Reid My Mind

TR:
Hey everyone!
Before we begin the podcast, I have a quick request.

2024 makes 10 years of producing Reid My Mind Radio. I’d love to hear from listeners, long time or new, that have a particular relationship to a specific episode, topic raised or the podcast itself.

I’ve received some really cool emails over the years from listeners who shared how this podcast has affected their lives.

It would be really cool to hear the voices from the family and share them here on the podcast in some way.

If you have a memory or comment to share, or maybe you just want to wish the podcast happy anniversary, please, send me an audio memo from your phone or computer.

Email it to ReidMyMindRadio@gmail.com.
Or, call the ReidMyMindRadio Hotline at (570) 798-7343 that’s (570)79T Reid. (A silly obnoxious giggle) and leave a message.

It would really mean a lot to me. And I think it could make for a cool episode to capture the moment.

I appreciate you family!
Aight! Let’s get into it!

— Swoosh transition
— Clock ticking…

TR:
The clock no longer symbolizes the expiration of time.
As in,

— “Times Up!” (modulated yelling voice)

TR:
Rather, it represents the new day!

— Birds chirping

We kicked off the new with SoundScribe,
a promising young global majority led organization from the UK making creative, innovative.

Today, we’re headed to Massachusetts.

England to Massachusetts, a path traveled before that sort of began something new.

(Giggles)
Don’t worry, this time, it’s not about conquering, genocide, human bondage or any of that colonialism.
We’re moving forward with the idea of a world free of the ism’s and phobias.
If you’re joining for the first time, I strongly encourage you to go back and listen to the entire season,
but specifically, Times Up, which provides some more context for this episode.

I’m Thomas Reid, host and producer of this podcast.

It’s time to think differently about access.
It’s time for an Access Revolution!

— Reid My Mind Radio Intro

— Helicopter flying over and outdoor protest. Sounds of people chanting, whistling and commotion.

TR:
(A voice speaking to the crowd via PA system)
The Access Revolution will not only be captioned and described,
it will include ASL interpretation,
It will be free from physical barriers and
in general a welcoming space for all.
—

TR:
Thinking and acting differently about accessibility, requires all of us working together.

Sam:
I’m Sam Gould. I’m an Ashkenazi, Jewish woman with salt and pepper hair, five feet tall.

TR:
Among other things, Sam’s the president of Open Door Theater.

Sam:
Open Door Theater has a 40 year mission of being an accessible theater and a training theater. We train actors, and we train backstage folks, and front of the house folks and now ASL interpreters, audio describers, captioners. It’s a training ground for people.

TR:
Sam’s also co founder of Think Outside the Vox.

Sam:
Along with Christopher Robinson

(Sam & Christopher overlap saying “Christopher Robinson”)

Christopher:
Christopher Robinson, African American male. He him pronouns, and like to say that I’m an aspiring Morgan Freeman salt and pepper beard and curly licorice locks on the top.

TR:
An ASL Interpreter who found his way into performing arts.

Christopher:
In the mid 90s, I was working as a staff American Sign Language interpreter for a very influential deaf Executive Director, and because I was in proximity to that director, who was a theater performing arts lover and concert lover, I was in proximity to these art spaces. And then I became it. I was the beacon. Because where else you’re going to find a black male sign language interpreter in the profession, it’s really scarce. The last numbers we heard as of 2024 was that 11% of the entire profession of American Sign Language interpreters in the registry. Only 11% is African American, and that’s 2024 Never mind 1995 when nobody’s even counting.

TR:
Even as a Black ASL interpreter, Christopher isn’t of the culture.

Christopher:
I was placed in those spaces by well intentioned white deaf practitioners, white sign language interpreters to be the interpreter for these black shows that have black content. We approached how to tackle the text of blackness, but I wasn’t born and raised by Black Deaf people, and neither were the white interpreters I was working with, or the white sign language coaches that I was working with, so they had nothing to offer other than just putting me on a soap box in front of a stage and watching my Black hand sign.

TR:
We’re talking about the importance of representation, authenticity, cultural competency.

That of course applies to all forms of access.

Sam:
The accessibility landscape, and especially the AD landscape, was very checking the box.

It was very much either non existent or performed by the old guard of people who had been doing it for years.
So we came to the 80 party a little late. Our audio description was competent, but it certainly wasn’t culturally competent.

We started to hear from patrons in the open door space, but also in the community, blind patrons that wanted more.

TR:
Then there’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The one thing that seems minor, but it’s really the compounding affect
the culmination of many things that just makes you say, times up!

We’re talking about access from all perspectives.

Christopher:
Well, what it came down to was, there was a theater company that wanted to do, and listen to the side of my Downton Abbey voice.
They wanted to do the right thing and the noble thing real intention, and get some sign language interpreters on the stage for this show. They wanted them to Shadow Mirror the hearing actors, so that any deaf person could go and see the show.
So they started doing their development research, and they started pricing out, well, how much is it going to be to get sign language interpreters on the stage? And the pricing points that they saw were for the context of legal Sign Language Interpreting work, medical sign language interpreter work in academic spaces, and that does not translate over into the art space.

TR:
Based on their estimates, the theater did some serious fundraising to pay sign language interpreters.

Christopher:
Fast forward through a conversation with me and a couple of deaf stakeholders that were involved. The development department of this theater company realized that if they do the anti ableist thing, which is, instead of hiring sign language interpreters, hire deaf actors. Now what you think about that? So they in the in the effort to be accessible, they were being ableist by not doing what their theater company was designed to do, which is to employ artists, and in this case, Deaf artists, to shadow non deaf artists on the stage. And where they needed the sign language interpreters was in the production room, in the rehearsal room.

TR:
That’s access for content creators as well as consumers.

