Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed

Male Voice: If you would, please raise your arms straight up into the air, everyone. Everybody please, hold them up—just like that. Keep them up. Now, we’re going to do a call and response. I’m going say ”Hands up” and you respond with “Don’t shoot…” I’d like you all to keep your hands up with me. Some of you won’t, but try. I’m asking you to be uncomfortable with me for a moment. For this moment in time, let’s attempt to experience the same experience together.

Jo Reed:  You just heard an edited excerpt Hands Up: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments. It is written by Dennis A. Allen and performed by Kamal Bolden. It’s a radio play produced by National Black Theatre.  National Black Theatre or NBT was founded in 1968 by Dr. Barbara Ann Teer—an award-winning performer, director and champion of the Black Arts Movement.  Based in Harlem on 125 St and 5^th Avenue, NBT has spent the last five decades presenting stories by and about Black Americans—its aim is "to produce transformational theater…by telling authentic stories of the Black experience” and it did so not just on their stage but in the streets, parks, shops, and bars of Harlem. And in the process, this not-for profit community theater has become an important cultural incubator.  Since its founding NBT has produced over 300 new works and worked with artists ranging from James Baldwin to Nikki Giovanni, from Nina Simone to Maya Angelou-- winning along the way 54 Audelco Awards, a CEBA award and an Obie Award.  NBT is also an NEA grantee receiving a musical theater grant and an ARP grant.  I spoke with the current CEO of National Black Theatre Sade Lythcott, and I asked her to tell more about the principles that’s guided NBT for over half a century.

Sade Lythcott:  So the National Black Theater was founded by a visionary artist, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer-- full transparency, also my mother <laughs>-- and she really began National Black Theater for a very specific and sometimes considered subversive reason.  She wanted to create an artform that was informed by the Black experience itself.  The subversive experiment that my mother was interested in was about infiltration, what does it mean to infiltrate our own communities with authentic and radical storytelling, and how restorative could it be to ignite, to liberate the stories and the talent that live within our own community. And if we were going to do this work right, we needed to do it for us by us. So she moved to Harlem, and founded the National Black Theater in 1968, -- one of the foremothers of the Black arts movement. National Black Theater comes out of that spirit of empowerment, of radical unapologetic storytelling in service of the Black identity, Black liberation, and she saw it ultimately in the bigger picture was in service to human transformation, and we've been on the corner of 125th and 5th Avenue ever since.

Jo Reed:  Now you're located in Harlem as you said, and you're a national theater, so how does NBT work with and within its community?

Sade Lythcott:  So it's a great question.  We always say we're very proud to say we're a community theater, and we say community with a capital "C".  It's really about bringing resources back to community, empowering community to see that within our ranks we have everything that we need when we lend ourselves to each other, and so that's one of the fundamental building blocks of National Black Theater.  We own our property on 125th and 5th, and one of the things that was a part of Dr. Teer's pedagogy was that Black artists should be able to live, work, and serve within their own community.  So we design all of our programs, and all of our programs are informed by that: how are we in service to Black artists and community to empower them to live, work, and serve within the community. So it's everything from site specific work like Ebony Noelle Golden's “125th and Freedom”, that used 125th Street to do 16 site specific theatrical works across the corridor.  It's through COVID creating new digital programs that are directly in response to the present pulse lived experience.  So, you know, site specific work like partnering with the New York Phil to do “The Bandwagon” in Marcus Garvey Park, or to bring the public theater's summer stage, you know, summer in the parks, to parks and open spaces in Harlem.  So we partner and we work within community in those ways. Probably the most important thing in the last two years is we work with community as active listeners to advocate for the needs of our sector and the needs of our community.  So how are we amplifying the specific need or time and place where we're experiencing challenges, where we're experiencing information that's informative to how we create a more sustainable landscape for not just the National Black Theater but all of the theaters within New York City, and nationally really looking at how are we a model and a template for sustainability for Black and BIPOC organizations across the country?

Jo Reed:  Well you tell your stories not only on the stage, but when you have works in the theater as opposed to out on the street, in the lobbies you create, you're known for these displays that you create, and you've called them a bridge that you built between the theater and the community.

