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IN TOUCH – Women's football; Blind opera singer

TX:Ìý 30.08.2022Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý FERN LULHAM

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White

Good evening. Ìý

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Cheering – football actuality

England lead in extra time.Ìý The fairy tale fixture might just produce the fairy tale result for England.Ìý Wow.

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White

Well, unforgettably, Chloe Kelly celebrating bringing home the women’s European Football Championship for England at Wembley last month. ÌýWhich massively, of course, raised the profile of the women’s game in the process.Ìý Well, in a moment, we’ll be finding out how the FA is trying to put blind women on the path that could lead to similar successes.Ìý And we’ll also be hearing how blind people are achieving their goals in other fields, for example, opera, well, more on that later.

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But first, the English Football Association’s disability talent strategy includes pathway schemes to identify and develop disabled footballers to represent the national para teams.Ìý Well, now, blind women are included in the strategy and blind women footballers from all over the country have been attending FA camps in the hope of being selected to represent England at next year’s IBSA world games in Birmingham – that’s blind games for blind people.Ìý Among those hopefuls are Zoe Harvey, Tash Mead and Alice Hopkins, all of whom join me now.

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Zoe, if I can come to you first.Ìý I’m interested in what the opportunities to play football if you’re a visually impaired woman have actually been.

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Harvey

Yeah, so I have 12 and a half percent vision.Ìý I was just approached by my local club, Cambridge United, as I was walking through the street with my white stick and just approached and asked if I wanted to play visually impaired football, with the guys, actually, so I was the only – and I am the only – female from around here that plays football.

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White

So, really, you haven’t had the chance to play with a women’s team?

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Harvey

I’ve played alongside the girls, we’ve got on, we’ve done development camps together, play in the blind league with some of the other girls, played with them and against them.Ìý So, yeah, we’ve had quite a bit of opportunity to play together.

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White

So, just for people who don’t know, in what ways does the game differ from that of sighted women that people watch play and win the European cup the other day?

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Harvey

So, when we’re talking about blind football, players have their eyes taped up, they have total eye shades on, so they have absolutely no vision, so it’s a level playing field.Ìý You play with a noise ball, so it has ball bearings in it, so you can echo locate.Ìý It’s a smaller game, as well, so it’s a 5 v 5 game as opposed to the 11 v 11 that everyone would have watched when the ladies won.

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White

I guess that’ll seem quite odd to people?

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Harvey

Yeah, some of us girls that have got sight, I know for me, personally, sort of putting the eye shades on for the first time it was quite daunting to play or even think about playing football with absolutely no sight because when you’re visually impaired you grab on to every little bit of sight that you’ve got and then suddenly to choose to take that away.Ìý But it’s actually really empowering, I find I enjoy playing blind football more because I’m not struggling to see and track a ball, I can purely use my other senses.

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White

Let me bring in Tash.Ìý I mean what about you, what got you interested, tell us about your journey from starting out in football to where you are now.

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Mead

Yeah, so, I attended the Royal National College for the Blind based in Hereford.Ìý It was a specialist blind college for people with visual impairments or blindness.Ìý There was a sports academy blind football sessions put on through the week and I thought I’d quite like to attend that one.Ìý I started getting better and progressing through the ranks and only recently in the past year or so I’ve been attending the FA power football camps and I also play in the Blind Football Development national league and play for Brighton and Hove Albion in that.

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White

Because you were quite lucky in the sense that Hereford – the school at Hereford you mentioned – they’ve got really good facilities haven’t they?

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Mead

Yeah, they have.Ìý You’ve got the gym; you’ve got the fully sized AstroTurf football pitch and it’s got all the facilities there for us to access.

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White

Let me bring in Alice.Ìý I guess quite a lot of our listeners will be wondering about the actual practicalities of playing football with sight loss, for example, identifying other players if you want to pass to them?

