Joeita interviews Arthur Gwynne, operations manager at RAMPD, the Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities, about creating disability-inclusive spaces in the performing arts.
Joeita interviews Arthur Gwynne, operations manager at RAMPD, the Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities, about creating disability-inclusive spaces in the performing arts.
Highlights
RAMPD –
Award-winning platform equipping the Music Industry with Disability inclusive solutions, programs, and a directory of peer-vetted music professionals and creators with disabilities, neurodivergence and chronic and mental health conditions.
Find RAMPD online - Facebook, Instagram
Arthur Gwynne Bio - from LinkedIn
Arthur heads operations for the award-winning platform RAMPD (Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities) where he’s collaborated with the likes of Netflix and the Recording Academy to build inclusive programming. Arthur also manages the career of globally touring recording artist, charting songwriter and cultural activist Lachi—the go-to voice on Disability Culture in the music industry through her work on the GRAMMYs Board and as CEO of RAMPD. Throughout the course of this mission-work, Arthur stepped away from a career in executive recruitment, and opened up publicly about his own neurodiversity. Today Arthur runs a robust diverse team, booking national tours, negotiating major contracts, working everything from creative projects and music releases to development programs from cradle-to-grave.
Arthur speaks on panels and podcasts—at places like the Kennedy Center and the Music Managers Forum—on how embracing one’s neurodivergence is an asset in the music industry. He has also made it his mission to break down the silos and barriers holding back the disability community, laying seeds for a national conversation on Disability Culture and what Inclusion and Universal Accessible Design means at a practical and industrial level. Beyond all of this, Arthur is Lachi’s stylist, and designs her iconic Glam Canes.
Joeita Gupta: I am Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. If you listen to this show regularly, you know I love to feature artists with disabilities. Disability art exposes the marginalization and societal exclusion of people with disabilities. Not only is disability art remarkable from an artistic standpoint, but it is also a vehicle for advocacy and change, yet there is a lot more that can be done to improve a platform for people with disabilities within the arts. Efforts range from making spaces and events accessible and going as far as redefining what art actually means. Though people with disabilities are talented artists, there remains an absence of disability representation within leadership positions within mainstream arts movements. Today, we discuss disability inclusion in the performing arts. It's time to put your finger on the pulse. Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI Audio. I'm Joeita Gupta. Joining me today is Arthur Gwynne, who is in charge of operations at RAMPD, RAMPD standing for Recording Artists and Music professionals with Disabilities. Hello, and thanks so much for joining me on The Pulse. I'm so happy you could be on the program.
Arthur Gwynne: Yes, thank you so much. Yeah. Again, my name is Arthur. I'm a big and tall white guy with way too much red hair, and I identify as neurodivergent, and it's a pleasure to be here.
Joeita Gupta: Arthur, tell me a little bit about what RAMPD is and what it does.
Arthur Gwynne: Sure. Yeah, so RAMPD is, at its core, it's a community. It's a networking community for professionals in the music industry that identify as disabled, neurodivergent, rare disease, chronic illness, that type of thing. We are an affinity group, so we are here to find community. We're here to build not just our own internal networking, but also connecting each other's networks together. And together with that community, we have really been doing what we can to penetrate the discussions at all levels of the music industry from top to bottom to make sure that discussions of equity, whether it's equitable access to venues or events, equitable opportunity for gigs and performances or in the workplace and on the actual white collar side of the music industry at Sony and everywhere else. We've done a lot of work with the GRAMMYs.
For many years now, we've worked with the GRAMMYs on the accessibility of the red carpet experience, as well as how they're discussing and highlighting people with disabilities and neurodivergences. And we're expanding that out to other folks as well, like Netflix, we're talking to the CMAs right now. We just did a whole big thing with Live Nation, which is really cool, and we're still just getting started. We're only about two and a half years old, so it's been pretty wild.
Joeita Gupta: Yeah, I'd say that's a lot of ground to cover in two and a half years, but how did you get your start? Because you mentioned that it was founded in 2021, established in 2022. That's two and a half years ago, but it's also right in the middle of the pandemic. And I'm curious about what happened in that moment, or what was the impetus in that moment to get something like RAMPD underway?
Arthur Gwynne: Absolutely. Yeah, so our founder and CEO was Lachi. I'm also her business manager, by the way, so I manage her. She's an artist, she's a speaker, disability advocate, and you're right. During COVID, the GRAMMYs was undergoing a big change during COVID because it too kind of saw it and looked at itself as like, "You know what? We're just a bunch of old white guys now. We need to do something." And so they did. They changed their leadership. The C level was completely changed up. A lot of their stuff was changing, and this was all happening during COVID. At that same time, as you know, the disability community was really feeling itself. All of a sudden, virtual work, working from home was everyone's experience, and it really evened the social playing field for a number of people from our community, and a lot of great conversations were coming out of that. And so it was an interesting nexus.
So for Lachi, Lachi was in the dance and music scene. She's got low vision. And pre-COVID, she wasn't really disclosing her blindness professionally. Her manager knew and stuff like that, but she was afraid that it would cause a problem with career. She was afraid it would bring up discussion she didn't want to be, or she'd be positioned in ways she didn't want to be positioned. And so she was generally not sharing that part of herself. When COVID came, early on, her longtime manager, Gary Salzman, unfortunately passed away of COVID. And so she had to re-examine her career, and while she was doing that, she was having these discussions with the disability community because we're all sitting around together. It was Clubhouse, which I never logged in to Clubhouse, but I know they got real rambunctious in there.
And so she got activated. She was thinking about this. The GRAMMYs, she started getting involved with the advocacy efforts of the GRAMMYs, and they had this big call and they were talking about the communities they were forming. And so there was the Black Music Collective, there was GRAMMY Proud for the queer community. There was Women in the Mix and a couple others like that. And then Lachi was like, "Okay, this is great. Where's the disability community?" And they were like, "What do you mean? There's not enough people to do that for. That's you and Stevie Wonder. There's not a wider group of that." She was like, "That doesn't sound right. So she went down and she started hunting it down and she found a number of other folks in the industry who also identify as disabled, including Gaelynn Lea, Siedah Garrett and a few others.
And they ran this GRAMMY webinar about disability in the music industry. It was the first panel of its kind ever held by the GRAMMYs in its 50 years of history. And it was also their most attended virtual event through all of COVID. And it was just this fascinating conversation. It was a new conversation for everyone in the room. And by the end of it, people came to Lachi and she was like, "Hey, this is amazing. Where can we get in touch with your organization?" And she's like, "What organization?" And so that's where RAMPD came from. But again, it was from that birth of Lachi didn't want to run something. She wants to be a musician. And finally, just now, two years later, she's in the studio again for the first time. But she just wanted to have a place where she could explore her own identity, find community, break through that feeling of isolation or shame where she was ashamed or afraid of how the industry would react to it.
And now she can be loud and proud of it, not because she changed, but because a place for that type of conversation was allowed to exist in the first place. And it's also not just been Lachi. We just did a whole week of meetings with all of our community members and we were hearing dozens of stories of the same thing from all across the country and the world from other people that have already been impacted just from having a place to talk with each other. It's been a wild thing to be a part of. And I don't know, it's been amazing.
Joeita Gupta: I can hear the enthusiasm in your voice. I'm curious about whether RAMPD is a community for people in North America or if it has a global reach. What kind of conversations did you have about deciding on who gets to be a part of this community?
Arthur Gwynne: Sure. Yeah. So RAMPD is not a nonprofit. We do have a fiscal sponsor. And so we have received some grants from Ford Foundation, Borealis and Craig T. Neilsen Foundation, which is great. But we also operate as a for-profit company doing consultations and doing panels and stuff like that. But we really focus on the community first. So anyone can join RAMPD as a community member. You go to our website, www.rampd.org, click register, and you're a community member. It's that easy. You can start hanging out. We've got a Discord and a Facebook group, we've got a newsletter and stuff, but the folks that are actually involved in everything are what we call pro members. Pro members, they build out a profile, they apply, and then we've got a committee made up of already existing pro members who vote and decide who fits our criteria. And that criteria is simple, identifying as disabled, neurodiverse, chronic illness, et cetera, and having a career in the industry.