Sade Lythcott:  Yeah, so I get the privilege as the CEO of National Black Theater to co-lead our space with our executive artistic director Jonathan McCrory. And when Jonathan came aboard 10 years ago, he and I right on the heels of my mother's transition in 2008, we really had one of those existential crises, at least I did.  I had an existential crisis where I was looking at shoes that were impossible to fill <laughs>, and I was looking at an organization and an institution in the community that was shifting dramatically in such a fast pace.  And we asked ourselves what is NBT in this new 21st Century context? And it wasn't about “how do we reinvent the wheel?” It was about how do we reinvigorate the blueprint of Dr. Teer and the original NBT company which she called liberators, and so what we did is we looked back into the archives, and we started to distill pedagogy, practices, classes, and we took them all and distilled them into something that we call holistic producing.  And so this is how we approach it.  National Black Theater was always performing in the streets of Harlem, they were always coming from a space of deep healing that our narratives could heal our communities and our artists, that we could be the salve for the PTSD that the Black diasporic population has experienced in this country. So they would go to bars, they would perform on the streets, and that would bring folks inside our building, and that's the part that I was referring to earlier as subversive, she wanted to bring the community inside so that we could have a conversation with our own identity and liberation. That said, our take on it was: well, let's find the work that we love, the playwrights that we want to invest in, that we believe in who they are and what they have to say, we're not going to ask them to be political, we're not going to ask them to have a social justice lens on their work, we will just produce it as brilliantly as we can. But if you're going to be <laughs> produced at NBT what we ask of you is that you allow us to delve into the text to tease out a dramaturgical social justice, social impact them that already exists. Then we blow that up into a dramaturgical lobby exhibit that really takes a look at the parallels of whatever is existing in the world of the play is existing in our own world today. And that sometimes community members need to be able to first relate to how it impacts their own lives to be curious enough to walk through our theater doors.  So we start with the play, it comes out into the lobby as a dramaturgical lobby exhibit, we've done every kind of theme from criminal justice reform, to urban gentrification and cultural erasure, and so the audience member will come into this dramaturgical lobby, take it all in, hopefully see themselves and their concerns all across the lobby, and then they walk in, and they have this experience at the play.  After every single play, and this is what closes out our holistic producing approach, Jonathan and I hold a post-show discussion where we turn the show, turn the experience over to the audience so that the audience can produce a new piece of work that encompasses their experience of the dramaturgical lobby exhibit, and the play. We wrestle, and we talk, and we discourse and digest the show with the actors. And it's the most beautiful and I think unique experience, and through that we really get to NBT's theory of change which is Black liberation plus art plus placemaking equals human transformation, I will tell you if you've ever been to a show at NBT, you walk out transformed.

Jo Reed:  Let's talk about the placemaking side of that triangle because we haven't yet.  How does placemaking work within NBT and the work that you do?

Sade Lythcott:  Placemaking is fundamental and foundational to the way NBT approaches its work, it's a tenet of our theory of change.  My mother when she founded National Black Theater, the stories that she was telling were so courageous and bold, some would say radical, and what we very quickly realized was that the work that we wanted to do sans the White gaze, was niche, controversial often, because it wasn't placating to industry standards. It was really its own art form and art standard, and so she realized that we needed to quickly figure out a funding model. And so that property that we purchased in 1986 was really this engine for placemaking. The real estate should subsidize the art so that we could stay truly independent, truly liberated in the kinds of work and classes and rigor that we wanted to produce on our stages. And so placemaking is fundamentally about self-determination, that we can be a template-- for other theaters, other organization, other artists--to approach their work and their craft from a space of being their own CEO, their own entrepreneurial kind of lens to their work so that we don't depend on anyone else for our own sustainability, for our own empowerment, and then we empower each other to pay that forward within the national and internationally the diaspora community.

Jo Reed:  You’ve also created partnerships with other theaters and organizations to develop and to produce new work.  How do you choose who to partner with and how does it benefits NBT and its partners?

Sade Lythcott:  NBT is going through a major capital redevelopment right now. We're doing ground up construction on a brand-new multiuse building that we're really excited about. And it really forced us to look at placemaking in a different kind of way because we would be displaced from our building for at least four years. So we started a new program called NBT beyond walls, and what we discovered in the process of really something that was completely utilitarian, we needed to partner because we were out of our space, was we discovered that NBT's placemaking is an idea more than it is brick and mortar. That the pedagogy, the idea of Black liberation in service to human transformation, the real, unapologetic Black storytelling was an IP that deserved to be everywhere, leaning back into Dr. Teer's first kind of stance that this is not about representation of Black actors on stage, this is about infiltration. So we approach all of our programmatic partners from a space of infiltration, that the work that we do together should be reflective not only of what you see on the stage but the values we hold as we produce and support the work.  And we have been fortunate enough to partner with all kinds of organizations, which is what's really exciting in this moment in time.  So we have an entrenched partnership with like stalwart partners like the Apollo Theater, like the Schaumburg, but we're also discovering that our pedagogy works everywhere.  So we have these new partnerships with the New York Philharmonic, with the public theater, with New York Theater Workshop, producing work all this season. So it's been really wonderful because even though those organizations may look very different and produce different work than National Black Theater traditional does, the coming together of our pedagogy and our values to craft something brand new has been exciting for both our partners and NBT during this time.

Jo Reed:  One example, Dreaming Zenzile, is a play that you've nurtured and coproduced and done in partnership with, I don't know, half a dozen other organizations? it kicked off in St. Louis, and it has a rolling world premier literally around the country, and it's going to end in New York.  Tell us a little bit about that play and that experience.

Sade Lythcott:  Oh, what a wonderful piece to be bringing back to live theater. “Dreaming Zenzile” is a brand-new musical by Somi Kakoma and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz and it's an incredible new musical about and based on Miriam Makeba's life that we get the privilege of having steward, nurtured, and developed over the last three years with Mara Isaacs of Octopus Theatrics, St. Louis Rep, the McCarter Theater, Arts Emerson, the Apollo, and we're so excited to then bring the world premiere to New York City. It will be coproduced by National Black Theater and New York Theater Workshop, and I have to say we could not have done it without the invaluable support of the NEA, and the new musical theater grant that we received from NEA. It was critical, and it's going to ensure that the work comes to New York.  So we're very excited about that and really grateful.

