Going to hear a dance

Abstract

Audio description for performance is written as a script to be delivered live between the spoken lines of dialogue or in relation to the soundscape of a dance performance. Should it be treated as an annotation or as part of the artistic work—or does it offer a way of bringing these two concepts together?

The process of writing an audio description is a form of translation from the visual mode to the verbal. As with all translation, choices have to be made from a vast field of perceptions and associations. The new text is not a simple equivalent to the original source but a new creation that aims to reflect the meaning, impulses and structures of the original. It can potentially draw on all the poetic resources of the target language.

Recent research on visual perception suggests that the whole body is activated in sight, in a sympathetic-mimetic process involving mirror neurons. This raises important questions for audio description. Can a spoken text provoke a physical memory or response in a similar way? Poetry can ‘send a shiver down the spine’ by virtue of not only the content but also techniques of repetition, rhyme, assonance and so on. The latitude offered by a thorough description of a non-verbal performance gives describers the opportunity to employ these techniques along with all the vocal possibilities of live performance. Describers also emphasize the tactile aspects of experience and supplement the verbal text with touch tours and dance workshops.

Neither neutral transcription nor recording, but texts negotiated between describers and other members of the creative team, audio description scripts offer an unexplored resource for performance study.

Notes

¹ An audio description of live performance is ideally prepared by two describers and includes three elements: the live description during the performance, typically offered for one or two performances during a run; a touch tour of the stage immediately beforehand; and a recorded introduction, available in advance, that describes the look of the production, including the settings, characters and costumes. This article deals only with the live description. Critical discussion of the problems raised by audio description has so far mainly been carried out in the field of ‘audiovisual translation’. See, for example, Cintas and Anderman (2009), in particular Andrew Holland's (2009) article in that collection, and Maszerowska et al. (2014).

² For Graeae Theatre Company, description is ‘woven within the piece … very much a part of the overall artistic concept’. Writer Alex Bulmer uses the phrase ‘access design’, and compares describers to sound designers, creating a score that ‘maintains the integrity of the play but also follows the artistic direction’ (Envisage 2006: 32). Haig argues for audio description for film to be constructed in collaboration with filmmakers, since audio description is inherently interpretative; it requires knowledge of the elements within the frame and how sequences are put together, as well as a sympathy for the creative vision. She sees the audio description as part of the ‘creative interpretation of the essential story’. Like film music or photography, it does not stand alone as an art but is one of the elements that constitute the film as a whole (Haig 2002).

³ See Bellos (2011).

⁴ Goodale and Milner illustrate the independence of the two systems by discussing the case of Dee, a woman who suffered brain damage through carbon monoxide poisoning. Unable to recognize faces or objects on the basis of their shape, she is able to pick up objects accurately. Although her perceptual visual system is no longer functioning, her visuomotor system is undamaged.

⁵ For someone who has had no direct experience of sight, visual concepts such as colour are nonetheless meaningful, due to the structures of cultural and linguistic relationships in which they are embedded: red is related to roses, blood, sunsets, fever, heat, anger, passion and so on (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In response to Brian Magee's suggestion that such concepts could have ‘only an attenuated content’ for him, the ‘born-blind’ philosopher Martin Milligan wrote that he ‘grasped as completely as most sighted people that looking is directed seeing as listening is directed hearing, that there are differences between glances and stares, glimpses and full views, loving looks and freezing looks, quizzical looks and solemn looks’ (Magee and Milligan 1995: 83).

⁶ In Talking Dance, a guide for professionals describing dance, Louise Fryer suggests that as well as researching different dance styles and looking at their sources for evocative images, describers may find it helpful to analyse movement using Laban's effort scale, in effect beginning a process of dance notation.