Choosing which shows get audio description at our venues

For audiences who are blind or have low vision, a night at the theatre is built on sound, timing, and trust. They need to know where a performer is moving, what a set looks like, and when a joke lands before the laughter starts. At Figueres a Escena, choosing which productions receive audio description is one of the more thoughtful conversations we have each season, and it pulls in programmers, access workers, describers, and audience members themselves.

We do not treat audio description as a bolt-on extra. It sits inside our planning from the first read-through of a season, and the decisions we make try to balance what is possible technically, what is meaningful dramatically, and what our audiences in Figueres and beyond have asked us for. The result is rarely a simple yes or no, and the rest of this piece walks through how we actually arrive at the list each year.

Understanding audio description as a practice

Audio description is a live narration of the visual elements of a performance, delivered through a headset to audience members who need it. The describer sits in a booth or at the back of the auditorium, watches the action carefully, and fits short, precise descriptions into the pauses between dialogue and music. For someone who cannot see the stage, those pauses are the only room they have to receive information, so the craft is closer to translation than to commentary.

The tradition is older than many people realise. Live audio description for theatre began in the United States in the early 1980s, and in Australia the practice has grown steadily since the Disability Discrimination Act of 1992 pushed venues and broadcasters to think harder about access. The ABC was an early adopter for television, and organisations such as Arts Access Australia and individual state arts bodies have spent decades training describers and pushing venues to take the work seriously. Our approach at Teatre El Jardí and Sala La Cate draws on that lineage, though the shows we program are often quite different from the touring musicals and operas that shaped early audio description in Melbourne and Sydney.

What makes the work difficult is that description has to compete with the production itself. A describer cannot speak over a song, a shouted line, or a sustained musical underscore, so the timing of every phrase is choreographed in advance. A quiet drama with long pauses is relatively forgiving. A circus act, a contemporary dance piece, or a fast-moving comedy is much harder, because the visual information is dense and the silences are short. That tension sits at the heart of every selection meeting.

Listening first: audiences we already know

Every decision begins with the people who already come to our venues. We keep an informal register of audience members who have asked for audio-described performances, and we speak regularly with local associations of blind and low-vision people, including groups that coordinate with Catalan and Spanish access networks. Some of those conversations happen over coffee in the arvo, others through email or phone, and a few take place in the foyers before or after a show.

What we hear back shapes the season in concrete ways. If a strong contingent of low-vision patrons has been asking for opera, we look harder at our opera programming. If families have been requesting children's theatre, we think about how a describer might handle a visually busy puppet piece for six-year-olds. Australian venues have shown how powerful this kind of listening can be. The Brisbane Powerhouse, for example, runs ongoing consultations with Deaf and disability communities, and the approach has changed the kinds of work it programs. We try to do something similar at a smaller scale, recognising that our catchment is regional rather than metropolitan.

We also look at what audiences have not asked for, but might still enjoy. A patron who has never attended a contemporary dance performance may not realise that audio description can make one accessible, so part of our job is gently widening the conversation rather than simply responding to demand.

Touring companies and their access readiness

Once we have a sense of demand, we turn to the companies. Most of the productions at Teatre El Jardí and Sala La Cate are presented rather than produced by us, which means we rely heavily on touring companies to provide materials in advance: scripts, surtitles, stage directions, lighting plots, and ideally a recorded run-through. Without those materials, a describer is working in the dark, and the risk of inaccuracy rises sharply.

Some companies are brilliant at this. They send detailed scripts months ahead, flag visual gags, and sometimes bring their own access rider. Others have never thought about audio description, and the conversation becomes a small piece of advocacy work in itself. We explain what we need, why we need it, and what the experience looks like for the listener. We also share examples from other companies, often Australian ones, where access has been built into the touring model rather than bolted on at the venue.

There are practical limits. A company that arrives with no documentation three days before opening is hard to accommodate, even with the best will in the world. In those cases, we may offer a touch tour or a pre-show introduction instead of full audio description, or we may postpone the described performance to a later date when preparation can happen properly. Honesty about what we can deliver matters more than a tick on a brochure.

