One of Blue Apple’s founding performers, James Benfield, has explored his craft across a wide range of roles, including notably, Ariel in The Tempest, Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein. So, James was well placed to seize the opportunity to widen and deepen his experience in the national Transforming Leadership Programme and begin to learn the craft of directorship.
Transforming Leadership is a programme for emerging learning disabled and autistic leaders, the first of its kind. Alongside James is another Blue Apple veteran founding performer, Anna Brisbane, who is pursuing the governing side of the programme. The programme sees learning disabled and autistic leaders employed in positions across all aspects of theatre-making including as theatre directors, workshop facilitators, digital content creators, and trustees.
James Benfield
A few years into the programme now, Transforming Leadership has proven to be a force for positive change with 7 disability arts companies from around the UK, where 14 trainee leaders upskilled, built a network, and learned to navigate work as learning disabled and autistic professionals.
There have historically been very few bespoke leadership development programmes for learning disabled and autistic creatives and little shared understanding of how to create accessible environments where leaders can thrive. So we aim to change that! We want to see an arts sector that expects and encourages learning disabled and autistic people to take up leadership roles.
Through the Transforming Leadership programme aims to:
Radically transform the leadership potential of learning disabled and autistic arts leaders
Develop sector-wide infrastructure that supports learning disabled and autistic leadership
Upskill existing executive leadership across the arts, improving organisational accessibility
Over the next 5 months, through a blog, Disability Arts Online and Access All Areas join to give a platform to the next generation of learning disabled and autistic leaders from around the UK, sharing what leadership, and this process, means to them..
In the third entry in this blog series, James Benfield, who took part in the programme as a trainee from Blue Apple, shares a memorable Christmassy experience, leading a workshop based on ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. But most importantly, his take-away from it.
Read the interview here:
Below, James in various roles in Blue Apple Theatre’s productions. See more roles and photos here.
Image credits:
Photos of A Christmas Carol, The Tempest, The Wizard of Oz by Mike Hall
Photos of Frankenstein by Harvey Mills
Read more about the Transforming Leadership Programme here.