Managing Director of The Hearing Care Centre, which has 13 centres across Suffolk said, “Being hearing impaired can be a very isolating experience. There is evidence that in some cases people can become withdrawn from their social circles, and stop doing activities like visiting the theatre.
“We work with the hearing impaired community on a daily basis and recently learnt about all the great accessibility work The New Wolsey are putting in place. Through regular interaction with our customers and other contacts we want to help spread the word and get people enjoying the theatre once more,” said Karen.
Kelly Kirkbride, Access Officer at the theatre said, “We are delighted to be working closely with The Hearing Care Centre on increasing and improving the access to theatre for deaf, deafened and hard of hearing audiences. We (New Wolsey) have always been convinced that more audience members use the captions than declare, so we carried out an experiment and identified that 30% of audiences found captioning in theatre useful.”
Captioned Performances available this season include Oscar Wilde’s hilarious The Importance of Being Earnest, on Thursday 7th October 2010, Reasons to be Cheerful, between Thursday 14th – Saturday 16th October 2010, and the fantastic rock ‘n’ roll pano, Jack and the Beanstalk, on Friday 7th January 2011, which is exclusively sponsored by The Hearing Care Centre.
To book or for more information call the New Wolsey Box Office on 01473 295900 or visit www.wolseytheatre.co.uk/access or www.hearingcarecentre.co.uk/theatre