Title
Getting in early. The role of access in the rehearsal room
Author(s)
Conference name
Intermedia. 5th International Conference on Audiovisual Translation
City
Country
Poland
Modalities
Date
20/09/2019
Abstract
Traditionally audio description (AD) has involved a describer (or describers) writing (and in some countries voicing) a description once the AV product (film, play, artwork etc.) is complete. In the UK, some theatre companies have been embracing “integrated AD” whereby AD is conceived from the start as an integral part of a production. This is similar to the approach of Accessible filmmaking (cf. Romero-Fresco, 2014). Yet, a few theatre directors have been introducing access practices even earlier in the process in order to tap their creative potential. This presentation reflects on a couple of those experiments.

For example, one company was working on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. With a visually impaired actress in the company, they made use of other access strategies, mainly line-feeding. While this technique is already acknowledged as a liberating process in rehearsal not only for actors with a visual impairment but also for actors with dyslexia or with cognitive disabilities or actors with no impairment who don’t want to be tied to the book, what was exciting were the possibilities line-feeding opened up were it to be carried into performance. The question of who should feed the lines to Lady McBeth (perhaps Hecate, another of the witches or MacBeth himself) would fundamentally affect the audience’s impression of who was pulling the strings, adding to the questions the play poses about power. Similar questions were asked about which voice provides the AD. In addition, questions were raised about how much inflection should come from the line feeder and how much from the character. Also the degree to which the visual layout of the text on the page affected how and where the text was segmented. These aspects would not have come to light, had the emphasis in the rehearsal not been on the role of the describer in turning visual stimuli into auditory information.

By getting in early with the AD, the company become co-creators in the access provided. This increases the company’s understanding of and investment in access, raising its visibility and allowing creative people to devise solutions that may not have been possible to implement or simply may not have occurred to the describer had they been working alone or later, once the production had been fixed. By getting in early, not only do access professionals provide access to content and access to creation (Dangerfield, 2017) for actors with disabilities, they also have the potential to transform the way non-disabled audiences experience theatre by transforming the way theatre is performed.
Submitted by Anita Fidyka on Thu, 19/09/2019 - 11:44