The Impact of Institutional Support
Audio Description for Dance, Arts Access, and Human Rights
By Krishna Washburn, Artistic Director Darkroom Ballet, Co-Director Telephone, Blind teacher of ballet and audio description.
Click below to listen to an audio version of this essay.
I’m Krishna Washburn, I’m the artistic director for Dark Room Ballet, the co-director of Telephone which was screened by Pacific Northwest Ballet in November 2024, and a blind teacher of audio description for dance. Audio description for dance is my particular activist field, and PNB has given me this opportunity to explain the reason why audio description for dance performance is so important.
To truly understand how important and groundbreaking PNB’s audio description program really is, we’ll need to learn two important terms, and to get a clear understanding of the state of arts access in the United States. The first term we’ll need to define is ableism. Ableism is a pervasive form of prejudice that discriminates against disabled people in all aspects of life: education, employment, health care, and full membership in cultural community. While it may be true that ableism is, at times, something that individuals commit against other individuals, it’s more useful to understand it as the universal status quo of all aspects of human life; the needs and interests of disabled people are typically only considered as an afterthought, if they are considered at all.
The second term we’re going to learn is education denial; education denial is an extremely common expression of ableism, in which an individual, institution, or culture decides what disabled people will and will not get to learn. Education denial is the process by which a series of seemingly minor denials of information accumulate to the degree that disabled people are fully excluded from major elements of human life. One of the fields in which education denial is most prevalent is the arts.
Contemporary American culture has a very contradictory way of thinking about art, and by extension, arts access. The zeitgeist implies that the arts are optional and not a necessary part of life, and yet almost all Americans engage daily with arts and culture of different kinds and would suffer greatly if they could not do so. I’m speaking directly to you, patron of the ballet: what brings you to this performance? What does attending the ballet do for you mentally, emotionally, culturally? Maybe you know that the visceral, embodied nature of ballet performance creates a place for you to experience emotional catharsis. Maybe ballet culture is where you live, it’s something that connects you to other people and to your own personal history, and to the centuries of history that ballet has spanned. Would you want a life without these important things? When our culture decides that something is important for one group (nondisabled people), but not important for another (disabled people), we make a grave error of understanding of what it means to be human. Your blind neighbor needs emotional catharsis and ballet as a cultural experience no less than your sighted neighbor, and suffers its absence just as much, even, and perhaps especially, when they have been kept unaware of what they’ve been missing.
Audio description for dance is still a very young artistic field. It’s vibrant, it’s exciting, and it’s full of innovation, especially when it is led by people who truly understand why they love dance. All too often, when an arts presenting institution approaches a new audio description program, they consider it as a list of boxes to check in order to hit the arbitrary goal of “accessibility compliance.” Audio description for dance is the vocal embodiment of physical expression, it’s a highly skilled and powerful art form, and when approached with the right mindset, can lead to truly effective and equitable performances, in which every person in the audience can be truly immersed in the art, receive its vitamins and oxygen, and grow.
I want to congratulate Pacific Northwest Ballet and audio describer Alyson Osborn for a truly excellent and mindful first season of audio described performances. It is my hope that more ballet companies follow your lead, understand the value of high-quality audio description for dance, and support audio describers as artists and professionals. Here’s to a world full of art for everyone.