Sam:
We were hearing from our blind patrons in the theater that
they were just grateful to have ad so they never actually asked for quality AD.
They weren’t feeling like they were getting the full picture of audio description in the theater when there were such great, diverse and cultural pieces going on

They were getting perfunctory dance steps, step together, step together, kick, kick.

They weren’t getting what the description was of, what the richness of and the vibrancy of the costuming, actors, characters, all of that. And they weren’t getting the sexually explicit content. Frankly, they were getting things sanitized to them, and that was making them feel infantilized.

TR:
Then there’s the perspective of Access providers.

Sam:
With respect to the AD space, we were hearing from a lot of recent trainees, and frankly, a lot of long term veterans that their training and their practices that there’s no place for race in audio description.

TR:
We’re talking about the “old guard” or the established “AD experts”
telling those who want to be inclusive and equitable that there’s no place in AD for that.

They are still out there.
They continue to practice their exclusion, but even worse,
they’re still training others.

Be advised, if your AD training isn’t including cultural competency, you may want to go elsewhere.

Sam:
from the few audio describers of color that we knew that were entering the field or in the field, they were actually being a little bit held back and corrected when they tried to put race. Into the space that was that was not welcoming race in the space. So that was, to us, an aha moment that was like, Okay, well, we know how to, from a theater open doors, but really kick them in and do something about this.

Christopher:
And Sam, I would add the ironic tragedy about that is that these colleagues of color were being put in these spaces for shows that have people of color and then stifled, not to mention that there’s color on the stage, yeah.

Why are you casting me to be in this space, only to not mention why you put me in the space, because there are some very specific choices and intentions on the stage in that space.

Sam:
Yeh, and also being left at home for the classic shows, which what?

Christopher:
Ohhh!

Sam:
There’s a deficit of audio describers in our region, and the audio describers of color were only being used for the shows that had color in them.

— Clock ticking

Christopher:
Then all the stories that Sam and I were experiencing just started bleeding together. And as they came together, Sam and I were able to see more egregious kind of violations of just out and out racism to colleagues who were doing this access work, ableism, doing this access work. So we needed to respond to the demand, but we also needed to take care of our people.

— Music Begins: A repetitive synth that feels like it’s foreshadowing something in the near future.

TR:
They began thinking more about the issues.
Thinking about ways to create a more inclusive space in live theater for their people.

Deaf and disabled performers, interpreters,
Blind AD consultants, disabled consumers…

They began thinking outside the vox!

— Music: The foreshadowing, revealed … a bass drum drop into a driving hip hop beat.

Christopher:
I love poetry. I love the abstractions. I live in that space.

So this idea is twofold. One is language based, and the other one is almost tactile, sensory, visual, the language or the notion of Vox or the voice. And we kind of think about the Latin and how V, O X, as a term is used in voice, Voice of the People, or the Vox.

Well, we want to think outside,

thinking about the voices that are not represented, the voices that are on the margin. So outside of the majority voice.

TR:
Ok, it’s tactile time with T.Reid.

Take your finger… c’mon, go ahead,
take your finger and trace the letter V in the air.

Christopher: :
When we think about the letter V, that depression into the valley and then upward movement out of the valley, that architecture of the V, we think a heart monitor, up down, up down. The humanity comes first. You can talk compliance all you want, but that’s not about the humanity.
Where is the human in this work that we’re doing?

TR:
The letter O.

Christopher: :
Our letter O is not spherical, is not a circle, it is box shaped.

We think about, what’s the frame? What is the frame of the work that the venue or the theater company, the arts company or the person? What’s their frame of reference, in terms of accessibility, we start where the person is at, what’s their world view. And then we have a conversation with you, beginning there.

TR:
And the x?

Christopher: :
We think of the word intersection. We think of a literal intersection, where all identities, experiences, lived experiences, professional experiences, where they intersect.

So we were at that frame box that’s the individual. Now we’re talking about the intersection of identities, assets, in terms of the business that’s an arts organization and the people within it. How can we create some value that circles back to that letter V to make a better human experience, we know that disability is a part of the spectrum of humanity, all in the art space. So that’s the poetry of think outside the vox and what it means to us and how we deploy it.

TR:
Think Outside the Vox is serving;
– the individual as in the audience members
– the professionals or artists and access providers or ASL interpreters and audio describers
– the business as in the arts organizations, theater companies or actual theatrical spaces.

Doing this effectively often requires additional advocacy.
What some might call Accessibility 101 or sensitivity training.

Christopher:
Things that our colleagues are exhausted, explaining to every venue again and again.

So we wanted to be available when called upon by our deaf, disabled and blind colleagues, to be able to go in and do some of that triage work.

TR in conversation with Think Outside the Vox: 23:03
So exactly what does that triage look like?

Christopher:
For ASL spaces and deaf spaces, often there’s a lot of email interchange and there’s a lot of jargon that theater companies email to sign language interpreters that are contractual and transactional, but when it’s working with our Deaf artists, they did not orient our Deaf Artists and our Deaf interpreters to working with the theater venues. So our hearing sign language interpreters were more oriented into the business transactions of the space than our deaf peers were. So when our deaf peers did not respond, or did not respond to the company or the venue the way the venue expected, then there was a lot of ableism and language and reply by email that was going toward the Deaf people such as

well. Are you sure you’re qualified to do this work?
How do I know that the translation is going to be accurate?

These people have lived experience, and their professionals look them up on LinkedIn, and you’ll see that they have more credentials than you. What they have not done is worked with you, and you provided no onboarding scenario for these colleagues who have expertise in accessibility, but you’re providing this orientation and onboarding suite of information and time to all your non disabled artists. HOST, administrators, technicians coming in, but you just want to plug and play the accessibility people as if you order in a pizza.