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Hopkins

So, a lot of it is use of your other senses, you’re mainly listening, you say void when you’re going in for a tackle.Ìý Across all the development teams within the league, everybody has their own key phrases that they’ll say to identify where they are.

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White

Let me go back to Zoe.Ìý What’s the strength of women’s football would you say for visually impaired people, I mean how many – how many potential players do you think there are?

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Harvey

So, we have our nice little group chat and any B1 female footballer that is interested gets added to that group.Ìý And I think there’s probably about 15, 16 of us in there at the minute but there’s more players being added each time, sort of each month, so we can all get to know each other, find out where each other’s located across the country, see if we can meet up outside of the pathway.Ìý So, it’s getting bigger, it’s getting more acknowledgeable now, now it's being talked about more players are coming forward hoping to play.

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White

And what are the opportunities?Ìý I mean there is this big IBSA world championship, how optimistic are you about that, a. of playing and b. of maybe emulating the England women’s team?

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Harvey

I think we’re all in the same position at the minute, we have to focus on now.Ìý So, it’s developing our own skills now, it’s going and being part of the national league, like Tash explained earlier, playing for our own clubs, just getting that experience and then, like with all football, hoping to develop back into the national squad for the world championships next year.

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White

And do you know where we rank?Ìý I’m just wondering have we come rather late to the party as a national team or are most countries in the same boat?

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Harvey

I mean as a female national team I don’t think we have a ranking yet, it’s quite a small area, it’s quite expertise, you know it’s quite specialist.Ìý So, at the moment, I couldn’t tell you where we rank and if we do rank but there’s a lot of new female developing teams, so I would not say England are far behind any of those.

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White

Tash, what advice would you give to people perhaps visually impaired women and girls listening at home, if they want to actually get involved and haven’t so far?

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Mead

I think give it a go, find your local club, contact the FA and see if there’s a club nearby which run disability football.Ìý So, yeah, just get involved when you can.

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White

Alice, if I can put the same thing to you.Ìý I guess there are some places where there just aren’t local teams aren’t there at this stage?

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Hopkins

I think there’s only about four or five league teams for blind football across the UK.Ìý I mean the main thing I’d say is definitely find one of the FA’s para pathway hubs, there are quite a few of them across of the country who can point you into the right direction and say go talk to this person.Ìý But I think the main thing is trying it out for yourself and having a go.

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White

Zoe Harvey, Tash Mead, Alice Hopkins, thanks so much for joining us and we’ll follow your progress with great interest.

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And now, the source of more inspiration.

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Music – Turandot

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Well, appropriately enough, this performance, by world famous blind tenor Andrea Bocelli, was at the opening ceremony of the men’s European Football Championships and it was performances by tenors, like Bocelli, which inspired 16-year-old Toben Durrant from Glamorgan to join the Welsh National Youth Opera during the pandemic in 2020.Ìý And he’s going from strength to strength.Ìý So, what kind of barriers had to be overcome originally?Ìý Toben joins me now.

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First of all, I mean take us back to your involvement with music early on because of course it didn’t begin with opera, did it?

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Durrant

No.Ìý I’ve always loved music, right from the off really because it’s one of those things you don’t have to see.Ìý So, it’s one of the things I’m able to do and I find passion and I find so much enjoyment from.Ìý I used to play the violin and then I switched to the viola, which is a slightly bigger violin, and yeah, it’s where I am now.

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White

Not particularly easy instruments to play, I mean I was discouraged from playing the violin when I went in for a competition and they said I hadn’t done badly for a beginner and I’d been at it for three years.Ìý Talking of barriers, one of my early recollections of music lessons, in my case the piano, was the difficulty of the braille music system.Ìý One of the obvious problems with braille music is, of course, you can’t read it and play at the same time, you can’t put the music up there on the piano where you can see it and follow it.Ìý So, you literally have to learn everything don’t you.

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Durrant

Yes, you do, it takes a lot of memory and a lot of willpower and I just did my grade 8 to learn however many songs I had to learn for that which was about 10 minutes, so that takes a fair while.

