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The Royal Ballet traditionally made available headphones with descriptive narration so that visually impaired viewers could track the performance on stage. Presently, via a groundbreaking production, the entire crowd will listen to such descriptions within a production that explores how lack of sight can reshape our responses to sensation, sound and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Artist Partners with Celebrated Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired creator, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in developing a new Royal Ballet work that will premiere on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

Through her work, Healey is driven by a ambition to show how blindness and physical challenge can offer an unique type of awareness for each individual. Her rich spoken descriptions, integrated with the score, establishes the heart of the performance on stage.

"Making world-class ballet and opera for everyone" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the organization is focusing on "complete inclusion – welcoming artists and audiences to experience dance in life-changing fresh approaches," he said.

Various Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Production

The recent commission is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all collaborating with Healey.

The curator, the curator of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was established on the idea of accessibility. After a decade, we're extending that notion more to examine how impaired perspectives can influence our performance style, and encourage viewers of every capability and backgrounds to experience ballet in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with the artist in Canada and Australian locations, the curator realized that those with vision who had heard Healey’s spoken descriptions felt it helped them understand ballet, which can look so abstract.

Touching Collaboration Of Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one duet, the company's performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from childhood and who had previously believed that dance was "primarily for sighted people". But the dancer has realized that it in fact "entails a lot of sensation and sentiments" and activates perceptions, "visual and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and using the sunlight to orient his way back had motivated a dance piece in which Dixon represents the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they perform as one," Malcomson explained.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the sunlight itself, I could feel the warmth … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a powerful representation. So the tale emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Unique Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an scholar of disability research at the University of Toronto, stated: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a active connection with motion in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s connection with their physical self and dance."

In working with the dancers, the artist was attempting to communicate what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through vision," she said. "I talk with the dancers to get a feeling of how they feel in their body, where their breathing is, what they think, how their muscles are feeling.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] clothing, lighting, stage design and sound designers, the understandings and innovation of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and seeing persons, develop a relationship through our affection of movement and dance. It is this creativity and love that I attempt to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the perceptions directed by visual impairment."

The artist added: "Although the vision of the performance, the beautiful display, is available before the audience, there is so much that they overlook or appreciating, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and blind viewers alike into the invisible. What I hope is that, when patrons depart, they feel dance in a different way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and hearing the understandings of, visual impairment in fresh and active ways."

Musician The Composer on Audio Descriptions

The composer, whose compositions have gathered more than billions of streams, stated the descriptive commentary formed a relationship between visual impairment and vision "through a soundscape, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He added: "It is not just a narration of a production. It is the art."

World Ballet Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for International Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will additionally provide access to behind-the-scenes footage, preparations and recently created productions – transmitted in real-time via their official platform.