Tag: guests

Categories
News / Announcements

Rotating Faculty 2026: Improvising with our Ecosystems with Shannon Brooks

image is described in caption
Shannon crouches on the floor holding a microphone with neon yellow/green tulle draped across their body and smushing their face. They speak/sing into the microphone with their eyes closed. Photo credit: And Keller

Presented as part of our 2026 rotating faculty series:

Improvising with our Ecosystems: a Laboratory and Introduction to Improvising with Movement, Sound, and Self-Audio Description with Shannon Brooks

About Shannon Brooks:


Shannon Brooks is a multisensory, multimedia artist grounded in iterative, time-based experimentation. Their practice engages with the full range of our senses and draws on ritual, material, and performance, to construct strange worlds between the physical and the ephemeral. Their practice researches the interconnected systems between ecology, decay, the body, disability, power, ghosts, geologic time, movement, textile, and memory.

Their practice decentralizes sight as the ultimate means of validating experience, creating cacophonies of textures and sounds to explore the dimensions of our senses. As a low-vision person, Shannon understands accessibility as an imperfect creative force that transforms time, space, and power structures.

About This Workshop Series:

Improvising with our Ecosystems is laboratory to experiment with different approaches to improvisation, ground into your body’s impulses, explore imaginative embodiments, and play with self-audio description improv with live music. 

Workshop Dates and Details:

These workshops are set up to build on one another but can be taken separately. 

They will be offered virtually on Zoom.

Each workshop is two hours long:

  • Sunday, February 1, 2026 – Improvising with Our Ecosystems with Shannon Brooks, 2 PM to 4 PM (Eastern/New York Time)
  • Sunday, March 1, 2026 – Improvising with Our Ecosystems with Shannon Brooks, 2 PM to 4 PM (Eastern/New York Time)
  • Sunday, April 12, 2026 – Improvising with Our Ecosystems with Shannon Brooks, 2 PM to 4 PM (Eastern/New York Time)

To register for this workshop series, send an email to info@darkroomballet.com with the subject line Improvising with our Ecosystems

Categories
News / Announcements

Yeah, It Was Good! Celebrating Audio Described Dance on December 13

Image described at the end of the post


Audio description for dance performances is still very rare, but that doesn’t mean that blind and visually impaired audiences should be satisfied when the audio description on offer is of low quality.

Several times over the last 3 years, Krishna has taught a popular audio description workshop called: Yeah, But Was It Good? Learning How to Listen to Audio Description for Dance Critically

But each time this workshop has offered, Krishna has discovered fewer and fewer examples of audio described dance available to explore online. Colleagues, companies and choreographers in the wide world of dance have made less of their work available in ways that prioritize the inclusion of blind and low-vision audiences — until now…

IT’S HAPPENING!

On Saturday, December 13 2025 from 4 PM to 6 PM (Eastern Time), Dark Room Ballet will be sponsoring an audio described dance film showcase, with contributions from at least 3 blind/VI choreographers, and including new audio described work from the American Ballet Theatre!

We are now finalizing the details, but this event will be free and open to all, and you can register if you haven’t already at the following link:

Zoom Registration Link for Yeah, It WAS Good! A Virtual Showcase Celebrating Audio Described Dance (Dec 13)

You’ll receive confirmation of your registration and a link to join from Zoom.

Can’t wait for you to join us!

Image description:
A new version of a previous rectangular flyer with a new bright blue background. Blurred diagonal film-strip graphics run from lower left to upper right, containing indistinct navy dancer silhouettes. Swooping orange brushstrokes overlay the background.

Text in white and darker sometimes highlighted fonts now reads:

COMING UP!
Yeah, It WAS Good!
A Virtual Showcase Celebrating Audio Described Dance sponsored by Dark Room Ballet
Saturday December 13, 2025, 4 PM to 6 PM (Eastern Time) on Zoom

Categories
News / Announcements

A Practice of Being Workshop with Kayla Hamilton – December 10, 2025

image description in caption
A headshot of Kayla Hamilton, who is a milk chocolate colored Black woman. She is posing in front of a blurred brick wall, wearing a long sleeve black and tan striped shirt. She has light makeup and is smiling. Her black and golden locs are down.

Presented as part of our Fall/Winter 2025 guest artist workshop series:

A Practice of Being Workshop with Kayla Hamilton

About Kayla Hamilton:

Kayla Hamilton is a Texas-born, Bronx-based dancer, performance maker, educator, consultant and artistic director of Circle O—a cultural organization uplifting Black Disabled and other multiply marginalized creatives.

