Building off of my momentum with MGM providing audio description devices in T-Mobile Arena, I decided to take it a step further. Before losing my vision, Cirque du Soleil was one of my major interests. My parents brought me to my first show with Nouvelle Experience back in the early 90s. Since then, I’ve seen Alegria, Quidam, Dralion, Varekai, Mystere, O, Ka, Corteo, and Beatles Love. I enjoyed the motion picture version of Allegria, plus the Journey of Man combining some of the most fantastic pieces from all of the Cirque shows. I missed out on Saltimbanco and La Nouba sadly, and never got a chance to see Zumanity.
I wasn’t sure how to go about attending a Cirque performance again since going blind as I’d never heard of one being audio described. Having asked other blind friends, they just said the ticket offices would simply say No and that they didn’t offer that for their performances. Not being deterred, I started up my fervor and became determined to get at least one show on the Strip described.
I really wanted to bring Amy to see Zumanity, Cirque’s adult show at the New York New York hotel. Since we were going to be in Vegas already for the Sharks game against the Knights, I planned a trip to Zumanity for the night after. I started off as I normally do, a quick call to the ticketing office to inquire about audio description. Rather than getting a No, the amazing ticket representative actually took down my information and promised to pass it on to the right people. Now when I said I inquired about audio description, what I actually did was Request it outright. Making it a request is an effective way to assert our rights to audio description for these kinds of performances. Just asking gives them an out to say No, while requesting puts much more pressure on them since then they would be actively denying an accessibility accommodation.
I supplemented this request with a message through the Cirque website, but never received a response. Sure enough, after getting off the phone, I was CC’ed in an email sent to the show producer. I had requested Audio Description for a blind patron for the performance on April 1st, 2018. I was unsure of which showing to get tickets for and left that determination to the schedule of the audio describer they would be bringing in for the request. I also dropped in that I’ve had live audio description before from the describers from the Smith Center and called out for Chanelle Carson specifically. She was the one the Curran Theatre flew up to describe Fun Home for us a year earlier. The message went out and I sat back and waited a few weeks for a response.
Our trip was approaching and I still hadn’t heard back from Cirque nor the Zumanity office about my AD request, so I decided to pull in that VP of Counsel from MGM. MGM owns the New York New York, and I explained the situation, to which he got in contact with the legal liaison between MGM and Cirque. The response granting my accommodation literally came in three days before we were to fly out to Vegas.
The original show producer of Zumanity had been away on an extended vacation and had never actually received the email from the ticket rep. The very week we were to fly in, Cirque had switched the show producers around and brought the producer from Ka across the street to take over Zumanity. To say that he went above and beyond would be an offensive understatement. His name is Yago Pita and in a manner of days, he contacted me, learned about audio description and we worked out exactly what was expected. Initially his thought was to have an off-night singer do the description because of the quality of her voice, but I countered and said that there were already trained describers in Vegas who were professionals and knew the context of description and how to appropriately call things out for a blind audience. I gave Yago Chanelle’s name and contact info and he proceeded to contact her.
She just happened to be free on April 1st and chose to describe the late showing, being allowed to sit in on the early showing to draft her first pass of a description script. Yago worked out the technical details, finding a small radio and an open Coms channel that wasn’t being used by Tech, the talent, nor the front office. They had a perfect perch for Chanelle in the lighting booth and set up a mic for her to use over the open Coms channel so she didn’t have to provide any of the usual audio description radios/hardware.
I managed to purchase tickets for the love seat section for the late performance, and after talking with Yago, he managed to move our seats to a much better location. We are still forever thankful for his accommodation, understanding, expedience, and willingness to work with us. Yago and Chanelle met us in front of the Zumanity Theater. The early show had just gotten out, Chanelle was super excited to see us in person again and was buzzed from how fun the show was. Yago was great, thanking us for being the impetus to get this service set up, fully appreciating my story of how I loved Cirque and was more than happy to make it accessible not only for myself, but other blind patrons in the future, plus it was exciting to be able to take Amy to her first Cirque show and not have to worry about me just being bored and missing out on all the action.
Yago brought us all into the Theatre, passing by many of the show performers who were greeting patrons in the hallway. Amy was happily confused as to what was going on. I smiled, shrugged, and just said “Art!”
Chanelle split off from us to head to her perch while Yago brought us to our seat. The radio worked like a charm. I plugged in my iPhone earbud and quickly got used to the volume knob so I could manage the volume throughout all the changes in the show. It all worked without a hitch! Amy and I were able to enjoy the show together, Chanelle had an amazing script and was doing a fantastic job describing on the fly, grand descriptions of action, costumes, set and lighting design, all spot on allowing me to create my own memories for the show.
When all was done, the theatre emptied and we stayed behind for a post-mortem with the crew. Yago, Chanelle, the stage manager, and a few other managers all came out to greet us and hear my account of how it all went. We were beyond happy at having been able to set up the first ever audio described Cirque du Soleil performance! Since it was an adult show, I cracked everyone up commenting on Chanelle’s description, saying that “there are only so many words for boobs.” We then learned that the late show had been absolutely nothing like the early show, so most of the description script Chanelle had written was useless and the majority of her descriptions were done totally on the fly and improvised. I was shocked considering how natural and prepared she sounded during the show.
The takeaways were that Yago was super happy that it all worked out as planned, and that he couldn’t wait to bring a report to Corporate to start a process of learning how to scale audio description to spread it to all the other shows on the Strip and potentially bring it to the other traveling and stationary shows around the world. Having Chanelle or the other describers from the Smith Center sit in on the shows and draft scripts would probably be the best idea, coming in ever so often to update it as the show updates, and being available for live description as requested. The original concern and excuse for never providing audio description was that most of the shows change so often that there would never be a consistent performance, but Chanelle showed that a trained describer is great with improvisation!
The other scaling idea was to write a script and have an automatic system play it back based on lighting or sound cues from Tech, but I said that having experienced that before with Wicked wasn’t the best experience as it was not suited at all for improvisation, and should anything change last minute, it would be very difficult to adapt the playback script to fill in for the changes. Automatic was not adaptable. Cirque could easily set up one or two performances a month that would be called out as audio description nights much the same way traveling shows do it at the SHN theatres here in San Francisco. Having specific dates would work, but would not account for patrons who find out about the show but don’t have their trip set up around those dates, which is where live-description would come in. Handling it on a case-by-case basis would help with the describers especially if they are unavailable for that evening, or just requiring that accommodations be requested several days in advance, much the same way ASL interpreters are provided for the deaf and hard of hearing.
One step at a time, we’ve been pushing to make Las Vegas more accessible overall! With NFB on the way to the Mandalay Bay next year, it will be more important to start pushing for the rest of the shows on the Strip to get described so the thousands of blind and visually impaired conference attendees and exhibitors can inclusively enjoy all Vegas has to offer! Major thanks again to Yago for getting the request set up so quickly, Chanelle for providing mind-bogglingly amazing improvised audio description, and Amy for supporting me and giving me the drive to get this done so we could experience this show together.