TR:
Christopher was clear to note that the Deaf artists and interpreters are perfectly capable of advocating for themselves,
but he recognizes the additional labor that they shouldn’t be responsible for taking on.

I find it quite similar to Blind professionals forced to take on extra work to resolve access issues around completing forms or working with inaccessible software.

Sam:
And also in the AD space, it looks like actually mindset change and cultural shift, because it was sort of revolutionary to include a blind expert on the AD team.

It’s rudimentary in the ASL space, there’s usually a director of artistic sign language when it’s being done, right? But our colleagues in the theater spaces were not even considering that they needed a blind expert consultant on the team.

TR:
I imagine perhaps, for some of those unfamiliar with disability,
it may be more persuasive to hear from other non disabled people championing the benefits of
hiring disabled professionals as opposed to hearing directly from disabled professionals themselves.

This additional work, is all extra uncompensated labor and time that can take a toll on your physical and emotional health.

Sam:
then also in the theater spaces, it’s very common to have what they call a primary and a secondary describer. So the primary describer is the action boots on the ground in the moment description, and then the secondary describer is doing the pre show.

The disparity in the pay scale, in those was significant. It was like a 1/3 2/3 pay scale versus the workload was not shared more evenly as well. So we’re trying to make a more equitable model, and, frankly, a better quality model for the AD.

Christopher:
frankly, that was going on in the ASL space. You know, American Sign Language has so much visibility, and I use that word very specifically, whereas the ad work is literally hidden in the back of the room in the dark. Nobody knows it’s happening unless you’re wearing a headset, right? Whereas the ASL space is literally front and center. But that gives us illusion that there’s progressive decision making in that space, but behind the scenes, the paperwork was just as inequitable where our Deaf colleagues were getting a fraction, a third or a fourth of the compensation for showing up doing the same work to assist American Sign Language interpreters like myself, who are not deaf to be able to sign accurately.
Now how much sense does that make if I’m a sign language interpreter with all the credentials of A to Z, I should be proficient in the language. Well, the reality is, most sign language interpreters do not come from a native first language, primary language competency in American Sign Language. That’s why we’re bringing in this deaf what might be the equivalent of a dialect coach or an ASL coach, to make sure that our language in the translation is aligned with what’s on stage.

And these folks are getting paid less, and the sign language interpreters who are not deaf, we’re getting, you know, courtroom level, medical level compensation in terms of rates, and our Deaf colleagues weren’t.

Sam:
We were just in the Kennedy Center Leadership Exchange in arts and disabilities, which is a great space to talk about best practices in Arts Access. And one of the things that we kept hearing that was really upsetting from some practitioners, from some access coordinators at large institutions, was one of the ways they save money is by giving their experts free tickets instead of paying them for their expertise.

Christopher:
Starbucks cards, coffee cards.

Sam:
that makes my blood boil.

TR:
That’s the recipe for making real change.
Step one, bring your blood to a boil.

Then add the rest of the ingredients.

Christopher:
I think Sam, you jumped on that domain name too. It’s not real, unless you have a domain.

TR:
In addition to that domain, ThinkOutsideTheVox.org,
became a 501c3 company in order to raise funds to do this work.

Sam:
So we said, we know how to train, and we need to reach out and find the best trainers in the area that we can.

Sam:
we figured if we wanted gig workers, we had to make it easy for them to learn this skill and to fund it for them and get the grant funding for it.

Sam:
And we’re very lucky in Massachusetts to have the Massachusetts Cultural Council be a partner and a funder and a supporter in a lot of Arts Access. areas.
And so we got an innovation grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

TR:
The training, which weaves in the importance of Blind centered, equitable and
culturally responsive access
throughout the syllabus is just the first step in a very intentional process.

You have to find the participants. Which is often considered difficult, until you think about where to look.

And you can’t understate the importance of the training being free.

Sam:
We reached into areas where we figured we would find great describers. So the Boston black Writers Association, the Asian American playwrights Association, actors of color in our region, BIPOC, AAPI, et cetera, blind consumers of audio description and blind artists, and also the local interpreter pool, because we figured that would dovetail nicely into the audio description work. And we put together our first cohort of trainees and started there.

TR:
The virtual training over multiple weeks, was just the first part.
A key component is what happens after the training.

Members of the cohort were immediately given paid opportunities to write and narrate AD in actual productions with other seasoned professionals.

Welcoming professionals.

Sam:
And then when we were able to run the class a second time, we used the first cohort to train the second group, because there were already 14 describers up and running and working and picking up a lot of the slack of audio description in Massachusetts, because we had a deficit of audio describers to begin with, never mind audio describers who are culturally competent.

TR in conversation with Think Outside the Vox: 35:43
What type of impact did this crew of 14 have on that deficit?

Sam:
with respect to the hard numbers of audio describers of color. Prior to our project, there was one and a half audio describers who were non white, and I say half because one of the audio describers of color went to do more voice over and radio work, and frankly, one blind expert in the field,

Sam:
Modestly speaking, we doubled the number of audio describers that were actively working in live theater.

We definitely increased the capacity of theaters to be able to offer audio description, because there just weren’t enough providers to go around.

TR:
It actually extends beyond audio description in live theater and naturally includes image description in museums as well.

That increase in work opportunities include ASL.

Christopher: :
We were working with a handful of interpreters of color for at least 20 different theater performing arts venues and their seasons.

TR:
A season equates to an average of 3 to 4 productions in the year.
That’s somewhere between 60 and 80 individual productions.

And then there’s the touring productions traveling an hour to an hour and a half away within the state.

Christopher: :
or they’ll cross the line into Rhode Island or Connecticut. The same pool of people are being dispatched there.

