Creative Lab ‘Artistic practice shaped by disabled experience’

Our Creative Lab gathers selected national and international experts from the inclusive cultural sector with cultural practitioners from Germany.

Information /// Costs /// Accessibility /// Experts /// Programme details

INFORMATION

Date: Thursday, 07.05.2026, 2:00 pm, until Sunday, 10.05.2026, 1:00 pm
Location: Akademie der Kulturellen Bildung (Academy of Cultural Education), 42857 Remscheid
Target group: Art and culture workers of all disciplines, from venues and the independent scene
Number of participants: max. 25 – 30 participants

We are happy to issue a certificate of attendance following the Creative Lab.

EXPERTS

• Jo Verrent, Director of Unlimited (UK)
• Eyk Kauly, Artist, Performer, Deaf Coach, Director of the German Deaf Theatre (Germany)
• Dr. Kate Marsh, dancer, lecturer and researcher (UK)
• Laura Guthrie, Artist Development Manager, and Hana Pascal Keegan, director, writer and actor; Graeae Theatre Company (UK)

ARTISTIC PRACTICE SHAPED BY DISABLED EXPERIENCE

In the Creative Lab 2026, we address the questions: How do lived experiences of disability shape artistic practice? And what potential lies in disabled leadership?

To investigate this, we have invited several international figures from the worlds of dance and theatre: Introducing the topic will be Jo Verrent, director of the disabled-led arts organisation Unlimited (UK), and Eyk Kauly (Germany), actor, performer, Deaf coach and artistic director of the German Deaf Theatre. Afterwards, you can choose between two workshops: either a two-day theatre workshop with Laura Guthrie and Hana Pascal Keegan from the internationally acclaimed disabled-led theatre company GRAEAE (UK) or a two-day dance workshop with disabled dancer, lecturer and researcher Dr. Kate Marsh (UK), who has over 20 years of expertise.

The Academy of Cultural Education in Remscheid, located in the middle of nature, has very beautiful, spacious, barrier-free event rooms in which your collective creativity can fully unfold from a wide variety of perspectives in exchange with international speakers and colleagues.

ACCOMMODATION: 
Single or double room with shower, full board.

LANGUAGE: 
The creative lab takes place in easily understandable German and English spoken language and German sign language. With simultaneous interpreting during the creative lab, see ‘Accessibility’.

ACCESSIBILITY:

All meeting rooms are accessible. 
The academy has a limited number of single and double rooms with varying degrees of accessibility – All fully accessible rooms are currently booked. If you are interested, please contact us to discuss your specific requirements.
A resting room is available.
Assistance dogs are welcome

We will provide the following assistance if needed, please be sure to indicate your requirements when registering:

• Professional simultaneous interpretation English spoken
  language – German spoken language;
  • Continuously from Thursday to Sunday, NOT for the workshop with Dr. Kate Marsh (there will only be peer-to-peer interpreting)

• Professional simultaneous interpretation German / English
  spoken language – German sign language (DGS);
  • Continuously
    from Thursday to Sunday, NOT for the workshop with GRAEAE

• Peer to peer audio description
• Work assistance or mobility assistance on site
• Shuttle service between railway station and academy

COSTS

Costs (including all costs: accommodation and full board during the stay) 
according to self-assessment

Category 1: 210 € + advance booking (e.g., students, freelance artists) 
Category 2: 250 € + advance booking (e.g., employees of independent ensembles) 
Category 3: 290 € + advance booking (e.g., employees of large cultural institutions)

If you participate with your own assistant, their participation is free of charge.

We are happy to issue a certificate of attendance following the Creative Lab.

Due to system specifications, we cannot provide English translations for all fields within the registration form. With any questions please contact Theresa Heußen (beratung@un-label.eu).

For QUESTIONS and further Informationen: 

Theresa Heußen (she/her)
E-Mail: beratung@un-label.eu
Phone: +49 (221) 5501544

Website Access Maker – Innovationshub   

PROGRAMME

THURSDAY

Seminar times: 3:00 pm – 6:30 pm 

Taking power: Creating conditions for disabled led artistic practice to thrive
Keynote by Jo Verrent, Unlimited

In her keynote speech, Jo Verrent explores the question of how disabled-led art can flourish. What structures enable disabled artists to realise works of varying scales and sizes in terms of space, cast size and ambitions? What can cultural organisations do to ensure that all disabled artists can equally engage, and how can they avoid prioritise some over others? And how can the cultural sector ensure that disabled artists can manage their work consistently, creatively and coherently – from conception to presentation? What structures does disabled leadership need to function smoothly and regularly?