About This Workshop:

Come exactly as you are—rested or restless, steady or stirred. In this improvisational movement space, there are no set steps and no pressure to perform. We begin with breath, curiosity, and a shared willingness to see what wants to emerge. Movement may arrive small and subtle—or bold and expansive. It might surprise you, delight you, or teach you something  about how your body wants to be known.

Together, we’ll play, experiment, and follow sensation as it leads us into rhythm, stillness, or flow. Each moment becomes an invitation to the next. There are no wrong turns—only new possibilities. 

For anyone who craves freedom in movement, trusts—or wants to trust—their impulses, and is ready to say “yes” , together.

Workshop Date and Details:

This workshop will be offered virtually on Zoom.

The workshop is two hours long, from 6 PM to 8 PM on  Wednesday December 10, 2025 – NEW date and time

To register for this workshop series, send an email to info@darkroomballet.com with the subject line A Practice of Being Workshop with Kayla Hamilton

Categories
Krishna's Thoughts News / Announcements

What’s a Collegium, Anyway? (It starts so soon!)

You may have heard about the upcoming Dark Room Ballet Collegium, an upcoming free series of workshops sponsored by Dark Room Ballet that is starting very soon — the first workshop is coming up Thursday, October 9, 2025 from 6 PM to 8 PM on Zoom!

But what is a Collegium, anyway?

Merriam-Webster says, in part, that a collegium is:

An organized society or group: association” and also “a college, especially one in a university.”

That means that this series of high quality workshops, all provided for free by a group of passionate blind and low-vision professional artists, is like a Dark Room Ballet temporary university!

Read on to learn more about each offering, and reach out via email to register for any or all of these workshops at: info@darkroomballet.com to begin the registration process.

*If you have emailed but have not received a reply, we should have your message, but feel free to write again!

You can hear Krishna talk about the Collegium in a video on YouTube (with open captions and a transcript available):

Categories
News / Announcements

Vortex Workshop with Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez – December 6, 2025

image description in caption
Christopher moves his arms, creating curved lines while a dim light bathes his body, creating the effect of being in a cave.

Presented as part of our Fall/Winter 2025 guest artist workshop series:

Vortex Workshop with Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez

About Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez:

Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez is a Costa Rican-American artist who works in choreography, film, installation, sound, and blind art. His work explores the connections between access, trust, mythology, anthropology, and heritage. Núñez contemplates the body, its movement, and how it interacts with energy and force in relation to space/time and from his visual impairment.

About This Workshop:

Vortex explores the anatomical planes (sagittal, transverse, frontal) and the axes of movement (anteroposterior, mediolateral, longitudinal) through the body and  space/time. Vortex is spatial alchemy. Disabled dancers learn to navigate internal and external spaces using our heritage, lineage, memory, proprioception, breathwork and  magical existence.

Workshop Date and Details:

This workshop will be offered virtually on Zoom.

The workshop is two hours long, from 4 PM to 6 PM on  Saturday December 6, 2025

To register for this workshop series, send an email to info@darkroomballet.com with the subject line Vortex Workshop with Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez

Categories
News / Announcements

December 2025: Developing Your Voice Intensive with Alex Bulmer

image is described in caption
A white woman in her fifties with short light brown hair stands against a wall. She has black headphones on her head and wears a brown leather jacket with zippers at the wrist. Bright eyed she looks at the camera with her hands raised to the headphones.

Presented as part of our Fall/Winter 2025 guest artist workshop series:

Developing Your Voice — A Vocal Training Intensive Workshop Series with Alex Bulmer

About Alex Bulmer:

Alex Bulmer is an award winning Blind playwright, voice teacher, actor and performance maker with thirty five professional years working across Canada and the UK.

She finds joy and potency through mutual  growth and original expression, is dedicated to inter-dependent practice, and guided by an invitation to follow the grain of her own wood.

Alex is co-creator of multiple Blind-led productions including May I Take Your Arm, Perceptual Archaeology, Gesture and Maddy and The Invisible Band of Groovers.

She is artistic director of Toronto-based Fire and Rescue Arts, which de-centres visuality from imagination to creation.

In 1990, Alex graduated with an Advanced Diploma in Voice Studies from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Since then, she has been supporting Blind and Sighted performers to experience vocal freedom – the deep connection between breath and voice, the energy of resonance and vibration and the dynamic physicality of speech.

About This Intensive Workshop Series:

Developing Your Voice is a special intensive workshop series that addresses the specific vocal skills needed by both audio describers of dance and self-describing dancers.

In Alex’s words: The human voice, your voice, is your primary instrument as a describer. When describing Dance, your voice is called upon to be more flexible and expressive. So let’s learn to play your vocal instrument well!