Jo Reed:  It’s impossible to talk about theater right now without talking about the pandemic.  This has been just a hard, hard year for theater, for the performing arts, for everybody involved in the performing arts.  How have you coped, how have you been?

Sade Lythcott:  So I have to say in some ways the pandemic has been earth shattering, it is has been harrowing to see how we all in the sector have had to put on superhero capes to really bolster and keep our sector alive, and thankfully the support of spaces like the NEA and the federal funding that we've received from NEA and other recovery and relief funds have been what has kept some of our doors open that wouldn't have otherwise.  NBT in particular I will say is in a very interesting and critical juncture.  So we closed our doors to COVID in March 2020, and it was devastating. You know, within two weeks almost 100 percent of our earned revenue went out the window with the majority of our season still ahead of us. But what also happened in June of 2020, NBT finally signed its redevelopment deal for our new construction of our building. So COVID's been surreal for NBT because we would have had to close our doors anyway, and we have really gone onto the frontline when it comes to advocacy.  What we're doing through the pandemic is really designing and constructing our new space, and looking at strategic initiatives and strategic planning as we create this new incredible arts complex.  But we do still feel the impact of COVID on our partners and in our own organization but are grateful for the relief that we have gotten in the places that we have gotten.  NBT was able to get SVOG, Save Our Venues, we were able to get the ARP from NEA and PPP, and literally that was our organization's lifeline so that we could continue to offer uninterrupted programming to our community and to the sector while also focusing on the future of our space.

Jo Reed: You expanded your digital programming, didn't you?  With “Welcome to NBT at Home?”

Sade Lythcott:  Yeah, so I think the thing about COVID, obviously the devastating impact of COVID has been well documented, I think the thing that gets less talked about is that in this space of beginning again, of approaching reopening, it is for so many of us to really approach the work like startups, right?  There's uncertainty in what it is to be a startup but there's so much innovation, and so during this time I feel like NBT has really leaned into the innovation of different digital platforms.  So we started the series of talks with artists called NBT at Home where we would bring live into your living room interesting and present pulse conversation that were responsive to everything that we were living through in real time, so everything from the racial reckonings to the disproportionate impact of COVID on Black communities, the lack of safety net for artists when it comes to how the pandemic was playing, all of that were these really active and lively and rich conversations that we brought to you at home at NBT at Home.  We also leaned into radio plays, you know, I was so excited when you invited me to do this podcast because NBT instead of trying to figure out how to put plays on tape and stream them, we thought we're so excited by the podcast world, and that the roots of performance in a podcast style was the original way folks received performance which was radio plays, and that this medium we could reinvigorate with radio plays.  So that was a part of our NBT at Home, we would do radio plays, and then finally we leaned into the digital space in creating digital short films and programs by commissioning Black artists to take their theatrical voice and interpret it into a new medium of short films, and so we partners with All Arts, and have produced two short films there, we partnered with “When We All Vote” Michelle Obama's organization and created and commissioned 11 Black artists to respond to Shirley Chisholm's “Unbossed and Unbothered” quote and produce work that speaks to our communities, empowering our communities to vote and understand how important civic engagement is. Then lastly on the digital stage we partnered with the Park Avenue Armory here in New York and produced an ongoing series called “100 Years, 100 Women,” in response to the centennial of the women's right to vote, where most women, not all women, got the right to vote.  So it's been a really innovative time, and we've taken digital platforms and incorporated them, I think forever, into our programmatic output at National Black Theater.  I'll say the last thing that's really quite incredible about the innovation of all of us in the theater world finding our voice and space in digital platforms is that we've all gone from hyperlocal, some of us that were already national are now international and global because of our ability to reach audiences on digital platforms just like this.

Jo Reed:  You know, I'm very interested in the part that NBT played in the conversation about the long overdue racial reckoning, certainly in theater as well as throughout all stratas of society because these are conversations you have been having since you began.

Sade Lythcott:  Yeah, it was surreal to watch the country wrestle and awaken to truths we have known for generations. NBT actually paused when this racial reckoning was happening after the murders of George Floyd, Maud Aubrey, Brianna Taylor, where everyone flooded the streets, we did the opposite. We said these traumatic experiences require NBT to be still and for us this was about answering of the call to create safe, healing space for Black people because the world had become enraged and weaponized in ways that didn't put our care on the frontline. When you watch how the reckoning has rippled throughout our industry, the country, and it needed to, what you're also seeing coupled with it is cancel culture and call out culture. And NBT immediately put out a manifesto that this was not about calling out folks for us, this was about calling folks in. That has been our stance, that is what has been the bedrock of our partnerships, we're calling people into this work as opposed to calling them out on their work.  The thing about Black liberation in service to human transformation is that we can create the template and the model for how we all heal, and we use it through the vehicle of our storytelling, but our storytelling is as much for us, our people, and our community, as it is for everybody, because when you  speak from the space of authenticity, you recognize your humanity, our humanity in each other's stories, that is what we call soul.  That's why Dr. Teer always said keep soul alive, soul is an omnipresent force that recognizes that who we are is shared in our humanity. You can't see me fully human unless you can hear my authentic experience and storytelling, and so we're calling people into that, we're disinterested in analytics and ticking boxes that make you the larger society more comfortable that they're working in a space that has equity and parity but if those spaces are not calibrated for us to fully sit at the table together in our humanity, in our vulnerability, in what we know and don't know, and equally be committed to each other's healing-- then what are we doing?  So for us that's what this reckoning has been, it has been not asking for a seat at anybody else's table, but really inviting folks to the table that we have built 50 years ago that we have been setting every single day for the last half century and saying, “Yes, you're welcome here too, yes, you're welcome here too, and this is how we're going to do it.”

