Telephone… “is such a bouquet of emotions happening all at once. A piece of art that gives you so much in each moment, you simply want to burst out of your seat as an audience member. So many parallels going on to complement each other, this is truly a magical and fun movie of dance…”
– Natalie Schultz-Kahwaty, PhD, Director of the Rutgers Dance for Parkinson’s and Neuromuscular Conditions, Assistant Director of the Integrated Dance Collaboratory (IDC) at Rutgers University
“Audio description is typically understood as a segregated accommodation for a small segment of the audience, produced at the end of the creative process. Too often, this means that the results are at best only dutiful and dull. Telephone flips the script on the typical procedure, making audio description available to the entire audience, which enlarges that audience and offers new modes of understanding and interpretation of dance. The film also shows the radical creative potential when audio description is used as the impetus for creativity and collaboration.”
– Georgina Kleege, Writer, English Professor at UC Berkeley, and NYU Steinhardt Dean’s Scholar-in-Residence
“Wow, thank you for this exquisite film… gripping, revealing, visionary, inspiring, and courageous. I was fascinated and moved by the gorgeous movers, audio describers, questions, and revelations. Yes, art is necessary for all.”
– Sheiline McGraw, NYC-based contemporary dancer
“Telephone is an extraordinary and groundbreaking film, an unexpected exploration of the artful practice of audio description to describe dance, welcoming blind and low-vision audiences – as well as all so many others – into the dance world through this innovative project. This remarkable documentary powerfully demonstrates how audio description is far more than an access tool; it enhances the experience of dance in ways that are long overdue. Telephone is transformative!“
– Faye Ginsburg, Director, NYU Center for Media, Culture and History and Co-Founder, NYU Center for Disability Studies
“Recent experiments in describing dance, like the film Telephone, approach it not just as an accessibility service but as a space for artistic exploration… Resisting rote description, the film seeks to give anyone, with any level of sight, a rich sensory experience while ruminating on themes like the purpose of performance and the universal necessity of art.”
– Siobhan Burke, Dance Writer, New York Times
“A truly accessible film offers a springboard for dreams to as wide an audience as possible. Telephone not only offers an immersive introduction to techniques of audio description for dance, but fully demonstrates how much stronger dance (and dance film) can be when these techniques are synthesized through the process of generating the work. As a member of a dance film festival screening committee, I’m always interested in how a film can answer the question, ‘Why screendance?’ What can screendance documentaries do that conventional documentaries cannot? Telephone demonstrates a full spectrum of formal techniques to kinesthetically connect to an audience and activate their imaginations, demonstrating the potency of film created through the mode of screendance.”
– Clare Schweitzer, Production Associate, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Dance Film SF
“At NYU, Telephone Film has been screened in classes ranging from Dance Education to Disability Studies to Media Studies. It has transformed students’ thinking about disability arts, dance audiences, ekphrasis, digital accessibility—and more.”
– Mara Mills, Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, cofounder of the NYU Center for Disability Studies
“Dance belongs to all— but those of us with visual impairments and blindness are closed out of this world because vision is the mode of body communication. The film Telephone shows a new way forward where language and movement poetically work together to convey what dancers are doing when we dance. Those who have eyesight translate dance to feel the immediacy of the moment–Audio Description includes the blind and others who may not be able to attend to details or understand what’s going in dance without language —so all with visual impairments and blindness can be in the room as dancers do their magical work of speaking through the body. Please experience this beautiful film.”
– Devorah Shubowitz, NYC based dancer