I am trained and actively working as an Audio Describer across performance and visual arts. To understand more, and see if we might be able to work together, please get in touch. These are personal reflections on the process of audio description, originally posted on Instagram.
Image credit: Kuka Studios
Under @_meera 's inspiring leadership and vision, I spent a large part of 2021 exploring the dominance of the visual in dance, and untangling points of access into bharatanatyam that engage the non-visual senses.
What is bharatanatyam when you strip away the parts we are most accustomed to? What is it without the technical virtuosity, without how it looks?
This project began with blind and visually impaired audience members at the centre of the investigation, but began to be increasingly about our relationships with dance. A multi-faceted process that included Audio Description Training, workshops for blind and visually impaired students, consultations with BVI patrons, choreographic exploration and complex discussions, I'm grateful to have been able to enrich my artistic practice through this project and excited to share more about the work. Here are some offerings to start:
- Though text has a well established place for blind and visually impaired patrons within the paradigm of audio description, we felt there was potential to further disrupt the monopoly of the visual in dance. We worked with text beyond its capacity to describe movement 'objectively', exploring the rhythmic and musical possibilities that language offers.
- Rhythm felt like the key access point that Indian classical dance offers us into dance - kinaesthetic when felt through vibrations in the ground, audio when heard tapped clapped and stamped, and emotional when experienced in composition.
- Indian classical dance capitalises on the descriptive powers of music, but we felt there was even further to go. We worked with @camilo_tirado to research what a soundscape could be and what it could offer, if composed with blind and visually impaired people in mind from the outset.
#attuning #bharatanatyam #research #acefunded
#blindandvisuallyimpaired #acessintodance #artisticpractice#choreography #shivaangeewrites
Our research culminated in a live sharing at Lilian Baylis Studio in September. This offered us a precious opportunity to design the experience that guests were going to have of our work, and in doing so, further test our research on access points into classical Indian dance.
It was tempting to do away with the visual altogether, as we considered whether we should do the sharing in darkness, or behind closed stage curtains. However, these choices felt complicated - in trying to upturn sensory hierarchies by completely dismissing the visual, were we in fact reinforcing the hegemony of the visual? In centering the experience of blind and visually impaired people from the outset, were we creating work that would again be marginalised to the periphery, with no place for mainstream audiences? How could we be sure that our positionality as non-disabled and sighted people wasn't interfering with our aspiration to center the blind and visually impaired experience?
While not being able to fully answer these questions, I felt there was a level of integrity brought about by our commitment to the non-visual experience of dance, simply for ourselves and for the richness of our individual practices. When we stopped trying to 'do this for them' and started 'doing this for us', and being led by our personal investment in challenging the dominance of the visual, things began to feel more authentic, less contrived and more full of possibility.
This has parallels for me in how anti-racism work is conceived of. When we realise that anti-racism is crucial to each and everybody's wellbeing, we become closer to stepping out of embedded hierarchies that encourage one group of people to 'help' another group of people. Instead, we realise that dismantling incumbent structures has benefit for all of us and we enter into a more authentic coalition effort. Anyway, more on this later.
#attuning #bharatanatyam #kathak #odissi #research#choreography #blindandvisuallyimpaired #sadlerswells#acefunded #shivaangeewrites
It was an honour to put training into practice so soon, and be asked by Sadlers Wells to live audio describe the London premiere of Kattam Katti by @pagravdanceco, but I don't think I've worked this academically since I was at university.
This process of translating each moment of live performance into a written script reminded me of the process of translation from one language to another. No matter how much you research the semantics of each word, there's an inevitable subjectivity to your choice that's grounded in abstract memories, perceptions and experiences of language. In the world of translation, this subjectivity is embraced as different translators bring different voices to literature.
I erred on the side of research and crafted my script carefully to try and recreate the experience of the dance as "authentically" as possible. Through conversation with choreographer @urja76, I was able to gain a sense of the places in the work where room for interpretation has been protected.
In the minutes before the show began, I had the usual pre-performance nerves, sweaty palms and disturbed digestive system included, even though I was well out of sight of any audience members, high up in the AD box. It went as good performances do though, the intuitive system taking the reins and overriding anxiety.
Live description offered the chance for my script to be more alive, as pauses and timing are paramount to audio description cohering with what can be heard and sensed from the stage, to make sense to the blind and visually impaired patrons. In paying such close attention to each of the artists on stage, I had the strange experience of feeling deeply connected to the performance while completely invisible.
@_meera is leading a revolution in access-centred work in classical Indian dance, and I'm excited for what is to come.
#audiodescription #liveperformance #translation#dancewriting #attuning #shivaangeewrites