Jo Reed: Where do you want to see NBT in the next decade?

Sade Lythcott: We want to see NBT's everywhere. That the national in National Black Theater, we want to lean into the national in National Black Theater, and national is twofold, national is about having national and international reach, but it's also being a nationalist in that we are proud of the courageous work that we do, and that the work that we do in its radical experimentation of Black liberation in service of human transformation should be the work in every theater. And if theaters are doing that work, then it has a little bit of National Black Theater in them.  Also in the next 10 years we will be moving back, obviously before the next 10 years, into our new space on the corner of 125th and 5th Avenue, the most famous address in the world.  You can go anywhere in the world and say 5th Avenue, and everybody knows New York City opulence, and you can say 125th Street and everybody knows 125th Street as Harlem, the cultural capital of the Black world. So in 10 years, in 5 years actually, you can come back to your home away from home on the corner of 125th and 5th Avenue, and what we're building in our new space it's innovative, we're taking the pedagogy and the blueprint of National Black Theater and exploring it through technology and what we want to build is an immersive theater space so that we can deliver not only traditional storytelling on our studio theater stage but an immersive 360 hemispheric theater adventure where you cannot only see our stories but you can experience them because we know that technology XR technology is the wave of the future and we can create more impact, deeper healing, and a destination in the heart of Harlem that's reflective of who we are as a people and who we are as artists and a community.

Jo Reed:  And I think that is a good place to leave it.  Sade, thank you so much.  Thank you for giving me your time, thank you for the wonderful work that you do.

Sade Lythcott:  Thank you for having me, this has really been so wonderful to share a little bit more about NBT with you.  Thank you.

Jo Reed:  And for me as well, thank you.

That was Sade Lythcott—she’s the CEO of National Black Theatre—you can find out more about its programming at NationalBlackTheatre.org. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow Art Works on Apple or Goggle Play and leave us a rating—it helps people to find us.  I’m Josephine Reed. Stay safe and thanks for listening.

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Sade Lythcott: I get the privilege as the CEO of National Black Theater to co-lead our space with our executive artistic director Jonathan McCrory. We asked ourselves what is NBT in this new 21st Century context? National Black Theater was always performing in the streets of Harlem, they were always coming from a space of deep healing that our narratives could heal our communities and our artists, and that would bring folks inside our building. Our take on it was: well, let's find the work that we love, the playwrights that we want to invest in, that we believe in who they are and what they have to say, we're not going to ask them to be political, we're not going to ask them to have a social justice lens on their work, we will just produce it as brilliantly as we can. But if you're going to be produced at NBT what we ask of you is that you allow us to delve into the text to tease out a dramaturgical social justice, social impact them that already exists. Then we blow that up into a dramaturgical lobby exhibit that really takes a look at the parallels of whatever is existing in the world of the play is existing in our own world today. And sometimes community members need to be able to first relate to how it impacts their own lives to be curious enough to walk through our theater doors.

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts—this is Art Works—I’m Josephine Reed

Joel Snyder: Audio description is a way of making the visual verbal. And what I mean by that, of course, is using words, using language, that is succinct, vivid, imaginative, to convey the visual image that's not fully accessible to a significant segment of the population: people who are blind or have low vision. And it's a separate audio track that is accessible to people who want to access it.

Jo Reed: That was educator, advocate, and pioneer in audio description Dr. Joel Snyder.  You just heard Dr. Snyder’s brief definition of audio description—let me fill it out a bit: as captioning or signing gives people who are deaf or hard of hearing access to media and performing arts, audio description provides a similar service to people who are blind or have low vision. 

Audio description provides a narration of what a show is depicting visually, and it must do so without stepping on dialogue or musical cues. And the use of AD is removing barriers to culture for blind people. It was first used in theater and then moved to public television in the 1980s. Now AD is being heard throughout artistic disciplines from theater to film to streaming, from museums to dance to opera--- And Joel Snyder has been there from the beginning: wearing many hats—as an audio describer, voice talent, innovator, and educator--  running  the Audio Description Project, for American Council of the Blind. And in the interests of full disclosure, Joel Snyder also worked here at the arts endowment from 1982 to 2002.  It’s not every day you get to talk to a real pioneer, someone who helped create a new way of making the arts accessible—so I was interested in how Joel Snyder began in audio description. 