Beyond inclusion: Deaf perspectives, power dynamics, and theatre practice 
Keynote by Eyk Kauly

In his keynote speech, Eyk Kauly sharpens our understanding of rules, awareness and better exchange between hearing and Deaf cultural professionals

How do we bring Deaf and hearing colleagues together in institutions and cultural productions and promote both networking and mutual insights into different artistic working methods? Eyk’s expertise as a Deaf coach, actor and performer in independent productions and at various theatres, allows his keynote to particularly focus on collaboration in theatre and on inclusive rehearsal and communication processes in mixed teams.

Eyk draws on his own work experience in production workflowa as well as his extensive artistic and practical experience with aesthetic forms of expression – including sign language poetry, visual vernacular, visual signing and the use of visual media.

FRIDAY

Seminar times: 9:30 am – 12:45 pm / 3pm – 6:15 pm

9:30 – 10:00 am
Starting the day with Laura and Hana
Physical intro with Laura Guthrie and Hana Pascal Keegan, GRAEAE

10:00 am – 5:15 pm, including lunch break from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm

Two parallel workshops by Dr. Kate Marsh and Laura Guthrie and Hana Pascal Keegan, Graeae Theatre Company
In order to ensure intensive work in small groups, the two-day workshops will be offered in parallel – participants decide which workshop they would like to attend when registering.

Interpreting:
Workshop with Dr. Kate Marsh: In spoken English.
With professional simultaneous interpreting from spoken English to German sign language. Peer-to-peer interpreting service from spoken English to spoken German available.

Workshop with GRAEAE: In spoken English.
With professional simultaneous interpreting from spoken English to spoken German.

Being in the messiness – cultivating space for exploration and playful experimentation
Workshop with Dr. Kate Marsh

Designed for disabled and non-disabled people in the broad arts sector, these practice-led sessions will use choreographic and creative tasks to delve into our individual artistic inquiry. With a strong emphasis on responding to our own interests and needs we will create space, through practice, to share our ideas and to try out ways of working collaboratively. We will celebrate how being together in all our sameness and differences nurtures an exciting and safe environment to be in our practice away from a pressure to ‘produce’ or to cement our ideas. Staying with questions and experimentation, we will allow ourselves to try things and to embrace ‘mess’.

Drawing mainly from improvisation as a way in, we will explore group and individual tasks allowing ourselves to move and be moved by others. Individual access will sit at the heart of these sessions, based on a principle that often our needs are not ‘fixed’ that they may shift from minute to minute, day to day. We will make space for everyone to access the practice from exactly where they are in each moment of the workshop.

Theatrical exploration of disabled-led work
Workshop with Laura Guthrie and Hana Pascal Keegan, Graeae Theatre Company

Underpinned by the Aesthetics of Access we will make theatrical discoveries around how Disabled-led work informs the outcomes of theatre making.

This will be approached through working with existing play text and work developed through the sessions.

The process will include discussion as well as practical exploration, working as an ensemble, in small group and in pairs.

We will be looking at what difference it makes aesthetically and creatively when we place Disabled characters and Disabled creatives at the centre of mainstream work.

In the end there will be a sharing of the discoveries made in our sessions and the opportunity to create a call to action to our audience.

5:30 pm – 6:15 pm
Re-Imagining leadership through radical access and practices of care – exploring new models for the inclusive dance sector.
Input by Dr. Kate Marsh

‘I want to be with you. If you can’t go, then I don’t want to go. If we are traveling together, sharing political space together, building political family together, then I want to be with you. I want us to be together.’ Mia Mingus 2010

This session framed around discussion and inviting questions and provocation from all present is informed by Kate’s long-term exploration of leadership in the dance and disability landscape. Proposing a re-thinking of how leadership is understood. How can we begin to understand that leadership is part of the practices we are already doing rather than something we are constantly reaching for or waiting to arrive at. What if leadership is not a ‘job’ or a position, but is embedded in our dancing, making, creating and within our communities and how we come together?

Kate will propose that disabled artists do not need to change themselves to lead, that they do not need to ‘fit into’ a prescribed idea of what a leader in dance is, but that there is a vast and rich knowledge of bodies, choreography and pedagogy that already exists in disabled artists and that this knowledge has the potential to bring about new ways of working and practicing in the arts.

