It’s 45 minutes until showtime at Zellerbach Hall. Half a dozen people crowd into a small corner backstage alongside a rack overflowing with lacy yellow garments, enormous sun hats, and fabric-adorned sticks as dancers rush past in various states of dress. One performer sits in the wings, carefully coating his feet in makeup; another, fully costumed, pauses to smile and address the visitors.
“You guys seeing the performance tonight?” Alvin Ailey dancer Samantha Figgins asks, to a chorus of yesses from the group, most of whom are blind and visually impaired. “So y’all gotta get all the sensations before the curtain goes up.”
The “sensations,” as she calls it, is a multisensory introduction—including touch and audio descriptions—to the costumes, props, and dancers used in that night’s performance. Also known as a “haptic access tour,” this immersive, audio-tactile experience enables people with visual impairments to familiarize themselves with the show’s elements before it begins.
“I’m doing ‘Wade in the Water’ today,” says Figgins, who’s in her tenth season with the Ailey company, an annual visitor to Cal Performances for more than 50 years. “I’m in this beautiful white leotard and white dress flowing in the wind.” Her listeners murmur and croon with appreciation as she describes a stage lit in blue and white, filled with men carrying poles and women carrying the iconic umbrellas from “Revelations,” Ailey’s seminal work. “There’s two long blue pieces of fabric that wave like the ocean throughout the whole piece,” she says smiling. ”It’s a scene.”
Haptic access tours are one part of a larger push for accessibility at Cal Performances in recent years. Since 2022, the performing arts center has contracted with Gravity Access Services to provide live audio descriptions for several shows each season. This year, the service will be available for dance performances by Alvin Ailey, Grupo Corpo, and the Mark Morris Dance Group.
When it comes to Gravity’s accessibility services, the pre-show haptic tour is just the appetizer. During the performance, blind and visually impaired patrons wear headsets that transmit a live audio description of what’s happening onstage. The describers, most of whom are working artists and several of whom are Spanish speaking, detail everything from the costumes and sets to the movement and formation of the dancers and the specific choreography they’re performing.
“It’s quite an art form…[to] describe without resorting to very technical terms,” says Managing Director Michael Whitson. “They have to use really concise, evocative language.”
“Dancers are the tool to paint with,” says audio describer and artist Gabriele Christian, explaining that every show requires a unique strategy. While a solo performance might be more focused on the specific movements of the individual dancer, a large group piece—like Pina Bausch’s ‘Rite of Spring’—would get lost in too much detail.
“That was my first time dealing with 38 bodies on stage,” says Christian. “There’s no more individual…I think less about the individual bodies and more about the swarm.”
This evening’s program includes four shorter pieces, with “Revelations” to close out the show. As the lights dim and the curtain rises, a soft voice pipes into the headsets.
“The house lights dim, and a solo dancer enters,” the audio describer says. “Into a yellow spotlight, they move in unison, stepping, stretching, pivoting.”
Not every detail can be captured, and the descriptions are simplified and systemized. Phrases like “swaying,” “pivoting,” and “moving in unison,” are repeated throughout, giving a consistent, if pared down, visual cue for the movement. But the describers are also creative, even playful with their language. “The dancer in the front undulates her spine like a jellyfish,” she says. “She moves her arms as if she’s playing in water.”
Whitson has been involved in Gravity since 2022. He says the original idea for the service didn’t come from the patrons themselves, but from a realization that there was an unmet need among differently abled audience members.
“Part of the problem is blind people didn’t even imagine that this could be available,” he says. The idea was born in 2017 from the late founder Jess Curtis’s experience working with artists with mobility and visual impairments in Europe. Now, with a team of just 13, including several audio describers and a blindness consultant, the program is making live performance accessible to a whole new—or long-forgotten—group of patrons.
Berkeley resident and dancer Carol Estes has been attending Alvin Ailey since she was in her early twenties. When her vision began to deteriorate, Estes had to abandon her professional dance aspirations. Even attending the theater started to lose some of its magic.
“Dance was in my soul, and when my vision started going, I had to let it go,” she says. But she describes the haptic tour and audio description as an “exponential” change that brings the entire performance back to life.
“ When I was touching the yellow dress for “Revelation” scene and the hat, and I’m thinking, ‘oh my god, that’s what the hat feels like,’” she says. “I didn’t know the dress was that heavy. So now I’m matching it together [with] what I can’t see. So it’s just making it that much richer for me tonight.”
In the last few years, Whitson says awareness and demand for Gravity’s services continues to grow. Their hope is to secure enough funding to make audio descriptions and haptic tours commonplace in live theater.
“We’ve gotten really positive feedback,” Whitson says. “Sometimes blind people come and say, ‘I went and saw a performance.’ … I say, ‘We allow people to experience the show.’”