Joel Snyder: Oh, goodness. Well, my background is in theater and voicework, going back into the '70s, so that gives you an idea of how old I am. I began recording talking books for the Library of Congress. And also during that time, I became a volunteer reader for a group right here in Washington, D.C., the Washington Ear, which provides readings over a subcarrier of an FM frequency. It provides readings of the daily newspaper, magazines, novels, that sort of thing. So, one of my assignments was the Washington Post on Sundays, and, of course, a newspaper is full of all kinds of images and graphics and photographs, so we would describe images in an informal sense, and there was really nothing called "audio description" at that point. But then, in 1981, it just happened that that same organization, the Washington Ear, its founder and director-- Margaret Pfanstiehl, who was a blind woman, and a fellow named Chet Avery, who was a blind gentleman working at the Department of Education, both of them were on an access committee at Arena Stage, right here in Washington, and Arena was a really-- a forward-thinking entity. In those days, there wasn't that much thought given to accessibility to people with disabilities, but they had just installed an assistive listening system, which is ubiquitous now, of course. It helps people here, who are hard of hearing. Well, when Chet and Margaret heard about that, they could see the value, and they wondered, "Hmm. If that's just a matter of a microphone on stage, amplifying the lines, couldn't someone offstage hold that microphone and describe images, using the pauses between bits and pieces of dialogue or critical sound elements; describe the elements of action, of costumes, of scenery, for folks who are blind or have low vision?" And Arena Stage, to their credit, gave it the go-ahead. And Margaret Pfanstiehl went back to the studio and grabbed me and about three others, and we began to hammer this out. Well, what would we do? How would we do this? What would we call it? And we came up with "audio description." And that summer, summer of '81, the first instance of audio description for live theater happened. That was a production of Major Barbara, at Arena Stage. And I do want to add, though, just to tie this off, Jo, at the same time-- just about the same time, in the late '70s-- a wonderful fellow named Gregory Frazier, the late Gregory Frazier-- he also had the same kind of idea. And he wrote, as part of a master's thesis at San Francisco State University, the very first published material research on how you would do this. So he published the first research material, and then later went on to develop something called AudioVision, in San Francisco, which exists to this day-- very much like the Washington Ear-- providing description for performances in the Bay Area. So it was almost simultaneous on the two coasts, when this began percolating.

Jo Reed: Okay. And before we go on, about what percentage of the population are we talking about here?

Joel Snyder: The numbers I use come from the American Foundation for the Blind, saying that there are over 32 million Americans who are, quote, "either blind or have trouble seeing, even with correction," unquote. And that's significant. That's upwards of eight to ten percent of the population. And then, of course, add to that, Jo, people with learning disabilities, people on the autism spectrum, people who are learning a different language; in this case, learning English, for instance. They're able to hear the language, just as with captions they're able to see language. It helps build literacy. It raises the level of sophistication, I think, with regard to language.

Jo Reed: I know this isn't the point. This is done for people who are blind or who are sight-impaired, but nonetheless, for those who can see, it raises visual literacy, too, I would think.

Joel Snyder: It really does. I'm so glad you mention that, Jo, and that you're tuned in to that, because sighted folks, we see, but we rarely really observe. How many times do you go to a movie, you like it, so you go to see it again, and then, "Oh, my gosh, I didn't see that the first time"? Had they had the audio description on, perhaps, they would have noticed it, because it's our job, as audio describers, to bring out those critical elements that oftentimes are just missed by, certainly, somebody who's blind. But it's also great for a sighted person. If you're in the kitchen making a sandwich, and the television is on in the living room, you don't miss a beat, <laughs> because you can hear what you can't see.  

Jo Reed: I'm interested in the process of creating audio description. Let's take media, for example, for television and film.  there's the description, and somebody needs to write that but then it needs to be voiced. Is this typically done by the same person? Are these two separate entities?

Joel Snyder: Again, Jo, that's a great question. You're right: For media, it has to be written, and then it's voiced; and almost always, those are two different people. It involves careful analysis and research, involving the particular video being shown. We are in service to the people listening, but also to the artist and the art form that we're describing, so we need to understand what a director is doing, what a cinematographer is doing, and first, observe everything that we can possibly see. We learn to become active seers, not passively letting the world wash over us. No, really look; really look, and then edit from that what's most critical to an understanding and an appreciation of the image. Because there's not time to describe everything. The eye takes in far mare than the voice can recount, so we have to be selective. And actually, that makes for better writing, better description, anyway, if we're zeroing in on the essence. And then-- and yes, then it's voiced by a separate person.

Jo Reed: Is there training for this? Do you work with the production team?

Joel Snyder: It's a very involved and a very professional service; it needs to be, especially for media. It's akin to captioning or subtitling, it's akin to sign interpretation, and people that do those kinds of things study it. You know, my PhD is in audio description from the University in Barcelona, because audio description is studied as a kind of subtitling, as a kind of translation; audiovisual translation. So, yes, there's training. And, in fact, I founded, about 12 years ago, the Audio Description Project of the American Council of the Blind, and one of our initiatives is, twice yearly, an Audio Description Institute where we train describers, principally focused on the writing, but we work with the voicing, as well, certainly; the writing of description and what's involved: observation, editing from what you see, the language. How do you come up with the words? What's the best way to come up with the words? So we do those-- at least twice a year, we do a major Audio Description Institute to train describers in the writing, and we're building a certification program, so that just like sign interpreters-- they can be certified by the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf-- we want to have a similar kind of process for audio describers.

Jo Reed: Perfect. You’ve been on the stage. You were an actor. You are an actor. I would imagine that when you're the voice talent, recording audio description, it's a different skill set. I've listened to audio description, and it's quite different from being the voiceover on a commercial, for example.