There will be time given to explore ideas of radical access, ‘inclusion’ beyond participation and into autonomous artistic practice that is made better when we understand access as a fluid phenomenon, acknowledging ‘access clashes’ and how we might navigate them so that everybody/mind is accounted for.

SATURDAY

Seminar times: 9:30 am – 12:45 pm / 3:00 pm – 6:15 pm

9:30 – 10:00 am
Starting the day with Kate
Physical intro with Dr. Kate Marsh

10:00 am – 5:15 pm, including lunch break from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm

Being in the messiness – cultivating space for exploration and playful experimentation
Dr. Kate Marsh, Part 2 of the workshop. Announcement see Friday.

Theatrical exploration of disabled-led work
Workshop with Graeae. Part 2 of the workshop. Announcement see Friday

5:30 pm – 6:15 pm
Hiring ‘emerging’ disabled artists isn’t radical
Input by Laura Guthrie, GRAEAE

Do you think your organisation treats Deaf and disabled artists equally?
Do you consider yourself an organisation that treats Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists equal to non disabled artists? Are you welcoming and ambitious providing pathways for disabled artists to progress beyond the status of emerging?
Based on the last 6 years of managing Graeae’s Artist Development programme Laura Guthrie will open a discussion on how the UK and German sectors’ outdated structures and traditions make this nearly impossible and what we can do to change this.

SUNDAY

Seminar time: 9:30 am – 1:00 pm
Presentation of the results from the workshops

Participants of the workshops present their respective work results and main findings in a plenary session.

Question & Answers
The concluding part of the Creative Lab offers plenty of space for questions from the participants and further joint transfer of the findings to participants’ own work.

EXPERTS

UNLIMITED – JO VERRENT (she/her) 

Unlimited is an arts charity based in the UK that commissions disabled artists – we commission exceptional work to challenge and change the world.

They work through 5 strands of activity: COMMISSION, DEVELOP, SUPPORT, CONNECT and CHANGE.

• Unlimited COMMISSIONS disabled artists in order to make CHANGE. 
• Unlimited SUPPORTS and DEVELOPS disabled artists and CONNECTS them with the sector.
• Unlimited SUPPORTS and DEVELOPS the sector and CONNECTS them with disabled artists.

Unlimited receives funding from Arts Council England (they are in their National Portfolio), Arts Council of Wales, Creative Scotland, British Council, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and others.

Jo Verrent works in arts and culture at strategic levels with national agencies, embedding the belief that diversity adds texture and turning policy into real action. She is the Director of Unlimited, commissioning disabled artists to challenge and change the cultural sector. Unlimited was part of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad and is now an independent charity and a National Portfolio Organisation. It works with partners including Arts Council England, Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Wales, and the British Council through five strands: commission, develop, support, connect, and change. Jo leads on change, which includes creating resources such as Cards for Inclusion and the Anti-Exploitation Academy. She is responsible for the impact the organisation has both at home and abroad. 

Her arts history includes creating award-winning video installations (with Luke Pell) and Sync (with Sarah Pickthall), a transformational program examining the interplay between disability and leadership in the cultural sector. Jo has won both Cosmopolitan’s Woman of Achievement and a trophy for jam. She sits on the Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy Oversight Committee, Arts Council England’s National Council and is a Clore fellow. 

EYK KAULY (he/him) 

Eyk Kauly works as an outside eye, Deaf coach, performer, actor, artist and theatre educator.
He is Deaf and fluent in German Sign Language (DGS), German lip-reading (LBG) and International Sign Language (IS). 
After graduating from high school, Eyk worked on various projects as an actor, performer and sign language artist. Together with Susanne Tod, Eyk coached the inclusive youth club at the Ernst Deutsch Theater in Hamburg. He currently works as a Deaf coach at the Cologne Opera, among other things. Eyk Kauly has been directing the German Deaf Theatre since 2023.
Eyk has appeared on stage in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (director: Michaela Caspar) and ‘Die taube Zeitmaschine’ (production: Possible World) at the Ballhaus Ost Berlin, and at the German Deaf Theatre in the productions ‘Servant of Two Masters’ (director: Zoe Xanthopolou) and ‘Die Hauptsache’ (director: Jeffrey Döring). He has also taken on roles in various productions, e.g. at the Munich Kammerspiele (‘Tristan (and Isolde)’, directed by Nele Jahnke), the Staatstheater Hannover (‘Die Wut, die uns vereint’ by Finegan Kruckemeyer, directed by Wera Mahne) and at the Kaserne Basel, Switzerland (‘Screening invisibilities’, directed by Zino Wey). At the Schauspiel Leipzig, he plays several characters in the play ‘Altbau in zentraler Lage. Eine Schaueroper’.