So the visibility, especially for the ASL interpreter and the ASL coach space with this handful, has made those venues who cross attend other ASL interpreter shows where there are these interpreters of color. Then they want to poach and grab those ASL interpreters and bring them to other spaces.

Christopher:
Literally, there were a handful of interpreters of color that were actively working in theater performing arts spaces. Now they’re closer to 11 that are working in those spaces. That includes individuals who are deaf.

Christopher: :
Now, generally, people might say, well, that’s not staggering.

there’s less about how many individuals we increased.
I think the numbers are in the demand.

TR:
The more TOV on boards new theaters, the greater the visibility which further increases the demand.

Meaning, the more people are aware and are able to understand and see the benefits of increasing equitable access, the more it is adopted.

The benefits include everyone involved.
* Benefits of AD Cohort

Sam:
From our first cohort of culturally competent audio describers, it increased the workload of the local blind expert, quadrupled her work once we started to teach the industry good practices, to make sure that they were including a blind professional in the audio description work that was like life changing and door opening for this one individual, but also for all the theaters.

One of our actors that was trained, he’s a great orator and writer, but he’s got a toddler at home, so he’s been struggling to keep the acting work and keep food on the table, and by doing the audio description, it’s more finite in time, and he’s able to make bills paid with his child at home. And so it really has been instrumental for the gig economy workers in our region.

TR:
Many of these gig workers fall into one or more marginalized groups.

Christopher: :
There are other colleagues that I’m working with in the sign language space that are able to turn down jobs not out of arrogance, but because the venue hasn’t done their due diligence.

TR:
The venues that weren’t doing the appropriate on boarding or paying equitably.

Today, with workers having more welcoming opportunities , they can now say;
Times UP!

“We’re not working with you until you fix this and show us the respect we deserve.

Christopher: :
it’s been a wake up call.
People come back and say, Hey, Chris Sam, can you help us find this person or that person? Because these other ones actually flat out, turned us down, and we’re able to ask, Well, why?

It’s a different kind of conversation than what it used to be, which was just a lot of our peers calling us and saying they’re causing us damage. They’re causing us trauma.

I think the scales have tipped in the other direction, which is a wonderful problem to have.
TR:
For those who don’t necessarily appreciate the anecdotal, TOV is collecting quantitative metrics as well.

Sam:
Certainly with Open Door Theater, we can take in exactly the metrics of who’s coming to the performances for what access service. But we’re starting to get and collect that information from other theaters, and we’re getting and collecting that information from the patrons who are attending the performances.

What worked, what didn’t work. And we’re also getting the information from our cohorts of audio describers as to what jobs they’re taking, what jobs they’re doing, and the feedback that they’re getting directly from the patrons in the space.

TR:
Keeping focus on the humanity in access continues to guide Sam and Christopher into their future plans for TOV.
Christopher:
When you’re an access provider who is plugged in, brought into content that’s very specific to the lived experience of the provider, whether it’s a August Wilson piece or Baldwin piece, or some of the more contemporary pieces that are black centric or BIPOC centric?

Well, you’re getting saturated in that journey, and a lot of it is trauma written in some of these stories.

So some of the future things that Vox is considering is,

how do we create a respite space and an information resource repository for sustaining our access providers that are exponentially more exposed to trauma because of the content that they’re working on and The frequency they’re working on than some of the artists who are producing the shows themselves.
So we got to sustain our people, not just refer them and plug them in into these spaces.

So some kind of sustainability, resilience, mental health, support and resource for our gig workers is in our future?

Sam:
We’re trying really hard to not be global, national too fast because of capacity and burnout.

We’re trying to make sure that we are sustainable in what we’re doing and creating a model and a blueprint, and then we can work on helping other people distribute that elsewhere.

TR:
In addition to more culturally equitable AD Trainings,
TOV has plans to assist artists to engage with legislators
to assure their needs are properly being met in government.

Sam:
We’re working on an exciting project with the local arts Boston calendar, and they are putting out a calendar that is accessible and sortable by access point, which we’ve needed in the sector so badly, so that want to go see a show that’s interpreted in sign language or audio describe. You can sort by that access point and then the audio description pre show is loaded right into that website, and the ASL blog is loaded right into that website. And you can see who the providers are, because you might be a fan of a certain audio describer or director of artistic sign language.

Every city should have one.

TR:
Every city should have a Sam Gould and Christopher Robinson and Think Outside the VOX!

— Music begins: A bouncy up tempo groove.

TR in conversation with Think Outside the Vox:
You know Sam, Christopher invite folks in, and they share their information with the family.

And so it means that you, Sam, Christopher, are now. You’ve always been, but you are now official Reid My Mind Radio Family!

Sam:
I’ve been waiting for you to make it official for years.

TR:
I know there are some listening who either are in position or in proximity to those who want to make their local theater space much more accessible and do so equitably.

Listen back to this episode or read the transcript… then reach out to TOV!
You can find contact information and more about them as TOV and individually at ThinkOutsideTheVox.org.

We can all head on over to OpenDoorTheaterr.org. Learn more about their work and accessible productions.

Sam:
The next production that the theater is going to do is The Prom, it’s a fun show. It’s got a mission of inclusion, but it’s also got a mission of self advocacy, and don’t foist your agenda or your accommodations on me. So that’s the one we’re looking forward to

TR:
Some times it feels like everything is a fight.

Right now, we’re in the midst of fighting for so called democracy hear in the US. I just want to once again encourage everyone in the states to please exercise your right to vote.

I can’t tell you who to vote for but if you’re listening to this podcast, I hope that means you have both a high level of empathy and intelligence. You care about your fellow human. That combination can only really go one way.

