Dancing with Blindness: With Devon Healey and Esie Mensah
Live on CIUT 89.5 FM
Airing Date: October 4, 2025
Host: Nicole Inica Hamilton
Featured Guest(s): Devon Healey and Esie Mensah
This week on Turn Out Radio, featured guests Devon Healey (FFDN Scholar-in-Residence) and Esie Mensah (FFDN Artist-in-Residence) discuss how Blindness elevates our experience of dance, and the real-time generation of movement and Immersive Descriptive Audio. Originated by Healey, IDA is an artistic technique that verbalizes the sensations of witnessing movement as a blind person, of creating movement as a choreographer, and of moving as a dancer. Witness the collaboration of their work during open rehearsals, and at the Up Next event occurring at Fall for Dance North (FFDN) 2025. Learn more here.
About Devon Healey
Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at OISE, University of Toronto. All of her work is grounded in her experience as a blind woman guided by a desire to show how blindness, specifically, and disability more broadly, can be understood as offering an alternate form of perception and is thus, a valuable and creative way of experiencing and knowing the world. She is the author of, Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan). Devon is an award-winning actor and the co-founder of Peripheral Theatre. Her new play, Rainbow on Mars, co-produced with Outside the March and the National Ballet of Canada premiers August 2025 in Toronto.
About Esie Mensah
Esie Mensah is an award-winning choreographer, director, dancer, movement director, educator, and TEDx speaker whose powerful voice shapes the future of performance across dance, theatre, opera, and film/TV. A Dora-nominated artist, she has worked with global leaders Rihanna, Nelly Furtado, Kenny Ortega, Canada’s Got Talent, AGO, and the Toronto Raptors. Her work has toured internationally to the U.S., U.K., Ghana, Nigeria, France, and more. She has created for Soulpepper, Obsidian Theatre, and Shaw Festival, and directed Serving Elizabeth at Theatre Aquarius. This season, she makes her Stratford Festival debut with Ransacking Troy and is choreographer for Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha: A Musical Reimagining, premiering in Chicago in May 2025.
Esie collaborated with FFDN on her film TESSEL (2021) and as an original advisor to 8-Count. She is the Afrodiasporic Movement Program Lead & Afrofusion teacher with Canada’s National Ballet School.
