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The Royal Ballet traditionally made available audio devices with descriptive narration so that sightless viewers could understand the action on stage. Now, through a innovative production, the entire audience will listen to such descriptions within a work that explores how visual impairment can redefine our perceptions to sensation, sound and dramatic expression.

Blind Artist Collaborates with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a recent Royal Ballet production that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

Through her work, Healey is guided by a ambition to demonstrate how blindness and physical challenge can present an unique form of perception for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the composition, establishes the center of the production on stage.

"Producing exceptional dance and musical theater for all" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the organization is focusing on "total access – welcoming artists and viewers to experience ballet in revolutionary innovative methods," he said.

Several Choreographers Partner on Fresh Work

The new work is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, all collaborating with the blind artist.

The curator, the organizer of this work, stated: "International Ballet Day was founded on the idea of access. Following a ten years, we're pushing that notion deeper to examine how impaired perspectives can mold our art form, and welcome viewers of all abilities and experiences to experience dance in innovative methods."

After collaborating with the artist in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator understood that individuals who can see who had experienced Healey’s descriptive audio found it aided them understand ballet, which can look so unclear.

Moving Partnership Of Professional and Amateur Dancers

In one dance piece, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from childhood and who had previously believed that dance was "mainly for those who can see". But Kikuchi has realized that it actually "involves a lot of feeling and emotions" and activates faculties, "sight-based and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s personal story of once becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sunlight to orient his way back had inspired a duet in which Dixon becomes the "soothing presence of the sunlight around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson explained.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could sense the temperature … So I continued moving to the west …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a excellent helper to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the narrative emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Unique Relationship with Dance

The blind artist, an academic of disability studies at the Toronto university, said: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a dynamic bond with dance in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's connection with their body and movement."

In collaborating with the performers, she was seeking to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through vision," she said. "I converse with the performers to get a sense of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breath is, what they consider, how their physical form are feeling.

"Partnering with the choreographers [and] clothing, illumination, stage design and music artists, the perceptions and creativity of visual impairment are ever present as we, visually impaired and sighted persons, build a rapport through our love of movement and dance. It is this artistry and affection that I try to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the faculties guided by visual impairment."

She added: "Although the sight of the ballet, the gorgeous spectacle, is there before the patrons, there is so much that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is encouraging sighted and blind audience members both into the unseen. What I wish is that, when audience members leave, they sense ballet in a new way, and they’re also sensing the existence, and perceiving the perceptions of, blindness in fresh and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose works have gathered more than billions of streams, said the audio descriptions established a relationship between visual impairment and sight "by means of a musical landscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He continued: "This isn't merely a description of a show. It is the performance itself."

World Dance Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide associates for International Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will furthermore supply entry to backstage material, preparations and newly commissioned productions – streamed as it happens via their official platform.