Joel Snyder: Oh, my. It is, and it's quite different from being an actor. You know, actors on stage, they tend to want to be in the spotlight. With audio description, the voice talent is in service to the people listening, and in service to the art form. We're very much in the background. We are not in the production; we are of the production, if you will. Our voices need to be consonant with what's happening on stage, but we cannot be interpreted as being a part of the play. The best compliment a describer can get after a show-- a performing arts piece, or even in media-- is that, "I forgot you were there. You disappeared, because you were seamless with the production." Years and years ago, when all this began, there was so much focus on-- and rightly so, perhaps-- on objectivity; that we not influence, in the writing or the voicing, what the listener will experience. Let them interpret what we objectively describe. And with regard to voicing, that meant everybody sounded like a golf announcer: "Now he moves here, now she moves there. Now they do this, and now they do that." Which unfortunately, goes too far the other way. It renders a track that's just uninteresting to listen to, and is somewhat disconnected from that happy scene, or that sober scene, what have you. So, I talk about "consonance" when I train audio describers, in the voicing, especially.

Jo Reed: Well, why don't we hear an example? You sent me a clip from the film Color of Paradise.

Joel Snyder: The Color of Paradise, yeah.

Jo Reed:  Why don't we just listen to you doing a bit of audio description for us?

Joel Snyder: Well, you know, I'm wondering if it might be even more interesting to hear a bit of the original soundtrack from this movie, The Color of Paradise, 1999-- a marvelous film; but what I do in training is, I let people listen to it and experience it as a blind person would have in the movie theater, with no description. It's a professional film. It has a professional soundtrack. You know, do you get anything from it? It might be fun to just listen to it that way, for as long as you can tolerate it, and then listen to it with the description, if that makes sense.

Jo Reed: Sure. We'll listen to a little bit of both.

Joel Snyder: Okay.

Audio: Nature sounds, water, birds…..

Jo Reed: Okay, so we just heard the one without the description, and you're right: I have no idea what's going on.

Joel Snyder: <laughs> Right. Exactly. Exactly. You know, you hear people say, "Well, there are birds," and people think there's water. They think this, that, the other. "Is that a body being carried? What's going on?"

Jo Reed: Yeah, exactly.

Joel Snyder: And if you were a blind person in the movie theater, you probably would be gone. You would've left the movie theater, because I'm not getting this at all, or you would've been poking your elbow against the-- into the ribs of the person next to you, going, "What's going on? What's going on? What's going"-- and, of course, then everybody around you is going, "Shh, shh, shh, shh! Shh!" You know, so, no description, then it means that that person ends up without access to an important cultural element of our society: film, television, and such. But now, let's add the description track. If we add the description, does it make a bit more sense?

Jo Reed: And here we go.

Audio with Description: Mohammed kneels and taps his hand through the cover of curled brown leaves. A scrawny nestling struggles on the ground near Mohammed’s hand. His palm hovers above the baby bird. He lays his hand lightly over the tiny creature. Smiling, Mohammed curls his fingers around the chick and scoops it into his hands. He stands and strokes its nearly featherless head with a fingertip.

Jo Reed: Indeed, it does make more sense.

Joel Snyder: I think it does. I think it does. That clip, especially-- obviously, there's no dialogue there. Now, that doesn't mean that the describer is free to simply talk and talk and talk. No, they need to let the sounds come through.

Jo Reed: We also get a sense of how rich, visually, this is.

Joel Snyder: Yes, absolutely. And most film these days really is, and we have to be sensitive to that. We don't want to cover any dialogue. We don't want to cover critical sound elements. But I like that example from The Color of Paradise. It didn't have description when it was first screened in movie theaters, but I wrote and voiced the description when it was later broadcast on television.

Jo Reed: Let me ask you this: Are blind people part of the process, at any point, of audio descriptions?

Joel Snyder: They are, and they should be, and they should be more frequently, because this was-- the old phrase, "Nothing about us without us," you know? This was begun by a person who's blind, by people who are blind. It's by people who are blind, for people who are blind. And people who are consumers of audio description, they are oftentimes used as quality control specialists, as consultants on the writing. There's absolutely no reason why a person who's congenitally blind can't be a marvelous master of language, and working with the describer, come up with ways in which to express the visual image with words. Some of the best voice talents in the industry are people who are blind. Some of the best audio editors are people who are blind. So, it's not as frequent as it should be, but I think it definitely enhances the whole process when the consumers of description are integrally involved in the production of description, and in its advocacy.

Jo Reed: Now, you talked about how audio description is different in different art forms, and you began in theaters. So, in theater, what is the process there? How do you prepare the script when it's theater, and it's live?

