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The Royal Ballet traditionally made available audio devices with audio descriptions so that sightless viewers could understand the movement on stage. Currently, through a groundbreaking performance, the entire crowd will experience such commentary within a piece that explores how visual impairment can redefine our perceptions to experience, sound and dramatic expression.

Blind Artist Partners with Celebrated Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind artist, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and musician the celebrated composer in creating a recent ballet company production that will launch on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

Through her work, Healey is guided by a wish to illustrate how blindness and disability can provide an different mode of perception for all people. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the composition, creates the center of the performance on stage.

"Making top-tier ballet and opera for each person" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the troupe is zeroing in on "radical accessibility – welcoming creators and patrons to experience dance in life-changing innovative methods," he said.

Various Choreographers Collaborate 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 director of this production, said: "International Ballet Day was established on the principle of accessibility. After a ten years, we're extending that idea deeper to examine how impaired viewpoints can mold our creative medium, and welcome audiences of diverse capacities and histories to encounter ballet in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator realized that those with vision who had experienced Healey’s audio narration found it helped them comprehend ballet, which can look so abstract.

Inspiring Collaboration Between Expert and Amateur Performers

In one performance, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from childhood and who had always thought that dance was "mainly for those who can see". But Kikuchi has discovered that it truly "entails a lot of sensation and feelings" and activates perceptions, "visual and non-sight".

The dancer's unique narrative of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sun to guide his way back had influenced a dance piece in which Dixon becomes the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they perform as one," Malcomson explained.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the sunlight itself, I could feel the warmth … So I kept walking to the west …. It led 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 Provides Special Connection with Motion

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability research at the University of Toronto, stated: "Blindness and being blind encourages a vibrant bond with movement in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's bond with their physical self and dance."

In collaborating with the dancers, she was seeking to communicate what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not available through vision," she noted. "I converse with the performers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their body, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are feeling.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] clothing, illumination, set and music designers, the understandings and creativity of blindness are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted individuals, develop a rapport through our affection of dance and dance. It is this innovation and passion that I try to weave into the spoken commentary. It is a partnership of the perceptions guided by visual impairment."

She added: "While the vision of the ballet, the gorgeous spectacle, is available facing the audience, there is so much that they miss or valuing, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and blind patrons equally into the unseen. What I wish is that, when patrons depart, they feel ballet in a different way, and they’re also sensing the existence, and hearing the understandings of, visual impairment in innovative and active ways."

Musician The Composer on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose compositions have amassed more than billions of digital listens, said the audio descriptions established a rapport between blindness and sight "by means of a audio environment, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He added: "This isn't simply a description of a performance. This is the performance itself."

World Dance Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s global collaborators for International Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will also supply entry to behind-the-scenes video, preparations and recently created productions – broadcast as it happens via online channels.