You may not think your specific issues are addressed by either candidate, but I can tell you that one candidate
will ultimately mean your issues will never even be heard.
the other candidate will at the very least assure you have the right to protest her.

Your choice!

Unfortunately, I have to choose to conclude this season of Flipping the Script on Audio Description.

I had a good time producing it and I hope you enjoyed listening and or reading it!
(Shout out to those who read the transcripts)

I may have one or two episodes later this year. So stay tuned and subscribed!
I’d love to put together a celebration of ten years so please
if you feel any sort of way about the podcast or just want to give a shout out,
please as requested in the beginning of this episode, send it in.

I appreciate you all rocking with Reid My Mind Radio, which is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcripts and more are available at ReidMyMind.com.

It’s been determined by a landslide that the only way to get there is to make sure you spell it right!

That’s R to the E, I, D!

— Sample: “D! And that’s me in the place to be.” Slick Rick

Like my last name!

— Reid My Mind Radio Outro

Peace!

Hide the transcript

TR:

Welcome back to the podcast featuring essays of compelling people
impacted by Blindness and Disability.
it’s called Reid My Mind Radio!

Every now and then, I include some of my personal experiences as a man adjusting to becoming Blind as an adult.

I’m Thomas Reid, producer and host of this here podcast
living up to the claim of making blindness sound funky!

I’m not only referring to the actual sound, but I’m talking about the energy.
It’s positive, yet real and always upbeat. Funky is my way of challenging how you the listener may
think a podcast geared to those adjusting to blindness is supposed to sound.
Should it sound sanitized, institutional? Not here it won’t.

So if you’re riding with the Reid My Mind Radio family well then you must be funky too!

On the podcast today…

Audio: “Dance”

Audio: Reid My Mind Radio Intro

“Once you start asking; how does your body move? How does it communicate movement? Movement is a rigorous and tough beautiful way of communicating. We owe it to ourselves and to our audiences to find, nurture and develop the greatest range of nuance in physical communication that we can. It’s an amazing kind of vocabulary.”, Alice Sheppard

TR:

Today we’re exploring some of that vocabulary with Dancer and Choreographer, Alice Sheppard. She’s also the founding Director of Kinetic Light;

AS:

Which is an ensemble of disabled artists making immersive dance experiences.

[TR in conversation with AS:]

Tell me a little bit about your first experience with dance.

AS:

I was a Musician, an Orchestral Pit Musician. Dancers were just simply the things above me on the stage pounding away, being late, needing the music to go slower, needing the music to go faster. (Laughs) I didn’t understand much about the art form . Dance was not something that my family had access to or I would have had access to even try. Dance just wasn’t there.

TR:

Eventually, She’d gain that access but the steps to becoming a dancer were far from choreographed.

[TR in conversation with AS:]

My understanding is that you became a professor… Yes?

AS:

Yes!

[TR in conversation with AS:]

(Laughing…) AS:

Laughing…

[TR in conversation with AS:] I just want to make sure the internet is correct.

AS:

the internet… in this case the internet is correct! Laughs…

TR:

A professor of Medieval Studies to be exact.

in 2004, Alice saw a performance by a disabled dancer.

AAS:

I didn’t really know what to expect. I was worried it was going to be cringe worthy and it wasn’t.

It was, … amazing! It was smart. It was political. It was sour. It was bitter. It was funny. It was tender, loving and joyful. It was the fullest expression of what you can hope for a body and mind and a heart. It grabbed me. It transported me and transformed me in ways I had not imagined possible.

TR:

Following the performance , Alice had a conversation with the dancer, Homer Avila.

AS:

We were talking about Disability and art and aesthetics and integrity and how you could work from a position of wholeness. He had an amputation to his leg, but he wasn’t saying things like he’s working from a deficit position, he was just working with the body that he had and reforming the art around his body. I was all into this because it was in line with what I was reading and thinking and writing about as a professor.

At the end of the evening he had issued a dare to me and a couple of other people who were hanging out

TR:

The dare?

Take a dance class.

AS:

I said yes because you know when you’re drinking you say yes to a whole pile of things.

[TR in conversation with AS:] Laughing…

AS:

Yeh, maybe this should be a lesson in bad alcohol. Don’t drink!

[TR in conversation with AS:]

Laughing… Maybe it’s good though because it seems like it worked out for you.

AS:

Yeh, yeh! (Laughing)

[TR in conversation with AS:] Not that I’m promoting alcohol. Laughs…

AS:

Laughs…

TR:

Sadly, that was Avila’s last performance. He passed away six weeks later.

AS:

I really felt like I had to honor that dare.

TR:

Finding a dance class doesn’t seem like it should be that hard, but it took Alice some time to find a school that would actually teach her. Instead she received responses like;

AS:

Well I don’t really know how to teach you or you can just be over there and maybe you can figure something out or make something up.

I never actually got to be in the dance class.

TR:

One school even had security post up outside of the class. We’re still trying to figure that one out!

I personally have never seen dance outside of that performed by someone with full use of their legs. So I asked Alice to describe how she does it.

AS:

Mostly in a manual wheelchair. Sometimes on crutches and some of my work is actually being done in a wheel chair with crutches on my arms as well.

[TR in conversation with AS:]

So tell me what does that look like?

AS:

If you can imagine a pair of manual crutches with rings like the European Lofstrand forearm crutches, they just have hoops at the top so you can hang them off your arms. I made them too short to stand up on, but long enough to be able to push my wheelchair like ski’s. Then I have these huge like 9 feet long, I can reach all the way up to the ceiling up to 11 1/2 feet and 9 feet wide. it’s just the incredible feeling of this huge wingspan and you can whirl those crutches. You can turn like nothing on earth, you just whirl them. Because they’re so wide they give you this incredible balance. It’s awesome! (Laughs…)

[TR in conversation with AS:]

Wow!