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White

So, what led to this transition from playing instruments to opera, quite a big jump?

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Durrant

It is quite a big jump.Ìý I was doing one of my violin exams and my accompanist was a singing teacher and in the exam you had to do a bit of oral and he went – you’re a really good singer, you should start lessons.Ìý So, I did and that led to this.

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White

And no one had really pointed this out before.Ìý I mean you must have known you were a good singer.

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Durrant

I think people thought it, no one went let’s get you singing lessons.Ìý I started classical singing.Ìý So, I went to see an opera on my – again my singing teacher’s behest, he was like – you should go and see opera.Ìý So, I went, sure.Ìý And loved it and then we looked into it and then the WNYO was an option, so I went into them and they train you and it’s fantastic.

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White

You can hear the sort of passion in your voice about it.Ìý What is it about it that appeals?

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Durrant

It’s fun and it’s not normal because you don’t usually have people singing about weird stuff that they usually sing about, like the opera I was just in was about a black spider.Ìý They can be hilarious, they can be sad, they can be dramatic and you get all this through the medium of song and generally the costumes, the lights, the sets and I love that kind of ambience.

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White

So, tell me a bit more about your sort of highs and lows in getting the support you need because I think you’ve had both, haven’t you?

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Durrant

I have, unfortunately, much like many blind people, I’m sure.Ìý Obviously, with opera it’s a lot on stage, so there’s been a lot of work on – well how do we make this stage accessible.Ìý So, I started off doing performances at school and they were like – well, we can’t really make it accessible, how do we do that da da da.Ìý And then I joined WNYO, we did our production and they were like – we can do it.Ìý So, we taped string to the floor – that was quite an interesting one, just following string.

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White

Just so that you’re in the same position, in the right position on stage?

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Durrant

Yeah and to make sure I don’t fall down a five foot gap, as well.

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White

Because the other thing about opera, of course, is it’s not just singing is it, I mean there is an element of acting in it?

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Durrant

Yes, so how we manage the acting and stuff is I’m happy to be manipulated, so I’m happy for people to like move my arms and stuff and give me verbal directions as well as physical.Ìý But there was also a lot of literally grab me and move me, if needs be, on stage.Ìý That was quite fun just to have people just grab me and just be like – get over there!

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White

So, you’re cool about that because normally we tend to object to being pushed and pulled but I suppose you think this is part of the learning process.

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Durrant

Yeah, I had worked with these people quite a lot before, as well, so I knew who they were, it wasn’t just some random person on the street, which is quite scary.

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White

And I think the Welsh National Youth Opera, they have been pretty imaginative and supportive in the way that they’ve tried to help you with the various aspects of the work.

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Durrant

Yeah, they have.Ìý They’re very good at their verbal directions, as well as being physical.Ìý So, they did like a buddy system for me, so they buddied me up with an older guy and he was fantastic.

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White

And I think your first big public performance was in front of a rather important person, wasn’t it?

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Durrant

Oh yes, the first big one with the WNYO was in front of the Queen, I think, at the opening of the Senate.

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White

There’s nothing like starting big is there?

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Durrant

Yes, it was an experience, yeah.

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White

Well, stay their Toben because listening to that is Victoria Oruwari.Ìý Victoria is herself a blind opera singer and also a trustee of the Amber Trust, which is a charity which supports blind and visually impaired children to reach their potential as musicians.Ìý And Victoria, very sportingly on a bank holiday is talking to us from Boscombe Beach in Bournemouth.

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I mean there is a perception that music is a field in which visually impaired people can do very well, I mean you hear people say well, you’re all musical aren’t you, as if it were kind of handed out with dodgy eyes.Ìý So, is it perhaps rather surprising that there are as many barriers as there seem to be?

