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The Royal Ballet has long provided audio devices with audio descriptions so that blind audience members could understand the performance on stage. Presently, through a innovative performance, the complete crowd will experience such narration within a production that examines how visual impairment can redefine our responses to experience, music and storytelling.

Blind Artist Works with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired creator, is partnering with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in developing a new ballet company production that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as declared this week.

Through her work, the artist is guided by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an alternative mode of understanding for each individual. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, blended with the score, forms the heart of the show on stage.

"Creating exceptional dance and opera for all" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's director, the organization is focusing on "total access – inviting artists and patrons to discover ballet in transformative innovative methods," he said.

Several Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Production

The fresh production is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, each collaborating with Healey.

The curator, the curator of this work, said: "World Ballet Day was created on the concept of accessibility. After a decade, we're pushing that concept deeper to examine how impaired viewpoints can mold our creative medium, and encourage patrons of every capability and histories to discover dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, he recognized that sighted people who had encountered the artist's spoken descriptions believed it aided them understand ballet, which can seem so complex.

Inspiring Partnership Of Expert and Amateur Performers

In one duet, the company's performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired since birth and who had always thought that ballet was "mainly for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has understood that it truly "includes a lot of feeling and emotions" and taps into senses, "sight-based and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of once losing his way on his way home and relying on the sunlight to guide his way back had influenced a performance in which Dixon becomes the "gentle warmth of the sun around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," Malcomson stated.

"This occurred during the day and I had a sense that the sunlight should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could sense the temperature … So I kept walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sun could be a powerful metaphor. So the narrative originated from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Unique Relationship with Movement

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the Toronto university, said: "Blindness and being blind encourages a dynamic bond with motion in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's connection with their physical self and motion."

In partnering with the dancers, 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 dancers to get a sense of how they feel in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they think, how their physical form are sensing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] costume, illumination, scenery and music artists, the understandings and innovation of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and sighted people, develop a connection through our love of dance and performance. It is this innovation and passion that I try to weave into the detailed narration. It is a partnership of the faculties directed by blindness."

The artist continued: "While the sight of the dance, the gorgeous spectacle, is available before the patrons, there is so much that they miss or appreciating, and it is blindness that is encouraging seeing and blind viewers alike into the unseen. What I desire is that, when patrons depart, they experience performance in a different way, and they’re also sensing the presence, and listening to the perceptions of, blindness in new and dynamic ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Narration

Richter, whose compositions have accumulated more than 3.5 billion digital listens, commented the descriptive commentary formed a relationship between visual impairment and vision "through a soundscape, providing expression to that which does not always appear". He continued: "This isn't merely a description of a performance. This is the performance itself."

International Dance Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide partners for World Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will furthermore provide access to behind-the-scenes footage, preparations and newly commissioned productions – broadcast in real-time via their official platform.