Listen to dance! Feel dance! Experience dance!

With an extraordinary qualification program for audio description authors, the Tanzplattform Rhein-Main, a joint project of the Hessisches Staatsballett (HSB) and Künstler:innenhaus Mousonturm, is contributing to the removal of barriers for blind and visually impaired people and to greater participation in dance. The qualification program culminates and concludes with the HSB ballet evening “Chronicles”.

Parallel to the rehearsal process, blind, visually impaired and sighted authors participating in the qualification program will jointly develop an audio description including a tactile tour for the multi-part dance evening.

This audio description can be used for the first time by blind and visually impaired visitors at the premiere of the dance evening on February 16 at 6 pm at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden.

More information will follow soon.

On what levels does dance work?

As a physical art, dance is considered a form of expression in which visual aspects dominate. So is dance perceived mainly or exclusively through the sense of sight? How can dance be made accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired?

The Tanzplattform Rhein Main, a joint project of the Hessisches Staatsballett and the Künstler:innenhaus Mousonturm, has been working for nine years to strengthen dance in its diverse forms of expression in the Rhine-Main region and to create access to this art form for people with various physical and sensory impairments. Breaking down barriers in dance for people with disabilities in front of, on and behind the stage is an important concern for the Hessisches Staatsballett and its partner Künstler:innenhaus Mousonturm.

For a good two years now, the Tanzplattform Rhein-Main has been offering audio descriptions for selected performances at Mousonturm. The verbal description of the stage events that accompany a live performance enables blind and visually impaired people to take part in the dance piece. What has been standard in film and television for many years is still a rarity in dance and theater.

On the initiative of the Tanzplattform Rhein-Main, an audio description is being developed for the first time for a production of the Hessisches Staatsballett as part of the ballet evening “Chronicles”. The development of this audio description marks the end of a qualification program for audio description authors in dance. Led by the blind audio description experts Melanie Hambrecht and Fabian-Lilian Korner, a group from the Rhine-Main region consisting of nine blind, visually impaired and sighted people will be trained to independently develop audio descriptions and accompanying measures such as tactile tours and audio flyers for dance productions.

The aim of the qualification program is to make the outstanding pieces of the Hessian State Ballet accessible to blind and visually impaired people for the first time. In addition, the Nucleus is to be established for a pool of audio description authors in the Rhine-Main region, so that in future audio descriptions can be offered not only at the Hessian State Ballet or the Mousonturm, but also at other theaters and independent dance productions. Currently, such an offer is not only failing due to a lack of financial resources, but also due to a lack of qualified authors.

With the qualification program, the partners of the Tanzplattform Rhein-Main would like to make a contribution to the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was ratified by the German government in 2009. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities makes it clear that the independent participation of people with disabilities in all areas of life, including art and culture, is an indispensable fundamental right.

The Dance Platform Rhine-Main sets important standards with its program. It is directed by the blind experts Fabian-Lilian Korner and Melanie Hambrecht. It thus fulfills a central demand of the disability rights movement, which is “Not about us without us”.

The program also makes the work of author teams standard, in which blind or visually impaired experts always work together with sighted experts on an equal footing. The skills, experiences and needs of the target group of audio descriptions are thus placed at the center from the very beginning.

Under the keyword ‘artistic audio description’, the qualification also takes intensive account of the special features of the art form ‘dance’. It is thus radically different from the supposedly neutral, highly technical descriptions familiar from film and television. Rather, the initial questions are how the various sensory levels that are effective in a dance performance can be included or which sensory levels beyond the visual can be experienced in a dance performance and how these can be conveyed.

It is important to the directors of the qualification program, Fabian Lilian Korner and Melanie Hambrecht, to place acoustic, olfactory and haptic qualities of a dance performance on an equal footing with the linguistic description of the performance, such as the breeze that can be felt on the skin when a dancer moves quickly. The aim is to create a holistic sensory-aesthetic experience for the blind and visually impaired audience that is equivalent to the visual reception of the piece.

Audio description

The creation of the audio description as part of “Chronicles” comprises the following work steps:

Phase 1: In an intensive exchange with the choreographers of the pieces and the dancers involved, the authors develop an independent language that adequately describes the characteristics of the respective pieces and the choreographic handwriting. Which terms and adjectives can be used to capture the special movement quality of a choreography? Which sensory levels can be incorporated into the audio description alongside the verbalization of the stage predecessors?

Phase 2: Parallel to the rehearsals of “Chronicles”, the audio description teams are developing a script that will serve as the basis for the future audio description. As in phase 1, the exchange and constant feedback between the blind or visually impaired authors and their sighted colleagues is also central to this phase.

Phase 3: Implementation of the audio description during the performance. Users can receive the audio description via receivers with headphones. The script serves as an orientation for the speakers, who were also involved in its creation as authors. Live aspects of the respective performance are taken into account, such as the tempo, the intensity and the reactions of the audience. The performance is preceded by a so-called tactile tour, usually one hour before the performance begins. This enables the audio description users to feel central elements of the performance before it begins and to walk around the stage area to get a better orientation during the performance.

Further information

The Tanzplattform Rhein-Main, a project by Künstler:innenhaus Mousonturm and the Hessische Staatsballett, is made possible by the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain and is supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Frankfurt am Main, the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Art and Culture and the Foundation Alliance [Aventis Foundation, Crespo Foundation, Hans Erich and Marie Elfriede Dotter Foundation, Dr. Marschner Foundation, ODDO BHF Foundation, Stiftung Polytechnische Gesellschaft Frankfurt am Main].