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.

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.

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.