“How are your feet? Is one in front of the other?” asked Andrew Zhang, 22, who lost his sight completely in a childhood accident.
“You can feel it,” Mana Hashimoto said, grabbing one of his hands and placing it on her shin. “They are like in a natural position.”
At a recent workshop, Ms. Hashimoto, a blind professional dancer and choreographer, was surrounded by four students from the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School, a community school for the blind and visually impaired that’s near Lincoln Center. Part of her life’s work, her workshops bring the highly visual art form of dance to those without sight. This time, it was in preparation for a larger stage — helping the students recall the movements for when they sit in the audience during her upcoming performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual collaboration with the Lighthouse Guild
On Friday, May 18th, she is bringing dance to the stages of the Lighthouse Guild Met Concert for the first time, performing, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a contemporary dance choreographed to the Simon and Garfunkel song.
Read more about Ms. Hashimoto and her preparation for the upcoming event.
Excerpts taken from The New York Times, “How to Convey Dance to Those Without Sight? All Hands On” by Serena Solomon
