Content note: Contains nudity and the occasional swear word.
Amelia – The Scarf Dance
Descriptions
-
Amelia
The full piece has integrated audio description except at the very beginning where the following happens:
I am led on stage by my partner Al. I am a slim white human with buzzed brown hair, some sparkly make up and a blue sequinned robe on. Al is a beautifully round human with fantastically curly brown hair and clear rimmed spectacles. They wear a multi-coloured shirt and dark blue denim overalls. We both look cute as heck. We stop in front of a chair that is placed centre stage. Al holds up a rainbow coloured scarf in front of me, blocking me from view. I take off my blue robe, tossing it to the side (which is why people cheer) and sit down on the chair. Al drapes the scarf over my head, gathers up the robe and leaves the stage. Then the music starts and the rest is audio described.
This act was created with Extant which is the UK’s leading theatre company of blind and visually impaired people. We were looking at blindness and sexuality, and how to express that through burlesque and audio description.
Quick note I forgot! You only “need” to watch from about 1 min 50-5 min. Apologies. That was suppose to be in the original blurb. Obviously, you can watch all of it if you want to.
Hi Amelia. Here are some of the ways I take in your piece as a way of expanding my perception of “a body.” They are a voice. The body is hidden. It is something to be imagine. It is described. There is an arm, a wrist. A tongue in cheek seduction. What is not revealed is more important that what is seen. They move from describing themselves to checking in with the audience, thereby thwarting my voyeuristic tendencies, and (sweetly) assuming absolute control. Not adversarial, but by no means docile. This is a “friendly” subversion of the erotic body. In this, a new body is revealed and described: hairy, sexy, mocking, taking pleasure.
This is a prime example of “creative description.” This is a term and a practice that is more common in the UK than in the US. As is clear here the point of creative description is to tweak and even subvert the conventions of audio description. Here, description is not a segregated accommodation, available only to the blind and visually impaired audiences who request it. Description is center stage here, available to everyone in the audience. The blind person is not imagined as a passive recipient of description. The blind or visually impaired person, is controlling the description, even demanding it as apart of the flirtatious direct engagement with the audience.
At the same time, the piece tweaks the conventions of burlesque where the performer both reveal their body and controls that revelation.
As I ask what is the body, I am struck By the presence of the verbally articulated body partedness Of your own body and the collectively created imagined body – between you and me and then you, me, and audience – that is, in my mind at least, not parted or limbed at all. It moves in and with synchrony of all of its parts. – I noticed hear that I am questioning my own interpretive practices in the same way that I question them around Stephanie’s work as well – the relationship a body limb, and center and whole integrated body. The integrated descriptive practice creates a kind of questioning for me around the insistence of naming the body and yet the one naming of the imagined body that is present. Are we able to produce understanding of our relationship to whole or do we stay in part or whole and when do we shift and why? I am deeply called into the invoked play with sightedness, And I find myself paying particular attention to the question of control. In part, because in so many locations disability is framed in various ways as being “out-of-control”. But here, the notion of control is around the collective body not the physical body and the utter control of the collective body.
This “integrated audio description” is an innovation distinctive– in my experience– to blind dance. I would expand the way we talk about this genre of dance beyond that three word phrase by clarifying that it’s the artist who is speaking the description in a cadence that is musical in its formal pace and integration into the movement component of the dance. So the description is an essential component of the dance itself, giving the dance both visual and auditory forms for the audience. Moreover, this integrated description is in the form of a call and response with the audience that gives flesh to the erotic exchange of the striptease as a dance form. The pace and language, as well as the embodiment of this integrated description pulls together the visual, aural, haptic, interpersonal, and auditory elements of the performance to create what is for me a whole new dance form in which an aesthetics of form and content merge.
I was really excited to encounter this piece because I am interested in the intersection of sexuality and disability as well.