“I realized I was sitting in a room full of people who wanted to understand my experience.” — Audience member living with low vision
enVISION began with a conversation.
In 2019, ShaLeigh Comerford was commissioned by Arts Access to create a new work with dancer and educator Davian “DJ” Robinson, who lost his sight as a child. From the beginning, the collaboration felt expansive. Their movement research, artistic questions, and creative approaches continually deepened one another.
One day, while completing his degree at UNC Charlotte, DJ called with an observation that would change the course of the project.
For the first time in his life, he had attended a dance performance without needing to ask his sighted mentor what had happened.
That conversation sparked a flood of questions:
- How had that experience become possible?
- Why are so many dance performances designed around the assumption that vision is the primary way of understanding movement?
- What might become possible if touch, hearing, vibration, scent, storytelling, and embodied experience were treated as equal partners to sight?
As they explored these questions together, another challenge emerged. Audio description is an important access tool for blind and low-vision audiences, but dance is more than something that is seen. It is physical, sensory, emotional, and relational. How might a performance invite audiences to experience dance rather than simply receive information about it?
The pandemic delayed the project until August 2021, when the team was finally able to begin working together in the studio. They invited Krishna Washburn, founder of Dark Room Ballet and one of DJ’s longtime mentors, to join the process as a consultant. They also assembled a team of paid blind and low-vision community collaborators whose lived experience became central to the creation of the work.
Together, the team set out to create a performance that was not simply accessible to blind and low-vision audiences, but one that could be experienced differently by everyone. The process challenged deeply rooted assumptions about accessibility, dance-making, audience participation, and who gets to shape artistic practice.
The result was enVISION: Sensory Beyond Sight, a multi-sensory dance-theatre experience built through movement, sound, texture, scent, storytelling, and audience participation. Rather than separating audiences through different modes of access, the performance sought to create a shared experience.
When the work premiered at the American Dance Festival in 2022, every performance sold out.
Yet one moment remains more meaningful than the reviews or the ticket sales.
After a performance, an audience member who lived with low vision shared that he suddenly realized he was sitting in a theatre filled with people who wanted to understand his experience. Both he and ShaLeigh were moved to tears.
That moment affirmed what the collaborators had been discovering all along: accessibility is not simply about removing barriers. It can also serve as a catalyst for artistic innovation, deeper connection, and new ways of creating together.
Today, enVISION continues to evolve through disability-led collaboration with Blind, low vision, Deaf, hard of hearing, DeafBlind, and disabled artists. What began as a conversation between two collaborators has grown into an ongoing artistic inquiry exploring how accessibility can serve as a catalyst for artistic innovation, collective belonging, and cultural change.