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This prestigious ballet company for years offered headphones with audio descriptions so that sightless patrons could understand the action on stage. Presently, through a revolutionary new work, the entire audience will hear such commentary within a work that examines how lack of sight can transform our responses to sensation, sound and storytelling.

Blind Creator Partners with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired creator, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in creating a new Royal Ballet production that will debut on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as declared this week.

In her art, the artist is motivated by a wish to demonstrate how blindness and disability can present an alternative form of understanding for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, woven with the composition, forms the heart of the show on stage.

"Making exceptional ballet and musical theater for each person" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's leader, the troupe is focusing on "total access – encouraging performers and audiences to discover dance in life-changing new ways," he explained.

Several Choreographers Partner on Fresh Work

The fresh production is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, each collaborating with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the organizer of this work, stated: "International Ballet Day was created on the concept of access. After a ten years, we're expanding that idea further to consider how challenged perspectives can mold our art form, and encourage audiences of every capability and backgrounds to encounter ballet in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, he realized that those with vision who had encountered the artist's spoken descriptions felt it aided them understand ballet, which can look so abstract.

Inspiring Collaboration Of Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In one performance, the company's performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind since birth and who had long assumed that dance was "primarily for those who can see". But Kikuchi has discovered that it actually "entails a lot of feeling and emotions" and activates senses, "visual and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sun to guide his way back had motivated a performance in which Dixon becomes the "soothing presence of the sun around his partner as they move together," the choreographer explained.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sun should be beaming from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I kept walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a good helper to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the narrative originated from there."

Blindness Provides Special Connection with Movement

The blind artist, an scholar of disability studies at the University of Toronto, stated: "Visual impairment and being blind encourages a dynamic connection with movement in a way that is similar to a expert performer's bond with their physical self and dance."

In collaborating with the dancers, she was attempting to convey what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not accessible through sight," she explained. "I speak with the dancers to get a understanding of how they feel in their body, where their breathing is, what they think, how their body are feeling.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] costume, illumination, stage design and music designers, the viewpoints and artistry of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted persons, establish a connection through our love of movement and performance. It is this artistry and love that I strive to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the perceptions guided by visual impairment."

She added: "While the view of the dance, the gorgeous display, is present facing the patrons, there is a great deal that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and visually impaired viewers both into the invisible. What I hope is that, when patrons leave, they experience ballet in a different way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and hearing the viewpoints of, visual impairment in new and dynamic ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

The composer, whose works have amassed more than billions of streams, stated the spoken narration created a connection between visual impairment and sight "through a audio environment, giving voice to that which remains unseen". He added: "It is not just a narration of a production. It is performance."

International Dance Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global partners for World Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will additionally supply entry to behind-the-scenes material, rehearsals and newly commissioned works – transmitted as it happens via the event website.