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The Royal Ballet has long made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that blind audience members could understand the performance on stage. Now, in a innovative performance, the entire crowd will listen to such descriptions within a production that examines how lack of sight can reshape our responses to experience, audio and narrative.

Visually Impaired Artist Collaborates with Celebrated Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in creating a new Royal Ballet production that will debut on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as declared this week.

Through her work, the artist is motivated by a ambition to demonstrate how blindness and disability can provide an alternative mode of perception for everyone. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the score, creates the center of the show on stage.

"Producing top-tier ballet and opera for everyone" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the organization is concentrating on "radical accessibility – welcoming creators and audiences to encounter ballet in life-changing new ways," he said.

Multiple Choreographers Collaborate on Fresh Work

The fresh production is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, all partnering with the blind artist.

The curator, the director of this production, stated: "International Ballet Day was established on the principle of inclusion. Following a ten years, we're extending that notion more to examine how disabled viewpoints can influence our creative medium, and encourage viewers of diverse capacities and experiences to encounter dance in innovative methods."

After collaborating with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he realized that those with vision who had encountered Healey’s spoken descriptions found it assisted them grasp ballet, which can seem so abstract.

Inspiring Partnership Between Professional and Amateur Performers

In one duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind since birth and who had long assumed that dance was "mostly for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has discovered that it truly "includes a lot of sensation and emotions" and activates senses, "sight-based and other sensory".

The dancer's unique narrative of previously losing his way on his way home and using the sunlight to guide his way back had inspired a performance in which Dixon becomes the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson stated.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be radiating from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the rays itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a good guide to me. The sunlight could be a powerful representation. So the story originated from there."

Blindness Presents Special Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an academic of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Visual impairment and being blind encourages a vibrant relationship with motion in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s bond with their physical self and dance."

In working with the dancers, she was attempting to express what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she said. "I talk with the performers to get a understanding of how they’re feeling in their body, where their respiration is, what they’re thinking, how their body are feeling.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] clothing, stage lights, set and sound designers, the understandings and innovation of blindness are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and seeing people, develop a relationship through our affection of dance and dance. It is this creativity and passion that I try to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the perceptions led by visual impairment."

She added: "Although the vision of the ballet, the gorgeous display, is there in front of the patrons, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and blind viewers equally into the unseen. What I hope is that, when audience members exit, they feel ballet in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and hearing the perceptions of, blindness in fresh and active ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose recordings have amassed more than 3.5 billion digital listens, said the spoken narration created a relationship between visual impairment and sight "via a soundscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He noted: "It is not simply a explanation of a performance. This is the art."

World Dance Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide associates for World Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will additionally supply availability to behind-the-scenes footage, practice sessions and newly commissioned productions – broadcast in real-time via online channels.