Short Sighted, Episode 3: How to dance for people who don’t see

Graham talks to blind artist Devon Healey https://discover.research.utoronto.ca/32146-devon-healey, who makes dance shows for people who don’t see and explores the world of audio description. Special thanks to Justin Miller, Tarragon Theatre, Outside The March Theatre company and Vanessa Smythe. For more on Devon Healy’s “Rainbow on Mars” visit https://outsidethemarch.ca. New episodes will be released weekly on Tuesdays. Don't want to wait? Binge the whole season right now via CBC Stories Premium on Apple Podcasts apple.co/cbcstories.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi, I just had to tell you that I think your podcast has changed my life.

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  Season one of Sold a Story hit a nerve. It was about teaching kids to read.

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  We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation.

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  Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading.

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  I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math.

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  I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story.

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  This is a CBC Podcast.

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  My name is Graham Isidore. You're listening to Short Sighted.

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  I started to pay attention.

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  I started. I started. I started to.

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  Isidore is the type of person who never really knows where to put his hands.

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  Audio description is a form of narration used to provide information surrounding key visual elements in a media work such as a film or.

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  And it was teaching.

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  Graham's dressed in a gray suit jacket and gray pants. He's a medium-built man with bleached blonde hair.

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  That's the described audio from a play I recently performed. The play was a storytelling show. Storytelling, if you're unfamiliar, is a lot like stand-up comedy. The major difference is that when a storyteller tells a joke and it falls flat, they just pretend they were being interesting. As a format, it plays to my strengths. I'm a comedian, but probably only in the public radio sense of the word. I've always been more hmm funny than ha-ha funny. Luckily, independent theater audiences are so starved for real comedy, they treat the show like I was Letterman.

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  Anyway, putting together the described audio for the show was a trip. Described audio provides information surrounding key visual elements in a play, movie, or TV show. Basically, it helps low-vision and blind people know who's on stage and what they're doing. Typically, described audio needs to be over pretty quickly so it doesn't impede any dialogue, a kind of bare-bones factual impression of what's going on. And it's useful for that. But the format doesn't actually do a lot for my particular condition. With my vision, I get shapes, colors, sizes. It's the details that get hard. For audio description, what I'd want is an actor's subtle lip quiver, the eyebrow raise

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  that changes the dynamic of a relationship. Instead, for most shows, what I get is a real-time account of people entering and exiting doors. And that's not good or bad. It's just not what I need personally. Online, you can find all sorts of debates about described audio, different opinions on what's most useful, whether it's supposed to be a utility or an art form unto itself. During my play, we had one description hitting all the factual beats, and a secondary description based solely on vibes.

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  A warm spotlight focuses on Grant Isidore as he sits back nonchalantly in his chair. Isidore is the type of person who never really knows where to put his hands when he's talking. Both his hair, bleached blonde, carefully be sheveled, and clothing selection, secondhand Armani from the mid-'90s, are meant to convey the contradictory ideas that he put a lot of effort into his appearance while simultaneously suggesting that he has never really cared about a simple thing in his entire life. Isidore is the type of person you might consider handsome if you decided you already liked him for some reason.

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  How many times in his life has he been told he looks like the actor Mark Ruffalo? Perhaps the most accurate description of Isidore is that he is someone who is a little too flattered by the idea of being compared to Mark Ruffalo.

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  A vibes-based audio description isn't practical on any level. Accessibility as DVD commentary is a fun idea to think about, but for a lot of shows, it would prove a distraction. Still, it's an interesting thing to consider. So much information is communicated visually. What happens when you take that away? How do you communicate it?

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  As my vision loss has progressed, I'm not always sure I see the same things as other people. There are times I rely on friends or family members to let me know what's happening. And when you zoom out on that idea for a minute, it leads to all these big questions. How does something change based on the way it's described? Should the description feel more like math or poetry? If we don't have the same language, are we having the same experience? Others are kind of stupid. Do blind people enjoy physical comedy? Is a nutshot still funny if you can't actually see it? These questions would dance around in my head, but the idea I kept coming back to

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  is how I'd have to reframe everything. Everything, if I could no longer consistently rely on my eyes. What would that feel like? And how would you describe it to another person?

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  I no longer took the world for granted in the sense that it was just there to be seen, but rather I approached the world and my blindness as something to be experienced and to be investigated and explored. And so that's really how I began to feel my blindness as that full-bodied experience.

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  This is Devon Healy. Devon wears a lot of hats. She's an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto. She's a blind author, actor, and playwright.

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  I mean, even picking up a glass. Is no longer picking up a glass anymore. It's a detailed relationship. It's my fingertips caressing it, coming to know it. Where is it in the room? Where did it come from? What's in it? How did I find it in my hand on this table? Who am I with?

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  I knew Devon's writing before we met. Her work was one of the first times I'd experienced another person exploring their sight loss creatively. A thing we both had in common was, like me, Devon had trouble finding the right words to describe her vision loss.

