The Allusionist 19. Architecting About Dance
Sep 24, 2015
Stephen Hoggett, a theatre choreographer known for Once and The Curious Incident, and Alice Sanders, an audio describer for blind and visually impaired audiences, explore how to put movement into words. They discuss describing dance on screen, translating wordless movement into language, creating company-specific vocabularies, notation and preserving choreography. Short, lively conversations about making movement speak.
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Words Can't Fully Capture Dance
- Talking about dance is uniquely hard because dance communicates in nonverbal, physical terms that resist direct verbal translation.
- Helen and Alice highlight that translating movement into words often flattens or misrepresents the original expressive intent.
Audio Describer’s Dissatisfaction
- Alice describes her experience writing audio descriptions for dance films like the Step Up series and feeling horrified by the result.
- She says her descriptions often read like a boring shopping list and leave her dissatisfied with the final work.
Choose Mood Over Move Lists
- Avoid literal lists of movements when describing dance because they sound tedious and can't fit the full choreography.
- Instead, prioritize conveying mood and key movement qualities even if that risks sounding poetic.