The describers themselves: skill and judgment

The describer is the person most directly responsible for whether an audio-described performance succeeds. Our team includes both paid professional describers and trained volunteers who have come through specific access training programs. Many have backgrounds in theatre, translation, or journalism, and almost all have spent time shadowing experienced describers before taking the microphone on their own.

The work is cognitively demanding. A describer has to track multiple performers across a stage, anticipate visual moments, write or memorise cues, and deliver them at the right tempo without flattening the production. For physically demanding work, such as aerial circus, the preparation is even more intense. We have written elsewhere about the physical demands of aerial circus training at ATEB, and the same kind of bodily awareness that goes into that training feeds into how a describer learns to track a performer swinging through the air.

We also rotate describers across genres. A describer who has spent a season on contemporary dance brings a different sensitivity to an opera, and vice versa. That rotation keeps the team sharp and stops any single voice from becoming the only reference point for our audience.

Inside the venues: technical and spatial realities

Audio description needs somewhere to live inside the building. At Teatre El Jardí, the describer works from a small booth at the rear of the stalls with a clear sightline to the stage, and the audio is transmitted through infrared headsets that we lend free of charge. Sala La Cate is more intimate, so the describer often works from the back of the room with a portable rig, and we run extra cable checks in the week before each described performance.

Headset counts are tracked carefully. We never want a patron to arrive, find the described performance sold out of equipment, and have to leave. Cleaning, battery checks, and a small buffer of spare units are part of the running cost. Australian venues we admire, such as the Sydney Opera House, treat their access equipment with the same seriousness as their stage lighting, and that culture of maintenance is something we continue to build.

Lighting itself also plays a quiet role in selection. A show lit in deep shadow may be artistically stunning, but it makes the describer's job harder and the listener's experience thinner. We do not refuse such work, but we are honest with programmers about the additional preparation required.

Budget, demand, and the question of fair go

Audio description is not free. Each described performance carries costs for the describer, the equipment, the extra rehearsal time, and the coordination with the touring company. Across a season, those costs add up, and we have to be realistic about what our budget can stretch to.

We try to apply something close to a fair go principle: every patron who walks through our doors deserves a genuine chance to follow the show, regardless of whether they can see the stage. That means we do not concentrate all our described performances on a single genre, a single price point, or a single night of the week. Spread matters, because a working-age patron may only be able to attend on a Saturday evening, while a retiree may prefer a weekday matinee.

Funding partnerships help. Grants from local councils, Catalan cultural agencies, and European access programmes offset our costs, and we are increasingly exploring partnerships with Australian counterparts who share touring circuits with us. The financial picture is never easy, but the principle is simple: access should not depend on whether a particular show happens to break even.

From selection night to the audio-described performance

By the time a season is announced, the described performances are usually already locked in alongside the rest of the program. Tickets go on sale with a clear symbol in the brochure, and the booking page notes that headsets can be reserved. In the weeks before the performance, the describer attends a technical rehearsal whenever the schedule allows, refines the script, and sometimes meets briefly with the company director to clarify intentions.

On the day, we offer a touch tour of the stage and set roughly forty-five minutes before curtain for patrons who want it. Ushers are briefed on how to guide someone wearing a headset to their seat, and there is always a staff member on hand in case a battery fails or a patron arrives without a reservation. After the performance, we ask for feedback, both formally through a short survey and informally through conversations in the foyer.

When a show does not receive audio description, we try to offer something else: a pre-show talk, a programme with rich visual description, or a touch tour. The absence of description is never the end of the conversation, only a different shape of access for that particular production.

If you are blind or have low vision, or you know someone who is, we would love to hear what would make our seasons work better. Drop us a line through the website, talk to our team at the next show you attend, or join the conversation at one of our programmed access events. The list of which shows get audio description is built, season by season, with the people who will sit in the dark and listen.