You’re going between the chair and the floor sometimes too, right?

AS:

Oh yeh! We use the floor in our chairs. We wear straps so the chairs come with us and we come with the chair. And then we can dive to the floor and roll and do all kinds of things on the floor. Sometimes we’re on the floor without our wheelchair.
It’s an amazing kind of vocabulary. I think once you start asking how does your body move. How does it communicate in movement? Movement is a rigorous and tough and beautiful way of communicating. We owe it to ourselves and to our audiences to find, nurture and develop the greatest range of nuance in physical communication that we can.

TR:

Eventually, Alice found her way to the Access Dance Company in Oakland California, where she took her first physically integrated dance class.

[TR in conversation with AS:] What was the experience like for you?

AS:

No one has ever quite asked me this before. Give me a moment to actually tell you the truth of it.

It was a sense of being at the beginning of something. Something I knew I couldn’t do. I knew I didn’t have control. I didn’t have the skill but it was being at the center feeling this whole area open up wide, wide, wide before me. And the joy and the pleasure of if I could be in there it would be amazing. I was aware that I sucked massively. I wasn’t doing the things that they asked, well. Even though I was doing them to the best of my capacity at the time. As a musician I recognized that I was at the same level of inquiry that I was at in the music practice. Where you’re like oh right I can see it, I can feel it, I don’t know what it’s going to be but I know that I have to work to get there.

TR:

Meanwhile, on the east side, in Georgia to be exact, Laurel Lawson was preparing to enter grad school.

LL:

I grew up playing music both as an amateur and as a professional and acting. I saw this dance class. It was in a great time slot right before I needed to be at one of my acting jobs. I thought it would be interesting, you know pick up a little broader skill base and it would be a good warm up. I’ve done a little bit of jazz like that minimum amount of theatrical dance that you need in order to get through musicals. So I went and signed up for this six week class. Boy I sucked so badly!

TR:

Well Douglas Scott apparently saw some talent there. He’s the founder and director of Full Radius Dance, a premier physically integrated dance school. He invited Laurel to audition for the dance company.

LL:

Two months later I was on stage in my first professional appearance.

It’s a little weird right. I often think about that. It’s like the most “bass awkward” way of falling into this field in some ways. A field that is so competitive that people work and dream and hustle from the time that they’re five years old and I took this weird circuitous path and almost wound up dancing by accident. Maybe that’s the title of my autobiography, “The Accidental Dancer”.

[TR in conversation with AS:]

Laughs…

TR:

The community of professional dancers isn’t that large. Eventually, Alice and Laurel met. First chatting about technique, exercises and shared experiences.

LL:

We always knew we had work to make together. It was just a matter of getting to the point for us as individuals, for us as artists where we were ready to do that. Where we could put together the kind of structure to support it and for the rest of the world to get to the point where we had this little bit of an entry to be able to get other people to realize hey we have something to contribute here. The funding and presentation landscape makes a huge difference in what gets presented and what does not.

TR:

That structure is Kinetic Light.

LL:

At the core of it, Kinetic Light consists of this collective of three artists, Alice, myself and Michael Maag who is our production, projection and lighting designer.

Kinetic Light is a little unusual in the way we operate compared to what you might call a conventional dance company. We’re a multi-disciplinary. In some ways we’re not necessarily a dance company. Dance is front and center but there are also ways in which we are a multi-modal performance company. Are we a tech company? That’s a question that we keep going back to because we’re not quite a dance company.

TR:

There’s multiple functions associated with running a dance company.
Of course, there’s the choreography, but we can’t forget the administrative work of funding, managing projects and more.

And then there’s something of particular interest to those with vision loss that Alice explains has always been a part of the plan.

AS:

My thought was always that we would do access. What I didn’t know was the kind of journey that it would become.

TR:

We’re talking about audio description. Well we’ll call it that for now. But the question is really how do you take a visual art experience like dance and make it available to those who are blind?

First, Alice invited friends to attend a live performance.

AS:

Georgina Kleege who is a Blind professor at UC Berkley. She’s a professor of Blind aesthetics and the arts and writing. She’s got this awesome book out right now called “What Blindness Contributes to Art”.

TR:

The goal was specific.

AS:

We want all of our people to come and have a good experience. How do we do it?

This was in 2016, but in 2012 I began exploring these types of threads anyway in my work. And then she picked up those threads and pushed them to the next level. And I was like ok, let’s do that.

Georgina and Josh Miele who, if you don’t know Josh you should talk to Josh, he’s an amazing technologist.

TR:

Shout out to Reid My Mind Radio Alumni Josh Miele. I’ll link you to his episode on this episode’s blog post.

AS:

Cool!

Georgina and Josh said yeh, ok, so you did better than the average and your definitely on some pathway but that isn’t it. It isn’t enough. We aren’t getting what everybody else is getting.

At that time what we were doing was making description of the physical movement.

LL:

That was really painful for us. this was our community that we had invited to come see us and we failed.
[
We hadn’t offered them an equitable experience.
]

TR:

Describing a dance performance isn’t a straight forward task.

Let’s take an example I feel almost everyone is familiar with.

Let’s say a dancer puts his left foot in.

Audio: Horn!

then puts his left foot out.

Audio: Two horn hits!

he does the Hokey Pokey and turns himself around.

Audio: Hokey Pokey song

Now that’s description!
It’s actually conveying all that’s taking place.
Well, if there’s only one person.

But let’s make that dance a bit more complicated.
say our dancer’s left foot is in while his right hand is up
and his partners right leg is up
and another dancer is flying across the screen with a particularly dramatic facial expression.
I’m not even getting into the lighting or stage props that often accompany the Hokey pokey!

