Marta’s first encounter with Camilla and Giuseppe took place during the 2021–22 season at Spazio Kor, an interdisciplinary cultural project located in Asti. Curated by Chiara Bersani and Giulia Traversi, a season entitled Paradise focused on redefining words such as accessibility, inclusion and community, and explored how to render a number of performances accessible to an audience with sensory impairments and neurodivergence. Marta was one of the artists invited, and she presented the version entitled Trespass_Processing an Emerging Choreography. Camilla, a dramaturg, and Giuseppe, a blind performer and choreographer, were in charge of exploring how to make the piece accessible for visually impaired audiences. Camilla and Giuseppe were already exploring the poetic audio-description of contemporary dance performances, an approach nurtured by their partnership in life and at work, that had initially emerged as an intimate way of communicating when attending dance performances together. In contrast to dry audio-descriptions of a performative event, the duo’s creative approach lends eyes to the visually impaired and reverberates in the imagination. In every project they work on, their close collaboration with the artists and the creative team is part of their work ethic, as in their recent collaboration with La Veronal for the audio-description of Marcos Morau’s Firmamento, which was available to listen to in excerpts during the Equilibrio Festival in Rome in February 2024.
Within the first research period at Spazio Kor, the three collaborators realised that, ‘since Trespass’s choreographic structure pays attention to spontaneity and extemporisation, Camilla and Giuseppe’s approach could not take the form of a fixed text, as usually happens in their work, but instead had to be an improvised audio-narration based on common principles’ and on meeting points between the choreography and the audio narration. They also considered the idea of removing the headphones from the visually impaired audience and rendering the audio output as an element that could unite a mixed audience by creating an audio narration that all the audience would hear through speakers. Inevitably, this decision brought up the issue of how to create an audio context that could be meaningful and interesting to people both with and without visual impairment. As Camilla admits, ‘in our work, we often prevent people without visual impairment from listening to audio-descriptions that we have made over-descriptive, because we noticed that detailed audio-descriptions may reduce imaginative potential.’
With that in mind, Marta explains that the new research question focused on ‘how could audio narration be another level of the work, a shared access point and not only a service for the visually impaired audience’. This question became the focus during the Accessible Creations residency in 2022, an opportunity to promote research on accessibility in contemporary dance, conceived and produced by Orbita | Spellbound National Center for the Production of Dance in Rome, under the direction of Valentina Marini and the curation of Dalila D’Amico.