In these workshops, you will learn how to prepare your voice for description, and gain skills to enable you to express language in the most effective way.

The workshop will cover a brief overview of how the voice works, discuss how you can keep your voice healthy, and offer exercises to nourish and develop your vocality, and better engage with the physicality of language.

You will learn a warm up routine that you can practice to develop and support you to vocally best connect Blind audiences with the art of Dance, whether as an audio describer or dance or a self-describing dancer.

Workshop Dates and Details:

These intensive workshops are designed for the learning needs of different professional groups, but can be approached in a cumulative way, with the second workshop building on the skills developed in the first.

They will be offered virtually on Zoom.

All workshops start at 4 PM (Eastern Time), and include 90 minutes of vocal technique followed by 30 minutes of open question and answer time.

  • Wednesday, December 3, 2025: Developing Your Voice for Describers of Dance
  • Thursday, December 4, 2025: Developing Your Voice for Self-Describing Dancers

If you an an audio describer, for the first workshop, please bring a paragraph of text that you can read and practice during the workshop — a sample of audio description from a recent project is ideal! If you are an audio describer or self-describing dancer, for the second workshop, please memorize one sentence that you can use during the workshop — it can be anything!

To register for this transformative workshop series, send an email to info@darkroomballet.com with the subject line Developing Your Voice

Categories
News / Announcements

November 2025 — Sensory Beyond Sight: A Choreographic Workshop Series with Davian “DJ” Robinson

image is described in the caption
A headshot photo of Davian "DJ" Robinson. He smiles widely, and is wearing a red sweater.

Presented as part of our Fall/Winter 2025 guest artist workshop series:

Sensory Beyond Sight: A Choreographic Workshop Series with Davian “DJ” Robinson

About Davian “DJ” Robinson:

Davian “DJ” Robinson is a passionate and boundary-breaking visually impaired dancer, choreographer, and performer. Drawing from his lived experience and athletic movement style, he creates choreography that is both physically powerful and emotionally resonant. His work blends dynamic storytelling with raw embodiment, inviting audiences into a world where rhythm, resilience, and adaptability redefine how we move and connect. Through both performance and education, Davian challenges conventions and opens new possibilities for inclusive expression in the arts.

About This Intensive Workshop Series:

Sensory Beyond Sight cultivates movement using breath, touch, spatial hearing, weight, and proprioception rather than sight. Developed by visually‑impaired choreographer DJ Robinson, the practice empowers participants to:

• Discover liberating, imaginative movement without visual imitation.
• Deepen body awareness in time and space.
• Build trusting partnerships that translate verbal cues into motion.

Tactile & Creative Supplies:

DJ often designs choreography using a tactile drafting board/felt board.

Magnetic or Velcro pieces represent dancers and pathways, allowing him to map formations by touch and communicate spatial ideas clearly.

This reminder models how tactile tools can replace sight‑based diagrams.

What follows are shopping links for the different equipment options that you can choose to use during the workshop series and continuing on in your own choreographic practice:

  • Wikki Stix Neon Pak (Amazon link)
    Reusable, bendable wax-coated yarn sticks for creative tactile art and sensory play. Great for children, educational projects, and travel activities.
  • DRAFTSMAN Tactile Drawing Board (APH link)
    A specialized tactile drawing board with stylus and film sheets, allowing blind or visually impaired users to create raised-line graphics. Durable and portable, offered by the American Printing House for the Blind.

Workshop Dates and Details:

This workshop series is cumulative, and each of the four workshops builds on the skills developed the week before.

All workshops start at 4 pm (Eastern Time), and are 90 minutes long.

  • Saturday, November 8, 2025: Breath & Foundational Body Awareness
  • Saturday, November 15, 2025: Deep Tactile Awareness & Directionality
  • Saturday, November 22, 2025: Partner Guiding & Shape the Mode Expansion
  • Saturday, November 29, 2025: Trust Guide Series & Culmination

To register for this transformative workshop series, send an email to info@darkroomballet.com with the subject line Sensory Beyond Sight

Categories
News / Announcements

Musicality Concepts in Ballet — A Pro-Level Intensive Workshop Series with Hannah Werbel

photo is described in the caption
Hannah stands on a large rock in a mountain meadow, surrounded by wildflowers and tall pine trees. She stands with her left leg held straight and supporting her, while her right leg is lifted high to the side, nearly horizontal. Her left arm curves overhead, and her right arm stretches toward her raised foot, creating a diagonal line across her body. She wears leggings, a short-sleeve shirt, trail shoes, and sunglasses, with her hair in two braids. The sky is clear, and snow-capped mountains are visible in the distance.

