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This prestigious ballet company for years provided audio devices with audio descriptions so that blind patrons could understand the action on stage. Presently, via a revolutionary new work, the complete crowd will hear such descriptions within a production that explores how visual impairment can reshape our perceptions to experience, music and narrative.

Blind Artist Partners with Celebrated Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a new ballet company work that will premiere on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as declared on Thursday.

Through her work, the artist is motivated by a wish to show how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an unique form of understanding for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the music, forms the center of the production on stage.

"Creating exceptional ballet and opera for each person" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the troupe is focusing on "total access – welcoming performers and patrons to experience dance in revolutionary innovative methods," he stated.

Multiple Dance Creators Partner on New Work

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

The curator, the organizer of this work, said: "World Ballet Day was created on the concept of accessibility. Following a decade, we're extending that concept deeper to explore how impaired perspectives can mold our performance style, and invite audiences of all abilities and backgrounds to discover ballet in innovative methods."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australia, he realized that sighted people who had encountered the artist's descriptive audio found it aided them comprehend ballet, which can look so unclear.

Moving Collaboration Between Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular duet, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from birth and who had previously believed that dance was "mainly for individuals with vision". But the dancer has discovered that it in fact "includes a lot of feeling and emotions" and taps into senses, "visual and other sensory".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of once becoming disoriented on his way home and using the sunlight to direct his way back had inspired a duet in which the professional dancer embodies the "soothing presence of the sun around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer said.

"It was during the day and I had a intuition that the sun should be shining from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the sunlight itself, I could feel the warmth … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It led me home. The sunshine was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a powerful metaphor. So the story emerged from there."

Blindness Provides Distinct Connection with Motion

Healey, an academic of disability research at the Toronto university, said: "Visual impairment and lacking sight invites a vibrant bond with motion in a way that is like a professional dancer’s relationship with their physical self and dance."

In partnering with the performers, she was attempting to convey what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not accessible through looking," she noted. "I speak with the performers to get a understanding of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their body are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] costume, illumination, stage design and music creators, the viewpoints and creativity of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and seeing persons, build a rapport through our passion of motion and performance. It is this innovation and love that I attempt to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the senses directed by blindness."

The artist noted: "While the view of the performance, the beautiful visual feast, is available before the audience, there is so much that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is encouraging sighted and visually impaired audience members both into the invisible. What I hope is that, when patrons leave, they sense ballet in a different way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and listening to the understandings of, visual impairment in new and vibrant ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Narration

Richter, whose works have accumulated more than 3.5 billion digital listens, said the audio descriptions established a connection between visual impairment and vision "via a audio environment, offering narration to that which is not always visible". He added: "This isn't merely a explanation of a production. This is the performance itself."

World Dance Event Collaborators

The company's international associates for World Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will additionally supply availability to behind-the-scenes footage, practice sessions and freshly produced pieces – streamed in real-time via the event website.