And so if it's someone that, again, we have a very wide umbrella definition of this, it could be we've got some members with lupus, we've got some folks with diabetes versus folks that have much more severe disabilities or neurodiversities. We're not medical model here. It's very social model. It's like, if your experience is that you live in a world that wasn't quite built for you, you're probably in the right place talking to us. And then how we measure a professional, it could be across any genre. It could be front of house performers, it can be back of house engineers and sync agents and managers, or again, even just someone that works at Sony Music doing administrative stuff. We want to have as broad a definition as we can for both of those terms to make sure that we are not the ones causing more isolation. Where we do kind of draw lines as where there's already community.
So if you're an actor, there's Reel Abilities. There's whole bunch of other groups like that or influencers and that kind of thing. So we are focusing on what, we're trying to classify as the music industry, but again, we've been very broad with that definition. And I'm sorry, you originally asked about geography. Yes. So we are pretty US centric. About 90% of our professional members are US, but we also have a number of international members. So our largest contingent is in the UK. We've got a few members in Canada. I think we've got one person Australia and Turkey and Germany I think. But we don't talk compliance that much. So we aren't centered on things like ADA. We're not centered on the legal side of these efforts. It's social and that's universal. And so really the more we can find how to bring these conversations to other countries, it starts by just having a member there and then we start hearing it, like Turkey.
I've learned, so the guy we have in Turkey, Kemal Gori, who was recently elected on our executive committee as a secretary, which by our elections are, again, only pro members can participate or be voted into our executive committee. Kemal, he is one of, I think only seven blind dog users in Turkey. And they had recently gotten the legal right to legal protections, but he's one of seven in the entire country. And so he is constantly having and battled fights with the police and with venues and stuff as he's trying to do just his day to day. And we're sitting over here in the US having very different conversations when we talk about compliance or social acceptance. And so I think it's really important we get that international conversation in there as early as possible so that we don't get too hung up on accessibility discussions. And frankly, the music industry itself can be, for being US centric.
Joeita Gupta: Yes, that's a really good point. And yet it's unavoidable with 90% of your members being from the US. Aside from setting up a society and a community with like-minded individuals, is there a portion of the work that you do that might better be classified as advocacy work? I mean, when you're thinking about the role with your work with the GRAMMYs or even pushing to make spaces and venues and events more accessible, it does lead one to think that there is a component of advocacy or a component of pushing the envelope involved with that aspect of your work. So to what extent is your work, to what extent would you say your work deals in the area of disability advocacy?
Arthur Gwynne: Sure. I mean, frankly, access is not really what we talk that much about. A lot of the introductory discussions, the reason a venue cares about this discussion is first, access. But they see access as like, "God, every time I see someone in a wheelchair come into my venue, I'm expecting a letter in two weeks with a lawsuit because of the height of the toilet or something." That's their whole experience connecting with the disability community. And so a lot of these discussions do start with compliance or access discussions, but it's more because that's where they're at. For us, that's step zero. It's like, asking if, "Hey, are my ramps going to let someone with a wheelchair come in?" It's the same as asking, "Are the lights on," or, "Are the chairs put out?" That should be something you're doing automatically. And hey, we'll connect you with where you need to do if you need to do that minimum stuff. There are plenty of services out there that already provide event accessibility, that provide ADA compliance stuff.
Those are services that exist, and we're not here to do that. What we're really here to do is to promote the culture. So what we did with the GRAMMYs. When we focused on the red carpet experience, it wasn't because we wanted to make sure it was compliant, it was because we wanted that you could visibly see that the entire experience of winning or being nominated for a Grammy, someone who is disabled or neurodivergent would be able to accept it and go through that process just like anybody else. And so the little things of making sure that the media center, so there's the big red carpet area, and what we did in our first year with them, is we had an ASL interpreter available on the carpet so that ASL could be live during their media interviews. And only one person took advantage of it, which was, what's her name?
Whatever Rodrigo. I should know all these people's names. But anyway, she did, and she had this whole viral moment because she had ASL during her TV interviews. And everyone was like, "Oh, wow, look, she brought an ASL interpreter." No, she didn't. We freaking did that. And then the next year, we had five interpreters on the carpet and it wasn't enough because so many other people saw that moment and were like, "I want to also have ASL during my media interviews." And we had them available. During the performance itself, that big stage, it's not wheelchair accessible.
And so if someone in a wheelchair or had mobility issues won a Grammy, they'd have to go behind production in order to receive it. And so we had a dais built, which is actually a wheelchair ramp. So it's a ramp that spirals up to a dais so that if someone were to receive a Grammy that needed that, they would. And in fact, SZA used it, but when she had her crutches, but then she didn't freaking use the ramp, she went up the steps anyway, but it was still there. You know what I mean? It was still there.