GRAEAE – LAURA GUTHRIE (she/her) & HANA PASCAL KEEGAN (she/her)

For over 45 years, Graeae has cultivated and championed the best in Deaf, Disabled and neurodivergent talent, locally, nationally and internationally.  

Graeae is passionate about igniting artistic curiosity, championing accessibility and providing a platform for new generations of artists through the creation of trail-blazing theatre. It is also a human rights company, founded on the need to tackle social injustice, discrimination and exclusion. 

Graeae’s work has been seen in stadiums, theatres, schools, at festivals and streamed online. Recent productions include, Bad Lads, Romeo and Juliet, award winning Self-Raising, High Times and Dirty Monsters, UK Theatre Award winner The Paradis Files, Kerbs, Olivier Award nominated 10 Nights and two seasons of the digital new work programme Crips without Constraints. Other work includes the hit Ian Dury musical Reasons to be Cheerful and outdoor spectacles The Iron Man and This Is Not For You. In addition to productions, Graeae also runs an extensive programme of training, learning, and creative professional development programmes. Since 1997, Graeae has been run by Jenny Sealey OBE, who also co-directed the London 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony. 

Artistic Director and Joint CEO: Jenny Sealey OBE.
Executive Director and Joint CEO: Kevin Walsh. 

Laura Guthrie (she/her)
Laura Guthrie is a disabled artist with 34 years’ experience in theatre. She is the Artist Development Manager for Graeae Theatre Co, Co-Director of Meander Theatre Co, worked as an Agent For Change with Ramps On The Moon and for 20 years as Associate Artist with Bamboozle Theatre and 8 years with Carousel in Brighton as a creative facilitator and dance performer. Trained in Theatre Design Laura has devised, directed and designed theatre alongside Deaf,disabled and neurodivergent  creatives throughout her career. She is focussed on creating accessible structures for theatre making whoever she works alongside. Laura directed Sheffield Crucibles Launchpad 2023  show, Communitree & 2024 show Total Ripple Effect. Regularly working as an Access Consultant &  Disability Equality trainer past clients include, Nottingham Playhouse, Birmingham Rep, Shanghai Childrens Arts Theatre ,Bamboozle,  Level Centre, Bold Text, Egg Box, Carbon, Ditto, Grizzly Bear, Major Labia, Orange Tree  and New Perspectives  Theatre companies.

Hana Pascal Keegan (she/her)
Hana, originally from the British Virgin Islands, is a director, writer and actor drawn to plays that capture rich interpersonal dynamics and the thrills of the body. 
Hana most recently created and directed Beyond Her Years at The Almeida which innovatively interwove. four iconic plays: Henrik Ibsen‘s Hedda Gabler and The Lady from the Sea, Clare Barron‘s Dance Nation, and Ifeyinwa Frederick‘s The Hoes.
Her assistant/associate directing credits include: The Secret Garden (Open Air Regents Park); All My Sons (The Old Vic, NT Live), All My Sons (The Old Vic, NT Live), All Of Us (The National); Macbeth (Chichester Festival); Jellyfish (The Bush/National) and Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me (The Kiln). 

In addition to working with a range of contemporary classics and disability new plays, Hana has also worked in virtual and mixed reality production at The National’s Immersive Storytelling Studio. 
Hana trained with Graeae, The Young Vic and The Eugene O’Neill Center in the USA. She regularly runs access and inclusion workshops, directs for NYT and teaches devising for Theatre Academy London.

DR. KATE MARSH (she/her)

Dr. Kate Marsh is a disabled dance artist-researcher and Assistant Professor at Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE). With over 20 years of experience in performance, teaching, and scholarship, her work explores Disability, perceptions of the body and leadership in dance. Marsh’s research often sits at the intersection of creative practice and technology, including projects on AI-driven co-design for prosthetics and digital interventions in disability and dance. She is committed to amplifying disabled voices in the arts, challenging traditional notions of leadership, and advancing inclusive, innovative approaches to dance research and practice.

The experts from left to right: Jo Verrent, Eyk Kauly (©Steve Stymest), Laura Guthrie, Hana Pascal Keegan (©Johan Persson), Dr. Kate Marsh

Head image: © The Garden by graeae theatre company (photo: Praca Mauam, graphic design: Kai Kullen)

The Creative Lab is part of Access Maker – Innovationshub supported by: