Hearing Dance: The Power of Audio Description
Audio Description services logoImage description: On a black background, white capital letters AD are followed by three curved vertical lines.
Audio Description services logo
Image description: On a black background, white capital letters AD are followed by three curved vertical lines.
Merce Cunningham is famously attributed with this evocative quip: “Speaking about dance is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.” As a dancer and writer whose dual creative practices are intimately intertwined, I am perhaps attempting most of all to prove Merce wrong. Words have a powerful capacity to express ideas and feelings, while movement is visceral, multisensory, and yes, sometimes indescribable. For me, the real magic happens when those two worlds meet. In this piece, I’d like to explore the nuances of describing dance in the context of accessibility for people with visual disabilities.
Audio description for dance has only come to my attention over the past few years, and since 2019, Imagery has expanded our accessibility services to include audio description for both our live and virtual offerings. This month we’re presenting the audio described versions of last year’s SKETCH Films: Red Thread. Even if you experienced these four films last year (and especially if you haven’t, they’re brilliant!), I can enthusiastically recommend engaging again with the added value and depth of audio description provided by Gravity Access Services. You can also tune in from July 14-21 when Imagery screens three ballets as part of our SKETCH: Rewind series with audio description and closed captioning available.
Audio description is, of course, only one of many accessibility services that dancemakers can incorporate into their work. Sign language interpretation, captions or supertitles, sensory-friendly performances in relaxed theatrical environments, and physical access to performance spaces are all paramount for choreographers and presenters to center the needs and experiences of disabled artists and audience members. Access is a core value that benefits both the dance ecosystem and society as a whole. With that in mind, I invite you to join me in taking a deep dive into audio description for dance.
Audio description is an accessibility service in which spoken accompaniment gives a full experience of a work of art to blind, low-vision, or visually disabled patrons. It can also be a rich resource for all audience members, from neurodivergent people to young children, new patrons, and “old hats” seeking new ways to appreciate dance. In order to gain a greater understanding of the experience of a blind dance patron, I spoke with Susan Hood, a long time dance enthusiast and arts administrator whose vision loss began about four years ago. She is severely visually impaired due to retinal damage, and though she has no usable central vision, she can see some degree of light, color, shape, and movement. She says, “There are all different degrees of blindness just as there are different shades of blue,” and the spectrum of experiences and expressions of visual disability must be carefully considered when providing access services for dance and other art forms.
Since we generally consume dance in theaters and on screens, it’s easy to think of it as a visual art form. Susan reflects that “because [dance] is visual, people assume that people with visual impairments would not enjoy it.” However, when we probe more deeply it’s evident that dance is a bodily art form. And the beautiful thing about our bodies is that there is so much possibility built into our very cells and structures. There are many ways to access any and every experience, which is what makes our bodily existence so rich: we can use sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and that subtle extra-sensory perception we can’t quite pin down. The full value of dance resides in more than just the visual field. From the inside, dance is a multisensory experience unlike any other. Dancers know this very well; our kinesthetic sense of our bodies, finely tuned proprioception, and hyper-sensitive touch make us perhaps more deeply embodied than most. In any intimate live performance, it’s the embedded symphony of footfalls, breath, and the contact of flesh to flesh and flesh to floor that gives the deepest sense of the weight and power of movement. For Susan, those elements amount to a wealth of “sensory cues that, if you’re dependent solely on eyesight, it doesn't really register.” Even dance films sometimes use amplified ambient sound to help the audience feel closer to the work and the bodies on screen. Dancing happens in and through every sense, so why should audiences be limited in the ways they perceive dance?
This question is coming up more and more as dance companies strive to expand accessibility services for audiences. Audio description for dance is not new, but it’s only fairly recently coming into more mainstream use. And it takes many forms. In live performance, audio describers are typically positioned in the production booth or other area with a clear view of the stage, and patrons are provided with wireless headsets that transmit the description in real time. This allows for an in-the-moment, immersive experience of the dance, which can also include a reading of program notes or other contextual material prior to the start of the performance.
For all live performance has to offer, screendance opens up even more avenues for audio description. In some, a single voice describes movement in practical, unobtrusive tones, as in this full length stage performance by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Others take a more qualitative approach that creates a multidimensional sonic and poetic landscape, such as this short film by Katrina McPherson and Marc Brew. Disabled dancemaker Alice Sheppard’s company, Kinetic Light, provides multimodal access points in their recent film, One + One Make Three, which simultaneously incorporates sign language interpretation, captions, and audio description.
To varying degrees, each of these examples of audio description explains the dance’s features and reflects on its dynamics. For Susan, when it comes to describing movement, she says it’s important “to think of direction, levels, speed... sometimes musical terms can be useful. And just lots of good adjectives.” Add to that the very specific language of dance, and “there’s a much greater vocabulary available that you have to practice in as an audio describer… the more that people talk about movement in terms that people understand, like corkscrew… they understand the spiral or if someone’s being lifted or carried as though they were a baby being cradled as opposed to being hoisted aloft, because there are a zillion types of lifts. So it all has to do with really being conscientious about vocabulary.” Dance writers can take a cue here, as Susan states that in “good criticism and good journalism--good reporting--those are the same kinds of tools that audio description requires.” Audio description is most effective when it describes all the visual elements and qualities of the dance: not just the movement, but the people, costumes, setting, lighting, production, and camera work. Overall, for Susan “the challenge is really to be perhaps more poetic than prosaic, work with metaphor, work with simile.” I might venture to say that these are the very same challenges that a choreographer takes on in their creative process. Perhaps audio description has the potential to give people--both artists and audiences--the vocabulary to be conversant with dance in new and different ways.
We speak through dance with every sense and every cell, and our bodies are far from silent. The fullness of transportive embodiment in dance is the overarching reason why it appeals to me so profoundly. As a performer, if there’s one thing I want, it’s for the audience to feel as much of that as possible in any and every way possible. As we slowly return to live performance, I’m excited for sensory immersion to reconnect me to one of my first and deepest loves. At the same time, I’m curious and eager to see our practice and performance return with accessibility at the forefront.
Dance can and should become more relevant to more audiences through engagement with disabled communities. I hope you’ll be inspired to check out the virtual offerings linked in this piece. I’m deeply grateful to Susan Hood for her invaluable contributions to this piece and to my own learning. At Imagery, we’re always learning and growing, and we welcome your feedback: admin@asimagery.org. For more information on audio description and access services for dance, please visit these providers and explore more on your own: