Abstract
This essay addresses an artistic practice that is geared towards the needs of a community that sooner or later any of us may inhabit.1 The community is that of the blind, partially-sighted and visually-impaired – or BPS – and the practice is that of Audio description, or AD. I start with Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most searching meditation on inner vision (and also a play organised around, as David Sterling Brown cogently puts it, ‘white people watching other white people, surveilling, judging, and critiquing’2), and specifically with Hamlet’s words to Horatio, and a phrase that not only has long served as a metaphor for the visual imagination (though, as the Arden Third Series editors point out, the phrase is not Shakespeare’s coinage and had long been a commonplace3), but also succinctly defines the aim of AD for theatre performance. AD is a means of enabling BPS persons to see the unseen in their mind’s eye, to engage with experiences from which they might otherwise be excluded. It does so by providing important visual information (which can include settings, effects, appearances, and facial expressions, to name but a few) in spoken narrative form, relayed in screen media through an add-on audio track, and in live settings, usually, through portable media technology. AD is used in a range of exhibition settings, including museums and galleries, and in film and television, where it has been a feature since the 1980s. In 1996, in the United Kingdom, AD became a legal obligation for terrestrial broadcasters, who are currently required to audio describe 10 per cent of their output, and it often discussed in predominantly screen-centric terms (the UK’s Royal National Institute for the Blind’s website, for example, defines AD as ‘additional commentary that explains what’s happening on screen...[it] describes body language, expressions and movements, making the programme clear through sound’4). AD in the theatre is a more recent, more occasional and still less ubiquitous practice. The first theatre AD system was developed in the United States in 1981 by Margaret Pfanstiehl and Cody Pfanstiehl, who also codified some influential AD ‘rules’, which included their much-cited dictum that the audio describer should ‘not evaluate or interpret, but rather be like the faithful lens of a camera’;5 a contentious proposition we shall return to below. The first examples of theatre AD in the UK and US also date from the 1980s, but it is only in the past decade that it has been established as an element of most professional performances.