And so that's the kind of thing. And then what we really pushed the GRAMMYs to do is to celebrate it, to put in their advertisements about the event, the fact that they have audio description, captioning, that there's an ASL channel, that there was ASL in the arena for those that came, that the arena had accessibility features. Instead of it just being a footnote or an asterisk, making it really front and center and understanding that our community's already expecting not to be accommodated and not included.
You can't just slap on some kind of salve and think that you're going have people coming out. You have to announce it. You have to be proud about it, and you have to be okay with the criticism that may come with that, right? Because it's never really going to be enough. And the only way that you can take that as a business is to stop looking at it as a minimum compliance thing and to really embrace that this is a cultural movement, that this is cultural acceptance. The other good example I'll give, and I'm babbling, but I guess that's what I do, Live Nation.
Joeita Gupta: You're in the right place. Yes.
Arthur Gwynne: I'm in right place. Okay. Just like what, three weeks ago, we were at the Live Nation headquarters and they invited us in to have a very frank discussion. Live Nation had just recently hired their first corporate national level accessibility coordinators. And so we came in, we had a great talk, and it was originally, they came to us because they wanted to talk about, again, venue access. And the guy was telling us, it's like, "Oh, I'm trying to figure out where Live Nation is at." And right now, their biggest concern is again, where the lawsuits are at or where their compliance issues are. But we had a whole conversation with them, and what they ended up doing is they had followed some disabled team workers from different venues and different fans who were disabled through their experience top to bottom. And the thing they learned that blew their minds, which maybe shouldn't have, was that it isn't about accessibility measures, it's about feeling included.
It's about having the same access and same experience as everyone else that's going there. It's about autonomy and it's about dignity. And so having a separate ADA section that is technically compliant and safe, you're not serving the disability community because now they're way off in that back corner. They can't be there with their friends and family. They have a segregated experience. No one wants that. Saying that like, "Oh, yeah, no, our venue is accessible, but except for the bar on the second floor," and it's like, well then make sure the bar on the first floor is... You don't have to make an elevator to that second floor, but make sure you're not missing out from being unable to get there.
Make sure that your staff understands if someone comes up and they have an odd request, whether it's front of house or back of house, instead of being like, "Why would you need that?" It'd be like, "Okay, yeah, sure. Sounds great." Understanding that disability culture is at its core just that empathic desire for everyone to have the same fricking good time as everyone else, whether they're there to work or to party. And so that's my long, very long way of saying it's like, yes, we start accessibility, and maybe that's the lock that opens the door sometimes. The key that opens the lock or what have you.
Joeita Gupta: Yeah, the key that opens the door. Yeah, absolutely.
Arthur Gwynne: But we're here for, we're way past that, and we're really just here to make sure that they're understanding that when you're talking, you're not talking to one disabled person or one type of disabled or neurodivergent person. There's an entire community here and a shared experience of not being welcome. And the only way that's going to change is for people to start being welcoming again.
Joeita Gupta: Do you think it goes a bit further than that even where people may start to re-evaluate what they think of as art? Over the years that I've done this show, I've talked to artists who have worked with Braille and done everything from murals. I've had people who have used Alt Text as Poetry, and they've had ASL as an art form. So you can really play with things that are normally thought of as accommodations and try to reimagine what art looks like. Do you think that this has been a theme that's come up in the discussion that you've had with members of RAMPD, that they're actually pushing the boundaries, not just of who gets to be an artist, but what constitutes art itself?
Arthur Gwynne: Absolutely. I mean, frankly, so I've got two answers to that. But first, from the RAMPD side, a hundred percent. I mean, even just the collaborations that are forming up between the different RAMPD members, the conversations that are happening, the way that we're exploring things. So for instance, Lis Sniderman, who is our outgoing secretary, she did a whole thing called The Grieving Project. She has an immune deficiency, and so COVID was especially difficult for her, and they did a musical with other people with a similar experience to try to share how COVID was for people with immune deficiencies. And it was a live play in a stage, but then Lis was attending remotely via a robot. And so there was a Lis bot. So she was remoting into this [inaudible 00:21:52], but then a bunch of us were attending virtually in Meta, in the Meta Live thing, which was, I had never logged into that thing before.
