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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

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

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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

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News / Announcements

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

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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: Staccato vs. Legato 
  • Saturday, October 25, 2025: Accent In vs. Accent Out
  • Wednesday, October 29, 2025: Using the Floor to Absorb vs. Generate Energy
  • Saturday, November 1, 2025: Proprioception vs. Interoception, Dancing from the Inside Out

    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

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News / Announcements

October 2025 Improvisation Intensive Workshop Series with Shannon Brooks

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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.

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