Presented as part of our Fall/Winter 2025 guest artist workshop series:

Musicality Concepts in Ballet — A Pro-Level Intensive Workshop Series with Hannah Werbel (October/November 2025)

About Hannah Werbel:

Trained in classical ballet, with forays into jazz, contemporary and modern swing dance, Hannah has been dancing and playing with music since before she can remember.

As a student of Dark Room Ballet herself, Hannah is excited to share her love of music and expression with the community. She believes in teaching from a perspective of curiosity and play, and is looking forward to helping students discover a sense of expression within the structure of ballet. 

About This Intensive Workshop Series:

Musicality Concepts in Ballet is a special intensive workshop series that analyzes and reinforces select  musicality concepts in the context of a pro-level ballet technique class. Each week, we will explore two contrasting concepts and experiment with them through different combination-based movement patterns. This workshop is designed for disabled dancers who have been dancing ballet consistently for at least one year and have strong ballet vocabulary recall. (If you’re taking ballet class every week, this series is for you!)

Workshop Dates and Details:


 These intensive workshops can be studied either in a standalone or in a cumulative way.

They will be offered virtually on Zoom.

The format of each workshop is similar to a ballet technique class, but with an open floor for questions after each few combinations.

Each workshop is two hours long:

Wednesday evening classes will run from 8 PM to 10 PM (Eastern Time)

Saturday evening classes will run from 6 PM to 8 PM (Eastern Time)

  • Wednesday, October 22, 2025: Accents and Rhythms (8 PM to 10 PM)
  • Saturday, October 25, 2025: Dynamics: using the floor to generate and dampen energy (6 PM to 8 PM)
  • Wednesday, October 29, 2025: Staccato and Legato (8 PM to 10 PM)
  • Saturday, November 1, 2025: Rubato: playing with the music (6 PM to 8 PM)

    If you are a taped floor dancer, have your floor taped as you would normally for ballet technique class, and be ready to dance ballet in a richer, more expressive way!

To register for this workshop series, send an email to info@darkroomballet.com with the subject line Musicality Concepts in Ballet

Categories
News / Announcements

October 2025 Improvisation Intensive Workshop Series with Shannon Brooks

image is described in caption
Shannon crouches on the floor holding a microphone with neon yellow/green tulle draped across their body and smushing their face. They speak/sing into the microphone with their eyes closed. Photo credit: And Keller

Presented as part of our Fall/Winter 2025 guest artist workshop series:

Improvising with our Ecosystems: a Laboratory and Introduction to Improvising with Movement, Sound, and Self-Audio Description with Shannon Brooks

About Shannon Brooks:


Shannon Brooks is a multi-sensory, multimedia  artist working across movement, sound, sculpture, moving image, installation, and social-based practices.

Shannon’s work combines the heightened ritual of performance with the glorious imperfections of process. Their practice revels in the seams and edges of their work, lingers within transitions, and creates strange worlds. Shannon is a self-identified freak/weirdo and uses play and clowning to embrace the nonsensical. Their practice is iterative and spans time, it shifts form and medium to experiment to follow a thread of research or question, is it archival, it pierces into other dimensions.

As a Disabled and low-vision person, Shannon believes access is for everyone, is always transforming, and is a creative force that transforms time, space, and power structures.

Shannon will be accompanied musically on Saturdays by George Shands and Josh Meakim.

image is described in post
A two tone blue and white photo of George. His head is tilted to the right and he is making a calm face with a slight smile.

About This Intensive Workshop Series:

Improvising with our Ecosystems is laboratory to experiment with different approaches to improvisation, ground into your body’s impulses, explore imaginative embodiments, and play with self-audio description improv with live music. 

Workshop Dates and Details:

These four workshops are set up to build on one another but can be taken separately. 

They will be offered virtually on Zoom.

Each workshop is two hours long:

Thursday classes will run from 6 PM to 8 PM (Eastern Time) and will introduce new improvisation concepts

Saturday classes will run from 4 PM to 6 PM (Eastern Time) and will provide opportunities to more deeply explore those concepts while listening to live music!

  • Thursday, October 9th (6 PM to 8 PM): Improvising with our Interior Ecosystems: improvising with our bodies, impulses, memories, and self audio description.
  • Saturday, October 11th (4 PM to 6 PM): Improvising with our Interior Ecosystems: review + practice laboratory with live music.
  • Thursday, October 16th (6 PM to 8 PM): Improvising with our Exterior Ecosystems: improvising with our environments, materials, and others.
  • Saturday, October 18th (6 PM to 8 PM): Improvising with our Exterior Ecosystems: review + practice laboratory with live music.

To register for this workshop series, send an email to info@darkroomballet.com with the subject line Improvising with our Ecosystems