Creative Access in Dance Description: Experimenting with Integrated Preambles
Hosted by Amy Amantea
Since the early days of the pandemic, Dancer Describer Andrea Cownden and Access Disruptor Amy Amantea have been collaboratively exploring Creative Access in Dance — reimagining how Blind and low vision audiences experience movement. Their work moves beyond traditional audio description into a space of poetic integration, where description is not added on, but built into the fabric of the performance.
Their newest technique introduces an “integrated preamble”, or more — a moment of artistic “setup” that occurs within the dance itself. These preambles give essential visual and spatial information through movement, and language before a moment in the piece unfolds, allowing all audience members to share a deeper, more connected experience. Cownden and Amantea’s work is reshaping access as both a creative tool and a justice-driven practice in contemporary dance.
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Guest Bio
Andrea Cownden is an independent contemporary dance artist and creative audio describer based in Vancouver, BC on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. In 2019, Andrea had the pleasure of working as a sighted guide in Translations, a dance performance for the non-visual senses created by All Bodies Dance Project and VocalEye. After this rich introduction to the creative potential of varied descriptive modes, she became curious about how her experience as a professional dancer might inform her own descriptive voice. Since then, she has grown through the creation of descriptions for video works by All Bodies Dance Project, Company 605, Arts Assembly, Mardon+Mitsuhashi, and a handful of independent dance and media artists. She is grateful for these opportunities, as well as consultation and feedback from artists Amy Amantea and Collin van Uchelen, as she endeavours to create descriptions that honour and illuminate the idiosyncratic, embodied poetry of contemporary dance.
