Audio Description:
the Art of Access
Friday October 21st,
10am-6pm, central London (venue to be announced)
Sponsored by Royal
Holloway University of London
Organised by
Hannah Thompson and Eleanor Margolies
Featuring a keynote talk by Louise Fryer,
author of An Introduction to Audio Description: A Practical Guide (Routledge, 2016)
Call for
Presentations
This one-day workshop aims to explore some of
the aesthetic and technological questions around the practice of audio
description for live performance and in museums and galleries. Proposals for
20-minute presentations or workshop sessions are welcome from researchers and
practitioners working in fields such as theatre and performance, museums and
galleries, disability studies, the senses, writing and translation, voice and
sound design. Presentations might consider – but are not limited to – the
following themes:
* Audio description in promenade, site-specific
and multi-media performance
* Integrated audio description
* Audio description for dance
* Audio description for opera
* Indeterminacy and surprise: what is ‘access’
for post-dramatic and non-narrative performance?
* Other resources for access to the visual
elements of performance such as
performer-guides, recorded introductions, touch
tours and haptic tools
* Access to theatre for blind and
partially-sighted children and young people – is a different approach needed?
* The relationship between verbal description
and tactile and kinaesthetic experience in the touch tour and pre-show movement
workshop
* Other people making use of audio description:
theatre-goers on the autistic spectrum, sighted museum visitors, students of
visual culture
* Blind and partially-sighted performers’
experience of audio description and touch tours
* Talking about diversity, bodies, sex and violence
* The museum experience: orientation, audio
information, tactile guides and handling collections
* The describing voice: whose voice? live or
recorded? human or synthesised?
* The strengths and limitations of infrared,
radio and wireless systems; in-ear, on-ear and bone conduction headphones; new
directions in sound technology
* Achieving a balance between speech, music,
recorded sound and description
* Archives – the potential of description
scripts as performance documentation
Proposals (200 words) and a short biography
(200 words) should be sent to Hannah Thompson by 30 June: successful applicants will be contacted by 21st
July. There is no cost to attend the event and refreshments and lunch will be
provided.
