Audio description is a way of making pure visual content accessible to blind and visually impaired people. Often a sighted person describes what they see from their point of view. The limitations of this method are evident when it comes to creating an experience in dance performances. Blind and visually impaired audiences want to experience three-dimensional theatre. Rather than compromising, they want to access the artwork using their own style of perception. Fia Neises and Liv Schellander offer this workshop to find out together how performing arts can be created when there is a diverse audience to be finally considered.

The workshop facilitators have worked on performances involving the aesthetics of access, they will show examples from their practice. Fia Neises will share her methods of creating art in a multi-sensorial way and present impulses from her own practice both as a performer/choreographer and as member of the blind and visually impaired community. In addition, Liv Schellander will suggest ways not to forget one’s body. Subsequently, all available senses can be encouraged via self-experience. Following some theoretical input on the political categorisation of self-description, there will be time for instructed trial, failure and retrial.

Fia/Sophia Neises is a freelance performer, choreographer, access dramaturge, theatre educator and disability-rights activist. In her artistic research, she has focussed for almost ten years now on aesthetic accessibility for blind audiences. In 2023, she was honoured for extraordinary developments in dance as part of the German Dance Award for her activist work in favour of more inclusion. She identifies as a disabled artist and proposes that people’s individual styles of perception should be valued and unconditional access to art should be provided already during the creation process.

Liv Schellander is a dancer/performer, choreographer, Somatic Experiencing (SE)^® practitioner and facilitator. She collaborates with artists in various constellations, teaches and produces her own creations. More recently, she has been increasingly exploring multi-sensorial art creation in the performing arts. Since 2022 she has been collaborating with Michael Turinsky, and in 2023 co-created the dance performance With Or Without You with Fia/Sophia Neises, which shares spaces of access intimacy. Since 2023, Schellander has been developing her practice of ‘Choreo-Constellating’, which is artistically explored and implemented as part of various projects. Her collaborative project Animalariums’ Constellations was selected for Perform Europe 2025.