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The Royal Ballet has long offered audio devices with spoken commentary so that visually impaired audience members could understand the action on stage. Currently, via a innovative new work, the entire crowd will hear such commentary within a production that explores how blindness can redefine our perceptions to experience, music and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Artist Collaborates with Celebrated Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a new Royal Ballet commission that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared recently.

Through her work, the artist is motivated by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and disability can present an different form of understanding for all people. Her detailed audio narration, blended with the score, establishes the center of the show on stage.

"Creating top-tier dance and opera for everyone" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's director, the organization is focusing on "total access – inviting creators and patrons to encounter dance in transformative fresh approaches," he said.

Various Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Performance

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

The curator, the curator of this production, said: "International Ballet Day was created on the principle of inclusion. Following a ten years, we're extending that idea more to examine how impaired viewpoints can influence our creative medium, and invite patrons of every capability and experiences to experience ballet in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator understood that sighted people who had experienced Healey’s audio narration believed it helped them comprehend ballet, which can seem so abstract.

Inspiring Collaboration Of Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In one dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from childhood and who had long assumed that ballet was "mainly for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has realized that it actually "includes a lot of sensation and emotions" and engages senses, "sight-based and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of earlier losing his way on his way home and depending on the sun to orient his way back had influenced a performance in which the professional dancer embodies the "warm breath of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer said.

"This occurred during the day and I had a feeling that the sun should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could sense the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It led me home. The sunshine was a great guide to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the story originated from there."

Blindness Presents Unique Connection with Dance

Healey, an academic of disability studies at the University of Toronto, stated: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a vibrant connection with movement in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s connection with their body and motion."

In working with the dancers, the artist was attempting to express what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she noted. "I speak with the performers to get a sense of how they are in their body, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their physical form are experiencing.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] clothing, stage lights, set and music artists, the viewpoints and artistry of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and sighted persons, build a connection through our passion of movement and performance. It is this creativity and love that I try to blend into the detailed narration. It is a cooperation of the senses guided by blindness."

She noted: "Although the sight of the dance, the beautiful spectacle, is available facing the patrons, there is much that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and visually impaired patrons equally into the unseen. What I desire is that, when viewers leave, they feel ballet in a new way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and listening to the viewpoints of, visual impairment in new and dynamic ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Narration

Richter, whose works have gathered more than 3.5 billion streams, said the spoken narration formed a relationship between blindness and sight "via a musical landscape, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He added: "This isn't merely a description of a production. It is the art."

World Ballet Event Partners

The company's global collaborators for World Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will additionally provide access to backstage material, rehearsals and freshly produced pieces – streamed as it happens via the event website.