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This prestigious ballet company traditionally made available audio devices with audio descriptions so that blind patrons could follow the movement on stage. Currently, through a innovative new work, the entire audience will experience such narration within a production that explores how lack of sight can redefine our reactions to sensation, music and narrative.

Visually Impaired Artist Collaborates with Renowned Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in producing a recent ballet company work that will premiere on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as announced recently.

Through her work, Healey is driven by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and disability can present an different mode of awareness for all people. Her rich spoken descriptions, integrated with the music, forms the heart of the performance on stage.

"Producing top-tier dance and musical theater for each person" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the company is concentrating on "radical accessibility – welcoming performers and audiences to discover dance in revolutionary fresh approaches," he stated.

Various Dance Creators Collaborate on New Performance

The new work is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, each working with Healey.

The curator, the organizer of this commission, commented: "International Ballet Day was founded on the concept of accessibility. After a decade, we're expanding that notion more to explore how disabled viewpoints can influence our art form, and welcome audiences of diverse capacities and histories to encounter ballet in new ways."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator realized that those with vision who had encountered the artist's descriptive audio believed it assisted them understand ballet, which can appear so complex.

Touching Collaboration Of Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In one performance, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from birth and who had long assumed that ballet was "mainly for individuals with vision". But the dancer has realized that it truly "entails a lot of feeling and emotions" and taps into perceptions, "visual and non-sight".

The dancer's personal story of earlier losing his way on his way home and relying on the sunlight to direct his way back had motivated a performance in which the professional dancer embodies the "soothing presence of the sun around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer stated.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be shining from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the sunlight itself, I could feel the heat … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a excellent guide to me. The sunlight could be a powerful symbol. So the story emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Distinct Connection with Motion

The blind artist, an scholar of disability research at the Toronto university, stated: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a active bond with dance in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s bond with their physical self and movement."

In collaborating with the performers, she was attempting to express what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not accessible through looking," she explained. "I talk with the performers to get a feeling of how they feel in their physical self, where their breath is, what they consider, how their muscles are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] clothing, stage lights, set and music artists, the viewpoints and artistry of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and sighted persons, establish a relationship through our affection of movement and performance. It is this creativity and love that I attempt to blend into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the senses led by blindness."

She noted: "Even though the view of the performance, the beautiful display, is there before the patrons, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is inviting sighted and visually impaired audience members alike into the hidden. What I hope is that, when audience members exit, they feel performance in a new way, and they’re also sensing the being, and perceiving the viewpoints of, blindness in new and vibrant ways."

Musician The Composer on Sound Narration

Richter, whose compositions have gathered more than billions of online plays, said the spoken narration established a rapport between blindness and sight "via a soundscape, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He continued: "It is not just a explanation of a performance. It is the art."

International Ballet Day Collaborators

The company's international collaborators for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also offer entry to backstage footage, preparations and freshly produced productions – streamed in real-time via their official platform.