Guest Blog: Maria Oshodi On EYE SAY, EYE SAY, EYE SAY and Supporting Visually Impaired Comedians

Extant is a dynamic, political space to articulate and celebrate what visual impairment brings to the performing arts. Our company has been going since 1997, creating innovative touring shows, skills training for blind artists and awareness training for the rest of the theatre industry, as well as rolling out grassroots participatory projects.

Our biggest achievements have been staying Extant for over 20 years and creating some of the most audacious productions featuring blind artists which have ever taken place! We've staged shows on the roof of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, in disused churches, on double decker buses, as well as at a host of more traditional theatre spaces up and down the land.

The impetus behind creating Eye Say, Eye Say, Eye Say! came from the monthly improvisation club for visually impaired people living in London that we began in the middle of last year. Called 'No Dramas!', it runs every month and has really taken off, attracting a wide range of exuberant characters. We wanted to harness some of the natural comedy that comes from the group and offer them an opportunity to work on their own stand-up in a safe space.

We invited visually impaired professional comedian Georgie Morell, who we've worked with lots in the past, to mentor the performers and offer the editing and delivery advice she's learned from her years on the circuit. We also put out an open call through our networks for other 'wannabe' visually impaired comedians to send in their acts or ideas for consideration. We held an invite-only launch on Zoom back in June, which went down so well. The Bloomsbury Festival producers came along, and we're delighted the show is part of their 2020 Festival.

After six months of meeting, making and presenting through digital means, we are gagging to get out into the real world again. Eye Say, Eye Say, Eye Say! is our attempt to do just that.

We've had to negotiate our own anxiety and caution in order to build our confidence in beginning to get out again, assessing what feels right for us as individuals and as an organisation. There are additional issues for visually impaired people in lockdown, and attempting to get out and about with social distancing measures in place makes things like physical guiding incredibly hard. All the usual support mechanisms from public transport staff have been severely compromised, and that makes getting around London much more difficult for visually impaired people.

We've offered performers the opportunity to present their acts over Zoom if they wish; the majority have opted to perform live. We have offered to cover taxis for rehearsals and the show, or to have access workers to meet performers at local Tube stations and use guiding straps, which we have purchased for safe guiding which reduces physical contact.

As you can imagine, all of this lends itself to material for our comedians! We are proud of our brilliant line-up of performers and our two fantastic visually impaired MCs, professional stand-up Georgie Morell and newcomer, Tower Hamlet's answer to Cilla Black, Ashrafia Choudhury.

We've put all the Government's safety guidelines into place for rehearsals, and the Bloomsbury Festival offered us a performance venue large enough to accommodate all our socially distancing performers. We're trying to create a comedy club atmosphere by filling the seats with famous cardboard cut-outs, which will safely separate our live performers waiting to go up on stage.

We hope all these measures will relax our performers to enable them to deliver a cracking show. We want everyone - audiences and performers alike - to just have a real good laugh. It's something we all need right now. We will be live-streaming from the beautiful William Goodenough College on 17 October - come and join us on Zoom!

Eye Say, Eye Say, Eye Say! at Bloomsbury Festival