AAS:

What you’re getting is this kind of displaced description. You’re not getting a sense of the art.

This is where Laurel comes in, she’s an engineer and designer and she thought of a way in which you could play multiple sound tracks on an app and a way for it to actually sync in time with the show. And so with this kind of technology at the basis the question became not how you make dance accessible, that’s boring. The question really is how do you transform the art of dance into the art of sound.

LL:

I had a little germ of an idea that would become Audimance.

TR:

Audimance was developed in association with Kinetic Light’s DESCENT.

AS:

Descent is a queer inter-racial love story between two disabled women.

Basically invents a backstory to the sculpture the Toilette of Venus and Andromeda by Rodan.

It figures out what does this goddess from Greek myth doing with this figure from Roman myth and why are they put together. Why does Rodan do that with them? It challenges Rodan’s own notions of feminism and lesbianism. It challenges the place of the incomplete body in Rodan’s thinking and sculpture. It’s an incredible kind of imagining of the relationship between the two. A love story maybe. It shows the ways in which disability and art go together. It re-imagines access ramps. It’s a thing this Descent!

TR:

With that in mind, let’s walk through how a nonvisual audience member experiences this performance using Audimance.

It starts with the pre-show. Here’s Alice.

AS:

The program is recorded. In the program there’s some background context to the work, and overall plot summary, a background on the set, an overarching narrative context if you want that. Rodan’s sculptures so there’s some information about that. Basically, information that is contextual.

TR:

That one aspect of Audimance is already surpassing how many of us experience description. Meaning, no longer are we confined to the strict time limitations dictated by the performance. Audience members may be able to access this pre-show information days before the event itself.

And then, if you arrive at the theater early, before the show…

AS:

One of the things we’ve been developing is a kind of tactile experience. This was something that josh was essential in thinking through. We 3D printed the set. The ramp and you could hold a model of the set in your hand and feel some of the things around that. There’s samples of the costumes, the surface, the flooring of the set, the kinds of material elements.

TR:

You may wonder, why a 3D rendering of the set if you’re physically there? the set of Descent is a ramp. And not just any ramp.

AS:

It’s 24 feet wide, 15 feet deep and it goes to 6 foot high at a kind of pointed mountainous peak that I sit on top of.

Each part of the ramp has its name. There’s the peak it’s a top of a mountain. At the bottom of the peak there are waves and there’s water, projections of waves water and rock. And then there’s this huge deck, this angled deck that is sometimes grass and sometimes a mountain range and sometimes an ocean. And the water waves whip up and down the ocean. It’s incredible!

TR:

You have all of the context information about the upcoming performance. And now, it’s ShowTime!

AS:

“How do you transform the art of dance into the art of sound.”

(Repeated from above but with an effect as if reflecting.)

TR:

That one question became several more that she proposed to her friends experiencing the performance non visually.

AS:

What are you listening to? What is communicative sound for you? How do you get art out of sound? What sounds mean something?

And then the question was what sounds are actually in the dance itself? Here’s where we ended up. We have to be able to convey the sounds of the work itself as a sound.

I rang Disabled Queer Trans gender Poet Eli Clare and I said, will you write poetry for this dance? Eli turned the dance into poetry. And I was like wow!

TR:

Audimance empowers the listener with choice and control. Pairing for example the poetry of Eli Clare with the original sound scape composition of Dylan Keefe from the sound rich podcast radio Lab.

Laurel tells us about other tracks and possibilities.

LL:

We can be working with people who are writing prose. For example maybe even describing it technically so that a nonvisual audience member whose also trained as a dancer is actually hearing in dance language about what we’re doing and understanding it in that medium. We can work with sonification of the stage or our bodies or interpreted sonification of the choreography itself. So for example you might be hearing a breath, a heartbeat a sound (slap, slap) as we contact each other as our chairs hit the stage

If you imagine you’re in a big room, a museum gallery, imagine that there are 20 speakers scattered throughout this room. They could be on the ceiling, floating in the middle of the air, on the walls or the floor and every speaker is playing a different track. But all the tracks are part of the same performance. As you wander through this space you can control what you’re listening to. You’re creating your own experience of this art. You can go cuddle up to a single speaker and listen to one track from beginning to end. find a mix, maybe between three or four speakers that appeals to you. Keep moving and keep listening to the way that the tracks and the performance shifts and changes as you’re constantly in motion between these speakers. Got that image. Ok, condense all of that down into a phone screen and you got Audimance!

Since I am sighted every bit of process all along the way we were going back and forth with non-visual audience members, collaborators, testers.

From the describer side I think we’re opening a lot of stuff up to. We’re trying to involve the describer as collaborator through this process. We’re not replacing audio description, we’re blowing it open.

TR:

With other options for Descent’s nonvisual audience members like an interpreted dramatic dialog, a description track specifically for those with kinesthetic imaginations or those who actually feel what’s being described, plus description of lighting… yeah, kaboom!

LL: on centering blind

Audimance is specifically designed for nonvisual users. It absolutely centers Blind users who have advanced listening skills.

TR:

You know you’re an advanced listener when you have the ability to audibly synthesize simultaneous streams of information. Probably more common is the ability to comprehend information at an increased rate. 25 percent, 50 maybe even double or triple its normal rate.