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  I started to pay attention a little bit more to not only how I was feeling about blindness, how blindness was making me feel, but also what blindness was teaching me. And it was teaching me that the language we use to narrate and explore and connect and come together is a deeply sighted language. And I was always expressing my blindness and exploring it through sight, which became really frustrating.

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  Pulling together the stage show about my eyes, I used audio description to try to create the mood rather than one-to-one description of what people were actually seeing. Devon's recent work takes things a step further. Most of the time, accessibility is trying to recreate a visual experience for an audience that doesn't see. But what happens if blindness is built into the performance? If you were creating a show that doesn't put vision first, what does that look like? And is "look like" even the right way to describe it?

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  I just felt really unsatisfied. And so as a way to kind of disturb this understanding of blindness as a problem that needs to be solved, or questions of accessibility always being, how will we make this accessible for you? A way to disturb that a little bit, I thought, now, hang on. How can I make blindness, the perceptions of blindness, the creativity of blindness, accessible to not only blind people but sighted people as well? How can I make the presence of blindness that already exists within the world? How can we tap into that?

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  For Devon, the answer came from an unlikely place. She wanted to make a dance show for blind audiences. It's a bold proposition, especially since the whole point of dance is to, you know, watch the way people's bodies move. The last dance-adjacent show I attended was about a decade ago. A durational performance, set to atonal music. For about an hour, I sat as blurred figures supposedly raised and lowered their arms. It was about as interesting as you'd imagine. With my vision, I came to terms with the fact that dance is probably one of those things decidedly for other people, like good credit or falling in love. But the reason Devon wanted to make a dance show is because dance isn't something blind

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  audiences normally get to engage with. Her latest project was Dark with Excessive Bright, a show from choreographer Robert Binet, where Devon contributed. It was recently performed in England as a joint project between the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada. For the show, Devon created what she describes as immersive descriptive audio. The starting point for that work is blindness isn't the opposite of sight. Blindness is a form of perception, rather than the absence of it. It can bring something to the audience and the performers that they might otherwise overlook.

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  I would talk with Rob and ask him about his choreography, you know, what led you. So first, starting with that narrative, what kind of brought you to wanting to tell this particular story? And we'd break down each part of his choreography. And he'd tell me a bit about how he was feeling within it would lead him to that. Then I would speak with some of the dancers and ask them, in your body, what does it feel like when you're doing this movement? What do you think about? What parts of your body are you engaging? Where's your breath? I was able to also speak with the lighting designers, the sound designers. I could experience for Dark with Excessive Bright.

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  I was able to move through the stage before the dancers were there, just to get a feel for the space. So all of this kind of intricate work that is presented to audiences as visual, blindness began to animate that in a different way.

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  Dark with excessive bright was staged as a promenade. As audience members walked through the space, an audio track played over the headphones. Approaching a dancer, a lyrical reading of their gesture was whispered to the listener. They were encouraged to sync their breath with the movement. Wandering toward a spotlight triggered a poetic description of the hue and temperature, the fade or level of the glow. Every aspect of the space was described to capture the feeling, tone, and tenor of the dance. A whole world sitting adjacent to the visuals of the piece, interacting with the push and pull of bodies in the space.

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  For myself, for Devin, for a lot of people with sight loss, conversations about vision, trying to make people understand what it's like, get reduced to visual language and examples bombarded with sight. But putting on a blindfold and walking through a room is not the experience of blindness. Turning off the lights and trying to find your phone isn't the same as living with sight loss. It's not losing your glasses or walking in the fog. When we stop trying to think about sight loss in reference to how we see, it opens up all of these possibilities, trying to talk about what is there instead of what's not. Chatting with Devin about the project, I kept wishing listeners had the chance to experience immersive descriptive audio.

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  Again, the whole point of this podcast is we're trying to let people know what vision loss feels like by sharing how it sounds. So I got to thinking, if one of the goals for immersive descriptive audio is to share dance without actually seeing the dance, why not let you hear it? The following is an example from Devin's new show, Rainbow on Mars. It's a play that she's worked on with Toronto Theatre Company outside the March.

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  Magnet hands.

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  Into angled spine.

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  What are you doing?

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  Twisting.

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  Yearning for a heartbeat alone. Sticky feet thirst for the nourishment of connection. Inverted hurricane draw near. Crawl back, arch eyes. Slowly elevate. Careful. Infiltrator field. They spread into disappearing.

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  Geometric shapes twist. Cut all eyes on her beckon. An accordion pulses. Many hands become one.

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  On the next episode of Short Sighted, we talk about how to take photos when you can't see.

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  Short Sighted was created and hosted by me, Graham Isador. Editing and sound design by Christopher Ross Hewer. Music and additional sound design by Ron Kelly. For CBC Podcasts, the producer is Leah Simone Bowen. The sound designer is Julia Whitman. The coordinating producer is Roshni Nayar. Kate Evans is the senior producer. Tanya Springer is senior manager. And the executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. The director of CBC Podcasts is R.F. Noorani.

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  Remember to subscribe and follow Short Sighted wherever you get your podcasts.

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  For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.