Audio Description Training

The performance company Gravity is initiating a project to provide live audio description for performances in Berlin. In cooperation with Diversity Arts Culture in Berlin artistic director and choreographer Jess Curtis will lead a two-day workshop (10am-6pm) in Audio Description and Extra-Visual Access strategies open to people interested in learning the practice.

What is Audio Desctiption?

Audio Description provides blind and visually impaired people with access to the visual elements – action, costumes, settings, gestures, facial expressions, objects and other visually communicative elements – of e.g. theater, dance or live art performances, television/film screenings, museum exhibitions. Audio Description (AD) is usually a live audio track spoken by a professional Audio Describer to patrons with visual impairments through a wireless headset system, but the service may also be pre-recorded.
 

Gravity’s Audio Description Team is comprised of performers, themselves professional dancers and actors trained by Gravity Artistic Director Jess Curtis to provide clear and engaging descriptions of the meaningful visual details of a performance that might otherwise be inaccessible to audience members with visual impairments.

The workshop will primarily take place in English although we are looking particularly for native German speakers to be able to provide the service in German and English.

Ideal candidates will have good verbal/vocal skills, be familiar with dance, theater and performance in general and be comfortable with improvisationally describing live performance in real time without a set script. Dancers, Actors, Performers encouraged to apply. Please send a current CV and a letter describing your interest to be considered to julia@jesscurtisgravity.org. Space is limited.

Gravity creates, produces and presents engaging body-based art that physically explores and addresses issues and ideas of substance and relevance to anyone with a body.