Telephone Film

“Telephone” celebrates emotionally rich, poetic audio description for dance, which allows blind and visually impaired people to be included fully in the joy of artistic expression.

Heather Shaw

Krishna Washburn

2022

43 mins

Created with a visually impaired audience in mind, Telephone brings awareness to the art of audio description for dance while creating an immersive sensory experience for audiences of all sight levels. The film demystifies and legitimizes audio description, not just as an access tool, but as a rich art form in its own right.

“Recent experiments in describing dance, like the film Telephone, approach it not just as an accessibility service but as a space for artistic exploration… Resisting rote description, the film seeks to give anyone, with any level of sight, a rich sensory experience while ruminating on themes like the purpose of performance and the universal necessity of art.”

Siobhan Burke

Dance Writer, New York Times

Synopsis

The audio describers of Telephone are reshaping the world’s perception of audio description, adding emotional context and allowing their words to dance in the same way a dancer’s body moves. The result is a beautiful merge of poetry and movement, proving that: dance is visceral, not merely visual.

Audiences members leave with a refreshed and revitalized understanding on the world of dance and accessibility in all forms of performance art. At a moment when more arts organizations are committing to accessibility, Telephone asks what meaningful artistic inclusion should look like.

Reviews

Telephone... "provides a vital and viable means for blind and visually impaired audience members to experience, enjoy and benefit from exceptional dance performance as an artistic sensory experience. At the same time, it reveals the unique beauty and creative impact of audio-described dance to sighted performance attendees."

Ellen Gilmer

Journalist-Correspondent, IPA Press Arts

Read more at: dance-enthusiast.com

“Telephone is an extraordinary and groundbreaking film, an unexpected exploration of the artful practice of audio description to describe dance, welcoming blind and low-vision audiences — as well as all so many others — into the dance world through this innovative project. This remarkable documentary powerfully demonstrates how audio description is far more than an access tool; it enhances the experience of dance in ways that are long overdue. Telephone is transformative!”

Faye Ginsburg

Director, NYU Center for Media, Culture and History and Co-Founder, NYU Center for Disability Studies

Telephone… “is such a bouquet of emotions happening all at once. A piece of art that gives you so much in each moment, you simply want to burst out of your seat as an audience member. So many parallels going on to complement each other, this is truly a magical and fun movie of dance…”

Natalie Schultz-Kahwaty, PhD

Director of the Rutgers Dance for Parkinson’s and Neuromuscular Conditions, Assistant Director of the Integrated Dance Collaboratory (IDC) at Rutgers University

“Wow, thank you for this exquisite film… gripping, revealing, visionary, inspiring and courageous. I was fascinated and moved by the gorgeous movers, audio describers, questions, and revelations. Yes, art is necessary for all.”

Sheiline McGraw

NYC-based contemporary dancer

"A truly accessible film offers a springboard for dreams to as wide an audience as possible.Telephone not only offers an immersive introduction to techniques of audio description for dance, but fully demonstrates how much stronger dance (and dance film) can be when these techniques are synthesized through the process of generating the work.
As a member of a dance film festival screening committee, I'm always interested in how a film can answer the question, 'Why screendance?' What can screendance documentaries do that conventional documentaries cannot? Telephone demonstrates a full spectrum of formal techniques to kinesthetically connect to an audience and activate their imaginations, demonstrating the potency of film created through the mode of screendance. "

Clare Schweitzer

Production Associate, San Francisco Dance Film Festival | Dance Film SF

“Audio description is typically understood as a segregated accommodation for a small segment of the audience, produced at the end of the creative process. Too often, this means that the results are at best only dutiful and dull. Telephone flips the script on the typical procedure, making audio description available to the entire audience, which enlarges that audience and offers new modes of understanding and interpretation of dance. The film also shows the radical creative potential when audio description is used as the impetus for creativity and collaboration.”

Georgina Kleege

Writer, English Professor at UC Berkeley, and NYU Steinhardt Dean’s Scholar-in-Residence

“At NYU, Telephone Film has been screened in classes ranging from Dance Education to Disability Studies to Media Studies. It has transformed students' thinking about disability arts, dance audiences, ekphrasis, digital accessibility—and more.”

Mara Mills

Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, cofounder of the NYU Center for Disability Studies

“Dance belongs to all--- but those of us with visual impairments and blindness are closed out of this world because vision is the mode of body communication. The film Telephone shows a new way forward where language and movement poetically work together to convey what dancers are doing when we dance. Those who have eyesight translate dance to feel the immediacy of the moment--Audio Description includes the blind and others who may not be able to attend to details or understand what's going in dance without language ---so all with visual impairments and blindness can be in the room as dancers do their magical work of speaking through the body. Please experience this beautiful film.”

Devorah Shubowitz

NYC based dancer

Awards and Screenings

Mill Valley Film Festival, Official Selection

San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Official Selection

San Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, Official Selection

Reelabilities Film Festival Columbus, Official Selection

University screenings include: NYU, Rutgers, Carnegie Mellon, Carleton College, SUNY Purchase and more

Arts and educational screenings include: Lincoln Center, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Movement Research, New Museum Los Gatos, and more

Director Commentary

Telephone emerged from conversations that co-directors Heather and Krishna had during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic about audio description for dance. Dance may be among the most difficult performing arts to describe, but blind audiences deserve access to its emotional, physical, and aesthetic richness, it is necessary. For too long, audio description for dance has been treated primarily as a technical accommodation, evaluated by the information it conveys rather than the artistic experience it creates. Telephone begins from a different premise: audio description is art. Audio describers are artists. When they are empowered to create artistically, their work can become an integral part of a dance performance rather than an explanation added afterward.

The documentary explores the artistic philosophies and creative processes behind high-quality audio description for dance through collaborations among dancers, audio describers, filmmakers, ASL artists, captioners, and composers. Rather than presenting a single methodology, the film demonstrates how each work of dance calls for its own creative response.