Written by Madison Bigelow, with Support from the DAC Team
In recent news, The New York Times published an article entitled “Hear the Dance: Audio Description Comes of Age,” meant to highlight the advances in accessibility that dance performances have experienced as of late.
I really have a soft spot for dance– I grew up as a classically-trained dancer for 16 years and spent a lot of my time in classes that specifically concerned the composition of dances (as in, creating and choreographing pieces for others). In essence, my dance education was largely equivalent to a creative writing workshop, if it were grounded in composition and dance writing theories. So, when I came across this article, I didn’t just see this as an improvement in performance art’s accessibility, but a new type of artistic methodology.
Generally speaking, this article begins by detailing the experience of Krishna Washburn, a blind dancer, who felt alienated from the rest of the audience when attending a dance performance in New York City. While an audio description was provided for her, the “reporting” of the dance scenes lacked the intricacies inherent to the performance. When the audience was led to tears in the final few moments of the work, Washburn was unable to understand why that was, having only the audio description to guide her through the performance.
Regarding this moment as a turning point, Washburn set out to establish Dark Room Ballet, a “ballet curriculum designed for blind and visually impaired students.” There, she has also created a new piece titled “Telephone,” which follows the evolution of a series of dance moves as they are passed between individuals– dancer, then audio describer, then another dancer, and so on. According to the article, “at one point, Washburn shares a message specifically for blind and visually impaired audiences: ‘We made this for you,’ she says. ‘You are not going to be missing anything.’”
So, for audience members with visual impairments, this is a clear improvement for their viewing experience. Instead of understanding a medium like dance through audio descriptions that are usually incapable of capturing the entire experience of witnessing visual art, performance becomes much more accessible for these audience members with the additional layer of audio descriptions that are just as much a part of the piece as the dance itself.
What I’m more interested in, though, is how the pursuit of disability shapes one’s methodological approach to their body of work. By considering audio description as one necessary component of the larger art piece, Washburn and her collaborators’ endeavors are impacted by the inclusion of this additional factor.
In other words, the decision to include an audio description before the production of the art (as opposed to an afterthought) influences how one navigates the creation of a piece of art. This is neither good nor bad– it’s just another element of the work that they must consider. However, this element yields a vastly different outcome for the trajectory of the art piece (and its experiential immersion for audience members) than if Washburn’s composition had been created without considering audio as a tool.
In disability studies, we (or maybe I’m projecting) think extensively about doing work in the humanities and beyond– how we do it, what it looks like, and how we can encourage others to do it. I think that Washburn’s projects are an example of what doing disability work–and disability advocacy– looks like outside the realm of academia. By expanding the scope of access to her art, Washburn has created a new form of media. This is not to say that dance and visual descriptions have never been paired together– I can’t confirm or deny that Washburn is the first one to accomplish something like “Telephone.” However, I do think her work is a wonderful example of how doing work in disability studies can create new approaches to navigating the world, academic or otherwise, that continue to illuminate human experience in ways that aren’t popularly discussed.
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