For example, a more seasoned screen reader user probably sounds like this…

Audio: Fast screen reader reading
“You know you’re you’re an advanced listener when you have the ability to audibly synthesize simultaneous streams of information. Probably more common is the ability to comprehend information at an increased rate. 25 percent, 50 maybe even double or triple its normal rate.”
TR:

Someone new to vision loss and therefore new to screen reader technology and synthetic speech and in general active listening sounds more like this…

Audio: Screen reader voice reading in a slow speed.
” You know you’re an advanced listener when you… Oh my goodness this is slow! I’m getting sleepy, sleepy”

LL:

obviously anyone who is hearing can use it but this isn’t a question of trying to make it work for everyone. It is made for and it centers this population that was being underserved artistically

TR:

With multiple choices, someone new to vision loss may be more comfortable simply choosing one or two tracks such as the poetry or traditional description.

Audimance allows users to make selections at any time since the tracks are synchronized to the live performance.

LL:
Are we providing an identical experience to a sighted audience member watching the dance? No Because that does not exist and saying that we’re making something identical is false equivalence. Do we think we’re creating something that is equitable in terms of a rich multi dimension complicated artistic experience? Something that has been crafted by the artist as part of the piece from the beginning?

Yeah! And that’s the feedback we have gotten about it.

TR:

Audimance is Open Source software that’s still in the early alpha phase of development. But there getting close to where anyone will be able to download the program.

LL:

Where venues will be able to download a creator interface and you can just go in a venue and have it pull up the experience for the show that you’re going to see.

TR:

That could be the more traditional description. But I’m hoping for a more artistic, thoughtful, equitable experience.

LL:

It was created for performance art, but certainly any theatrical performance, potentially even for music performances or for speakers to provide visual descriptions of the people on stage.

[TR in conversation with AS:]
That’s going to be fun to watch when people just kind of take that and say I want to play with it because they’re not even thinking about it from the perspective of inclusion or audio description. And it’s just I want to play with this and see what I can do.

LL:

I am so looking forward to that part of it because technically well when you think of it it doesn’t necessarily have to go with a performance. It can be an independent audio only artistic experience. Having people play with this kind of spatialized durational sonic art is going to be fascinating.

[TR in conversation with AS:]
And so that’s open source meaning anyone is going to be able to have access to that. There’s the equity component of that too. Or is this going to really cost people thousands of dollars? (Laughing…)

LL:

(Laughing)

Well you know the problem with that is if we make it cost thousands of dollars we’re going to have a real hard sell telling venues okay, there’s no excuse for your performance not to be accessible. Or dance companies, choreographers here, even if it’s just you describing your dance. You go into rehearsal and you just do the description if you have to. We’re not telling you you have to pay to bring an additional artist in for the week and house them and so forth.

TR:

Audimance is currently being supported by donations. That’s financial and labor.

LL:

If you are interested in contributing to this software itself as a programmer, as a designer, as a technical writer we need everybody right now. If you’re a project manager. If you’re interested in helping us write instructional content. We need tutorials and how to use it. We’re going to need tutorials to introduce presenters to it eventually. You can find the project on GitHub.

People can make financial donations on our website, KineticLight.org.

TR:

you can even earmark your donations specifically for the Audimance project.

Want to learn more about Audimance, Descent, Alice and Laurel?

AS:

There is a newsletter!

[TR in conversation with AS:]
Really and how would someone subscribe to that?

AS:

On your phone you can text 66866 to sign up.

[TR in conversation with AS:]
Wow, look how fancy you are? (Laughs…)

AS:

Laughs…

[TR in conversation with AS:]

(Playfully)
So you’re telling me, you don’t go to a website and put in all your information. All you have to do is text?

AS:

You can do that too. You can go to the website and put in your information.

[TR in conversation with AS:]

What website would that be?

AS:

(laughs…)
KineticLight.org

[TR in conversation with AS:]
What would folks get from the newsletter?

AS:

That’s a really good question. You would meet some of the team. You would learn about the performances or film screening. You might learn about an award. Sometimes we put in cool ideas about Disability culture. Sometimes we’re talking about work friends of ours are doing.

[TR in conversation with AS:]
Yeh, I like it! Cool!

TR:

I’ll tell you something else that’s pretty cool!
That film screening she mentioned? It’s a film featuring Alice and three other dancers . It takes place…

called Inclinations. it too highlights performance on a ramp. This one however is outdoors.

This particular film consists of audio description with two narrators.

Audio:

TR:

you should recognize that voice. That’s Cheryl Green, a podcast alumni and part of the Reid My Mind Radio family!

And the other describer…

Audio:

TR:

Yours truly!

Big shout out to Cheryl Green, Lisa Niedermeyer and everyone else involved in making that happen! That was fun!

Inclinations has been screened at Festivals in Canada and the US including;
National Dance Day at Kennedy Center
Superfest Disability Film Festival 
Cinema Touching Disability

For more on Inclinations checkout Alice Sheppard.com

Audio: “Check it out y’all!”

TR:

there’s a lot to be excited about Audimance. The feature that in my opinion means the most; It’s empowering.

It shifts the conversation from providing access to creating nonvisual experiences.

There’s so much possibility. Especially when you factor in that the technology is open source. It’s made for live performances but the same concepts can be applied to recorded performances.

We’re in a time where audio production is on the rise. I’m talking about the growth of podcasting. I think about the potential in the live podcasting space. Moving away from the Q&A format to a sound rich experience.

Forget about that idea that we need to wait for the kind help from others. Audimance is a collaborative effort from the cross disability community. If you’re not throwing your fist up in solidarity for that one, check your pulse!

Salute to Alice Laurel and everyone involved with the project!

And if you like what you heard?

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I appreciate you listening and if you liked what you heard please rate and even review the show via Apple Podcast. And please, tell a friend to listen. Spread the love, man!

You can always visit www.ReidMyMind.com, that’s R to the E I D like my last name!

AS:

And I was like wow!

Audio: Reid My Mind Radio Outro

TR:

Peace!

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