Joel Snyder: Yeah, yeah. Well, Jo, I like that you used the word "script." And this is a prejudice or a bias of mine, but I think it takes time to really find the right language, and that requires then, ideally, working with the production throughout rehearsals, developing a script that can be voiced. And it shouldn't sound read. When you get to the performance stage, and you're offering the description, I often say half an eye is on the script, and one and a half eyes are on the stage, because it's live, and anything can happen, and you need to be ready for that. Most description in performing arts, still, these days, isn't quite like that. First of all, most is volunteer effort. It's based on, maybe, one or two viewings of the show, and then a few notes are taken, and then the description is offered, essentially extemporaneously, at only one or two performances out of a six-week run. And it's offered via either an infrared system or an FM radio system. So the individual using description receives a little headset and an FM or infrared receiver, and the person doing the voicing is doing so with a Stenomask microphone or a headset, and they have a transmitter, and so it's only heard by the people using the service. Some performances, some videos, have open description. And again, I like to think it can be appreciated by all, really. So, now, with television and film, it's a little different, because with television, this was the marvelous contribution of WGBH and Barry Cronin, in those days in the '80s. They heard about what we were doing at the Ear, and they had us do a pilot project for them. They realized that, for television broadcast, there's a secondary audio program channel -- SAP channel-- whereby a secondary track, audio track, can be delivered. You turn it on or turn it off. It was there, really, for the transmission of Spanish translation, and it's still used for that today, but it's also used for audio description, and that's how folks access description on television these days. And by the way, I mentioned the Audio Description Project of the American Council of the Blind. The website there, that's another great initiative of ours.  You could actually find out, "What's on television right now with description?" Because it's still just a small percentage of the whole...

Jo Reed: And we'll have that website in our show notes, so people can access it.

Joel Snyder: That's great. Thanks, Jo.

Jo Reed: How widespread is the use of audio description throughout the arts?

Joel Snyder: Well, it is growing rapidly. It began with performing arts, but then, once it became more prevalent on television and with film-- with film nowadays, Jo, just about every feature film that comes out has an audio description track, which is accessed in the movie theater. Remember those days when we all went to movie theaters?

Jo Reed: No. <laughs>

Joel Snyder: Yeah. <laughs> You can go to the movies...

Jo Reed: It's been a long time. <laughs>

Joel Snyder: Yeah. You get a headset, similar to what you do in a legitimate theater, if you will, and you hear the description along with the audio track of the film. So it's done that way in the movie theater, but most movie-- most feature films, I should say now, come with an audio description track. So it has grown-- the field has grown, exponentially. There are more and more people, and oftentimes it's captioning companies, who are already providing captions. I started the audio description program for the National Captioning Institute, back in 2002. Captioning companies already have the contacts with the film producers, the television producers, and so it's akin to that kind of postproduction work. In addition to the captions, we would provide the audio description.

Jo Reed: Is there a federal mandate, an FCC ruling, that says X percentage of programming-- and I'm talking about media now-- need to be accessible through AD?

Joel Snyder: Yes, there is. Yes, there is. In 2010, the 21^st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act was passed, which, for the first time, mandated audio description on television broadcasts; very small amount. At the time, it was only about four or five hours per week, and only for the top nine broadcasters. Now it's increased to just about seven hours per week, for those top nine broadcasters, in about 70 markets. But you know, there's so much television out there, if you add all that up, it doesn't even come to one percent, is my understanding, my estimation; whereas in the U.K., fully 10 percent of all broadcasts must have audio description. My hope is that, at some point, we're going to be akin to captioning in this country. Captioning, when it was mandated some 40, 50 years ago, the law said, each year, it should go up by a certain percentage. We don't have that yet. Hopefully, we will. So, captioning is at 100 percent now 

Jo Reed: So many of us access film and television through streaming services. Is there a mandate for them to provide audio descriptions?

Joel Snyder: There is no mandate on streaming services to provide description. But what's great is that entities like-- well, Netflix, for instance, probably does more description than any other streaming service. They're right up there with the others, certainly, and in a variety of languages. Initially, they weren't sure. How would this work? Because this is a whole other process. Well, they've learned to embrace it. They really have run with it, So it's not mandated. It doesn't come under the FCC rule; that's only for broadcast television. Even movie theaters, by the way, and performing arts spaces, they are, to a certain extent, covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that's why movie theaters have become more and more accessible. Obviously, if you're a person who uses a wheelchair, you have to be able to get into the space. But once you're in the space, it's got to be programmatically accessible. And that's why, beginning about 10, 15 years ago, movie theaters began to realize, "We're going to have to get films with description, with the captions, because we're going to have to provide those services."

Jo Reed: It would just seem to me that, as media becomes more digital, it's a much easier process to add AD.

Joel Snyder:, I think you're right. I think it is easier in one sense, certainly. There are parameters involved in digital production, as there were in analog production days, certainly. You know, when we all went to digital broadcast of television, the hope was that we could expand beyond just one secondary audio program channel. You know, if a program is being broadcast in Spanish, there's no description, because there's only the one channel. Well, the hope is that, because we're digital now, we can have up to-- I think it's a dozen separate audio channels. It has to do with how the different services access the audio.  Hopefully, that's another way in which audio description will grow.

Jo Reed: And I would also think, given the technology that we have-- that we literally carry around in our pockets now-- I think that really opens so many doors...

Joel Snyder: You know, you're right. In fact, I do many different presentations about audio description. One that I do fairly frequently these days is with a blind man, Petr Kucheryavyy, who works for Charter Communications. They now have a service called Spectrum Access, and it's an app. It's an app that folks download to their phone. The app-- it is actually able to listen to a movie being broadcast in a movie theater, or at home. Once you have that app, you download to it the audio description track that accompanies that film, and the app miraculously pairs the audio description track with the sound of the film. It does it automatically, and it's available to you through your own smartphone then, in your own earbuds. And you can listen to it. The description doesn't have to be on for anybody else in your home. You listen to it, independently. And I see that growing by leaps and bounds, and especially as the Congress and the FCC begins to realize the need for the expansion of the 21^st Century Communication and Video Accessibility Act. Really, like I say, captioning is at 100 percent. Why shouldn't description be at 100 percent, as well? And so I see a lot of growth in the future.

