ARTISTIC ACCESS

What does ARTISTIC ACCESS mean in practice in dance? How do we remove barriers? How do we create open spaces where we can meet, exchange, and collaborate? What aesthetics, languages, bodies, and forms of dance emerge? Collaborating with disabled artists and artists from different contexts and dance styles expands our ways of working and staging, enriches artistic perspectives and politicizes our team on and off stage, the institutions we collaborate with and of course our audience. ARTISTIC ACCESS is directed against social divisions and exclusions, marks racist, classist, sexist and ableist discriminations and searches for alliances, forms of assembly, the collective and solidarity.

(c) Jean-Marc Turmes

AUDIODESCRIPTION

How do we want to be experienced, seen, described? How can audiodescription queer the space and have political influence on the way dance is received?
Audio description (AD) is a verbal description of images, movements, situations and objects that can create access points to theater, dance for visually impaired audiences. Artistic integrated AD, in our application, breaks away from neutral description, approaches spoken word and becomes an extension of the dance experience, a way of working and mediating for heterogeneous audiences. Describers move in space, change perspectives and describe individual experiences, their being- touched as part of the performance. We are always looking for new strategies of translation and levels of mediation, and so AD in our projects grows beyond mere description, integrating sounds that bodies produce, self-descriptions, and achieving aesthetic autonomy.

(c) Jean-Marc Turmes

you are already in it. You are already in something. You are already always in the thing you call for and that calls you.

almost Fred Moten

In FUX, Tossi for the first time made accessibility for people with visual impairments an artistic tool and audio description a means. COSMICBODIES thus becomes not only an impressively precise danced body image deconstruction, but is also a dramatically narrated, philosophical science fiction adventure that works great with eyes closed.

SPOKEN DANCE

SPOKEN DANCE is a research project by Lisa Rykena, Carolin Jüngst and Ursina Tossi on artistic audiodescription. The website SPOKEN DANCE is being developed as a platform for exchange between users and artists as well as an archive and network.