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The Royal Ballet traditionally provided headphones with descriptive narration so that visually impaired audience members could track the action on stage. Now, via a groundbreaking production, the complete gathering will experience such descriptions within a production that examines how blindness can transform our perceptions to feeling, sound and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Artist Collaborates with Renowned Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in producing a fresh Royal Ballet work that will debut on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as announced recently.

Within her creative practice, Healey is guided by a wish to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can offer an alternative form of perception for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the composition, creates the core of the production on stage.

"Producing world-class dance and opera for everyone" is a motto of the the organization. Under the director, the company's leader, the troupe is concentrating on "radical accessibility – encouraging artists and viewers to experience ballet in transformative fresh approaches," he stated.

Various Dance Creators Collaborate on Fresh Work

The recent commission is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, every one working with Healey.

Robert Binet, the organizer of this work, commented: "International Ballet Day was established on the principle of accessibility. After a ten years, we're pushing that concept further to examine how impaired viewpoints can influence our performance style, and encourage viewers of diverse capacities and experiences to encounter dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he recognized that those with vision who had experienced the artist's descriptive audio believed it helped them understand ballet, which can appear so complex.

Inspiring Collaboration Between Expert and Non-Professional Dancers

In one dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from childhood and who had long assumed that dance was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it actually "involves a lot of sensation and emotions" and activates perceptions, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's individual experience of previously losing his way on his way home and depending on the sun to direct his way back had motivated a dance piece in which the professional dancer becomes the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around his partner as they dance in unison," the choreographer said.

"This occurred during the day and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be shining from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could feel the heat … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It guided me home. The sun was a good guide to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the tale originated from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Distinct Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an academic of disability research at the University of Toronto, commented: "Visual impairment and lacking sight invites a active relationship with motion in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and dance."

In partnering with the performers, the artist was striving to convey what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she noted. "I speak with the performers to get a sense of how they feel in their body, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their body are sensing.

"Partnering with the choreographers [and] attire, lighting, stage design and music designers, the viewpoints and innovation of blindness are ever present as we, blind and seeing individuals, build a relationship through our love of motion and performance. It is this innovation and love that I strive to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the perceptions led by blindness."

She added: "While the vision of the ballet, the beautiful display, is available facing the audience, there is a great deal that they miss or valuing, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and blind audience members alike into the hidden. What I wish is that, when viewers depart, they sense performance in a distinct way, and they’re also sensing the being, and listening to the viewpoints of, visual impairment in innovative and vibrant ways."

Composer The Composer on Audio Descriptions

Richter, whose recordings have amassed more than billions of online plays, commented the spoken narration established a relationship between visual impairment and sight "by means of a audio environment, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He noted: "This isn't merely a description of a show. It is the art."

World Ballet Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international associates for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will furthermore offer access to behind-the-scenes material, preparations and newly commissioned works – streamed as it happens via the event website.