Jo Reed: I've heard you discuss, and I'd like you to share, the potential that you've said audio description can offer, when it's part of the creative process from the beginning.

Joel Snyder: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You know, there are good examples of that. Foremost, perhaps, is Stevie Wonder's one of his music videos became one of the first with audio description built in. It's called So What the Fuss, and it's easily accessible on YouTube. The description is a part of the whole. It was written that way.  And he had the rapper Busta Rhymes voice it, so it was really a part of the whole. I think that I'd love to see that happen more and more in media; certainly, in performing arts. There's a company in New York; used to be called Theater by the Blind. Now it's called Theater Breaking Through Barriers. They've experimented with taking a play; maybe adding a narrator, or adding lines that are descriptive in nature, so that the description is built in. Their every performance is described, basically, right? You don't need to have an added-on layer. It's a little bit like shadow-signing, if you've ever been to a production that's being made accessible with sign language, with the signers on stage with the different characters. Every performance is accessible, with the signer right there in front of you, as opposed to off on the side, on the left or the right.

Jo Reed: Has AD grown with other art forms? And I'm thinking, actually, of dance, which on one hand seems unlikely, but then again, maybe not.

Joel Snyder: <laughs>

Jo Reed: Are we seeing AD offered in live dance performances, for example?

Joel Snyder: We are. We are, and that goes back a little ways, actually. One of the first groups to experiment with audio description-- and I'm proud that I worked with them on this-- is AXIS Dance Company, out of Oakland, California. That's a company that-- they speak of "integrated dance." They have dancers who are all shapes and sizes: dancers with one leg, dancers with no arms, dancers who use wheelchairs. They wanted to make sure their performances are accessible to everybody who are potential audience members, including people who are blind. And developing description for dance is somewhat dependent on, are we talking about a story ballet, which is like theater, in a sense; or are we talking about a more abstract form, where it's about levels and lighting and the directorial intent, that sort of thing? So that certainly makes a difference. Certainly, don't want to step on music. Opera is described, and we're careful to preserve the experience of the sound, to a great extent. But even in dance, too, we oftentimes will have, in theater and in dance, "touch tours," where people who are using the service can actually be on stage after the show, and actually touch props, touch costumes; touch the dancers, if you will-- in an appropriate manner, of course. But even more importantly, the people using the audio description service could move like the dancers, with the dancers, and really get a sense in their bodies of what was happening, visually. And that was just a marvelous way to help make dance accessible

Jo Reed: Okay, tell me about your time at the Arts Endowment.

Joel Snyder: Oh! Sure.

Jo Reed: When were you here, and tell me what you did. It was before I started working here.

Joel Snyder: Yeah! Well, it was a whole other time I was on the staff from 1982 to 2002, always working with arts presenters and multidisciplinary arts. In those days, it was called the Inter-Arts Program, and I was its acting director two or three different times, and working with, principally, arts presenters. And I remember that whole period so fondly. It was a time of tremendous growth for me. But all during that time, I was still working with description, and I became, in a sense, an unofficial member of the staff of what was called, in those days, the Special Constituencies program, and now, of course, led by Paula Terry, working with accessibility and the arts. Now the program is called Accessibility, ably led by Beth Bienvenu, and you know, and everybody that accepts a grant from the NEA, agrees to follow the regulations put forward in Title 504 and in the Americans with Disabilities Act, but sometimes there's much more that people could do to make their programs accessible to people with disabilities, and there's money available to do that--- money to help you do that can be built into a grant application. But it was a wonderful time, and I'm glad and pleased about what I was able to contribute to the funding of presenters, certainly, and other multidisciplinary arts endeavors, but certainly helping Paula, and getting the word out about accessibility.

Jo Reed: And what do you see for AD in the future?

Joel Snyder: Oh, I think it's going to continue to grow.  I think we need to be better at spreading the word about the abilities of people who have, quote/unquote, "disabilities." Everybody has abilities, and we're all using them to the best of our capacity, and folks who are blind, they're doing that, too. They simply need the art form, the culture, to be accessible to them. You know, the social model of disability dictates that a person is disabled only to the extent to which society doesn't accommodate their individual needs, so that if a building doesn't have a ramp, well, it's inaccessible, isn't it, to somebody who uses a wheelchair. But as soon as that ramp is there, or the building is designed with the ramp, the disability goes away. So there's really no good reason why a person with a physical disability must also be culturally disadvantaged. I don't think so. I think it's beholden on all of us who run public institutions, and certainly funded with public money, to be as inclusive as possible, to involve all of the public to a greatest extent as possible.

Jo Reed: Okay. And I think, Joel, that is a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.

Joel Snyder: Thank you, Jo.

Jo Reed:  You just heard educator, advocate, and pioneer in audio description Dr. Joel Snyder.  Check out some of resources that are available at the Audio Description Project, at the American Council of the Blind.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. If you like the show, follow us on Apple podcasts and leave us a rating, it really helps people to find us. I’m Josephine  Reed, stay safe and thanks for listening.

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