Tanz hören (?). Zur Versprachlichung von Tanz und Musik im Modus der vorproduzierten Audiodeskription

In the last two decades, the idea of extensive social participation and empowerment of people with special needs has become increasingly prevalent. In the context of such initiatives, audio description has become a common means of choice to give blind and visually impaired people access to media and performances that are naturally available to members of the sighted majority society. As an art form centered on the expressive capacities of the body, dance is inherently multimodal, engaging not only visual but also auditory and tactile perception through elements such as music, breath, vocalizations, and spatial interaction. Pre-produced audio description for blind or visually impaired audiences must therefore compensate for the absence of visual information without impeding the reception of content through other sensory modalities. This article is concerned with how the audio description of dance performance recordings takes place and which visual and auditory elements motivate audio describers to use certain linguistic formulations. Approaches to answering the following questions will be presented: Does audio description itself have an aesthetic character in this context, or is it able to add a linguistic aesthetic dimension to the multimodal experience of dance and music? The case study of a French-language audio description of the dance performance Triton by Philippe Decouflé and Vincent Hachet was chosen to provide answers to this question.