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Oruwari

I think it is very surprising but it’s also very evident that the world is not fully accessible.Ìý I mean blind children benefit a lot from music because it gives them a sense of independence, it’s the one thing we can do without the help of another person.Ìý But also, music is highly dependent on sound and children are really fascinated by the sound of a piano, the sound of a clarinet, the sound of a xylophone.Ìý So, it’s a good way of attracting a young child’s interest to music.

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White

When do the barriers tend to arrive because, as we said, you’d think music would be quite accessible?

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Oruwari

If schools don’t have good specialist teachers that can engage the blind children from an early age, then music is something that they might feel they can’t fully engage in and some boroughs are better served than others.Ìý Getting the right teachers who can inspire the young children to learn the instrument.

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White

What kind of support does the Amber Trust offer?

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Oruwari

So, the Amber Trust offers support by paying music tuition fees for young children and also directing them to websites where they can find qualified teachers who can teach various instruments, so the child’s interest can be better developed.

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White

So, is it mainly financial help that you can give?

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Oruwari

They offer financial support but they also offer advice to the parents of the young children who want to be musicians as to where to go to get experience.Ìý They provide concert venues for the children to perform.Ìý All the beneficiaries of Amber Trust often have concerts, like twice or three times a year, and those concerts are well attended.

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White

I mean you’ve heard Toben talking about doing opera, this is what you do but I would imagine there are challenges there, positioning, the movement, it’s acting, surely, as well as singing?

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Oruwari

When you get the right teacher, it is such an amazing experience.Ìý I was very privileged to have worked with a lovely music psychologist called Jane Davidson who actually worked with me and what she needed to work on were my thoughts.Ìý So, if I’m given a line or a role to play, she would ask me to read out that role and think about it and ensure that I’m thinking about the thoughts that I would like my face to express because she said like moving my hands, just for the sake of it, is going to be quite robotic if I did that.Ìý So, think a thought and then move your hand in the way that you feel that thought drives you to move.Ìý So, it’s about actually not being too specific as to what the blind person has to do and giving them room to be authentic in their expression and in their movements.Ìý And in that way, it just feels less choreographed.Ìý

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White

Right.Ìý So, rather than actually learn a series of movements, you’re almost being asked to improvise?

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Oruwari

Yes.

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White

Let me bring Toben in.Ìý Have you been given a fairly free reign about the way you move and the way you look?

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Durrant

Yeah, I’ve been given a very free reign in the way they’ve done that for me.Ìý The main thing with them moving me was like moving me into positions.

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White

Well, here you are Toben, you’ve got a professional opera singer at your service, even if she is on Boscombe Beach, anything you’d like to ask Victoria, while she’s here?

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Durrant

How did you get where you are at the moment, like not at Boscombe Beach obviously, like… [laughter]

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White

No, it’s a good question.

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Oruwari

It’s a very good question.Ìý By saying yes to many opportunities that came my way.Ìý By allowing some creative work to happen that normally would not happen.Ìý I talked to so many people.Ìý I attended lots of workshops on music professional development and I made contacts through those workshops that I attended.Ìý And I think the RNIB’s music services played a vital role in getting me out there and getting me introduced to different people.

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White

So, the advice seems to be Toben, don’t say no to things really, address them head on.Ìý But it sounds a bit that’s what you’ve started to do anyway.

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Oruwari

It does sound like you’re doing all the things that you should be doing and it does sound like the Welsh National Opera have been supporting you very well.

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Durrant

Yeah, they’re fantastic.Ìý I also get support from the Amber Trust as well.

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Oruwari

Great.

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White

Toben Durrant and Victoria Oruwari, thank you both very much indeed.Ìý And how else could we end this piece but with a snatch of talented Toben?

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Music – Toben Durrant

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That’s just about it for today.Ìý Do contact us on anything you think we should know about or should be covering, you can email intouch@bbc.co.uk or you can leave your voice messages on 0161 8361338.Ìý So, from me, Peter White, producer Fern Lulham, studio manager Simon Highfield and all our talented contributors, goodbye.

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Music – Toben Durrant