Help make SkirtsAfire Festival more accessible!

The Cause

SkirtsAfire is Edmonton’s theatre and multidisciplinary arts organization featuring women. Our 10 day festival runs each March at various venues in the city. Programming reflects the true diversity of the thriving arts community in Alberta and Canada, and is adaptive in its approach in order to remain responsive to the needs of artists and audiences.

We wish to build upon our accessibility plan; devising, implementing and evaluating additional and multifaceted accessibility measures with the aim to support our artists and audiences. We aim to make SkirtsAfire more accessible overall, removing barriers to include historically excluded communities.

SkirtsAfire has made strides in improving our accessibility by:
• Offering ASL interpreted performances for various shows in our festival (and collaborating with both hearing and Deaf interpreters to execute these special events)
• Hiring a Deaf Accessibility Consultant to advise our team on communications
• Providing “communication access real-time translation” (CART) captioning
• Conducting venue accessibility audits
• Updating patron communications, such as plain language descriptions and content warnings
• Having sensory kits available at all shows
• Having adapted relaxed performances specific to the neurodivergent community

We are proud of the advancements we’ve made, however we are still far from finished.

Our goal for this funding is to continue offering the accessibility measures we have put into place, to build upon them, and to fund outreach and communications. We will hire an Accessibility Consultant to do a full audit of our website and socials, creating a more user-friendly digital space for our neurodivergent audience members. Working with our Deaf Accessibility Consultant taught us about the difference between accessibility and inclusivity. To fully be able to engage with our Deaf Accessibility Consultant, we'll need to hire an ASL Consultant to support our consistent communications. Providing tools like captioning and audio description allow for a rich experience for all audience members, no matter impairment.

Special thanks to the Accessibility Consultants and Coordinators we have worked with on our accessibility measures offered thus far: Brooke Leifso, Carly Neis, Connor Yuzwenko-Martin, and Amorena Bartlett. We are also grateful to SOUND OFF Festival and Artistic Director, Chris Dodd, for their collaboration, support and guidance.

Who Will it Benefit?

Improving our accessibility allows SkirtsAfire Festival to expand our efforts to create accessible performance and continue to increase the diversity of our audience and artists. Accessible performance requires funds for professional expertise: ASL Consultants and interpreters, CART captioners, Audio Description, Access Consultants, and more. This initiative will benefit our artists by offering them the ability to reach a wider audience they may not have had access to before. It will also benefit our audiences who rely on these accessibility measures to fully enjoy and experience the shows.

Implementing new tools and removing barriers don’t serve a purpose unless the communities that can benefit from them are made aware of them. We will partner with SOUND OFF Deaf Theatre Festival, Canada’s national festival dedicated to the Deaf performing arts, as well as local Deaf artists, who will create ASL videos for our website and social media, allowing us to connect with the Deaf and hard of hearing communities. We will also implement changes to our digital communications to increase legibility and offer more helpful information in advance of attending.

SkirtsAfire has been curating gender minority performance for the past decade, specifically uplifting the diversity of women artists and stories. While SkirtsAfire has been intersectional in its approach, we aim to make the festival a place where all women feel they can participate. IBPoC (Indigenous, Black, People of Colour), Disabled and Deaf artists and audiences are still underrepresented within the arts community.