But I logged in, there was a virtual theater, they had different screens of the different positions in the theater. I could hear the live audience members and the virtual audience members who were talking to each other. It was wild, and it was so layers on layers of a hybrid music experience. And that's the kind of ingenuity that we get. And then when someone like Lis pushes that bar, is everyone going to go to that extent? Maybe not, but we can take that example and show it to Live Nation. We can show it to production companies like Marauder. We can say, "This is something that you can learn from for how we can make these events truly hybrid so that as the world gets back into in-person events again, especially the music industry, now we aren't abandoning the people that can't do that." Another one that's more to our heart, so Lachi, last year, Lachi did a single called... Oops, sorry, I've got a... Alexa, stop.
Sorry. ADHD. I'm a manager. I have to have my thing yell at me in order to do something. Lift Me Up. So Lift Me Up was a music video that Lachi did last year. It was after, Judy Heumann was her mentor. Judy Heumann helped her explore her disability identity. And then Lachi was helping Judy explore her being a star on stage through the Crip Camp stuff and everything. And so they were really having a great time together. So when Judy passed it really hurt Lachi, but she wrote Lift Me Up along with Gaelynn some others like James Ian to send her off and to bring her message out of lifting each other up. And we made this music video, and we had ASL as part of the music video. However, the interpreters were front and center instead of on the side.
And we had an interpreter for each of the singers, and each interpreter, I should say performer, ASL performer, used their own dialect to match the singing of the singer they were with. And so when we were in harmony especially, they were using different dialects to sign Lift Me Up at the same time. Beautiful thing. Really, we put a lot of intentionality into making accessibility an art form, like you said, right? And just now, in fact, on Wednesday, we are shooting a new round of music videos, performance videos, and again, we're going to have an ASL performer as part the performance band. And we're being very intentional with how we're filming it to make sure that it's captured properly so that it's not just like a slap on thing to be like, "Oh, it's just someone in the corner that we got off the internet." But it's actually integrated into the art.
And as far as I can tell, I mean, Coldplay copied us on the ASL thing, but... They copied us and they knew about, they supported us. They tweeted out our song when it came out.
Joeita Gupta: That's amazing though.
Arthur Gwynne: So the best way to get people to explore these things as an art form, even outside of the disability community and just in pop culture, is by showing how it's done. And we're seeing this all the time too. I mean, again, ASL, everyone saw that thing from the Super Bowl last year, right? It was like it was a national viral moment, but you couldn't even see it during the live freaking thing because it was the separate channel and everyone only saw it on the internet. And it's that segregated experience that needs to really get, we need to stop that if we want to see the integration. And if we need to prove, if we can do this, this is us doing, we don't have a label or something. This is a Lachi production. You know what I mean? And so if we can do it, freaking Sony and Universal can do it too.
Joeita Gupta: Absolutely. Well, on that high note, we should leave it. Arthur, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about RAMPD and some of your experiences. It was a pleasure having you on the program.
Arthur Gwynne: Yes, thank you. And again, anyone who's interested in any of this stuff, please come join us, www.rampd.org. Or you can find us across Instagram and Facebook and all that good stuff.
Joeita Gupta: Thank you. That was Arthur Gwynne, who is operations manager at RAMPD, which is the Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities. I hope you'll check them out on social media and on their website and keep a lookout for exciting news from them in the, I'm sure months and years to come. I have a brief announcement to make about The Pulse going on hiatus for a while. We will unfortunately not be able to bring you any new content in the not-so-distant future. But with that said, I hope you will still keep in touch with us. You can write to us, write to feedback@ami.ca with emails if you have any questions or comments. You're also welcome to find us on X at AMIaudio. Use the hashtag PulseAMI to let us know that the tweet is meant for this program. You're welcome to give us a call at 1-866-509-4545.
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So I hope you have enjoyed this journey as much as I have, and I will hopefully be in touch with you in a little bit longer. But for now, we'll be taking a break on The Pulse, but I hope you'll continue to listen and follow many of our live programs on AMI Audio, which will continue to provide you with news and perspectives that are important to the disability community. I hope you'll take care of yourselves and those you love, and it's been such a pleasure being with you. My name is Joeita Gupta. I've been the host of The Pulse. Have a wonderful rest of your day.