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This prestigious ballet company traditionally provided headphones with descriptive narration so that blind audience members could understand the performance on stage. Presently, via a revolutionary new work, the entire crowd will listen to such descriptions within a work that examines how blindness can redefine our reactions to sensation, audio and narrative.

Blind Creator Works with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in producing a fresh Royal Ballet work that will launch on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as announced this week.

In her art, Healey is guided by a ambition to show how visual impairment and disability can offer an alternative mode of perception for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the music, creates the heart of the performance on stage.

"Making top-tier ballet and musical theater for each person" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's leader, the organization is focusing on "complete inclusion – inviting artists and viewers to discover ballet in life-changing innovative methods," he stated.

Several Dance Creators Partner on New Performance

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

The curator, the director of this work, stated: "International Ballet Day was created on the idea of inclusion. After a ten years, we're expanding that notion deeper to consider how challenged viewpoints can mold our art form, and encourage audiences of every capability and backgrounds to experience dance in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, he understood that sighted people who had heard Healey’s spoken descriptions felt it aided them understand dance, which can appear so abstract.

Moving Partnership Of Expert and Non-Professional Dancers

In a particular duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from birth and who had long assumed that ballet was "mostly for sighted people". But the dancer has understood that it truly "entails a lot of feeling and sentiments" and engages faculties, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of earlier becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sunlight to guide his way back had inspired a dance piece in which Dixon represents the "warm breath of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they perform as one," the choreographer said.

"This occurred during the day and I had a sense that the sunlight should be shining from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could perceive the heat … So I kept walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sun could be a good representation. So the tale originated from there."

Blindness Presents Unique Relationship with Motion

Healey, an academic of disability research at the Toronto university, commented: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is similar to a expert performer's bond with their physical self and dance."

In working with the performers, the artist was attempting to convey what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she explained. "I speak with the dancers to get a understanding of how they feel in their physical self, where their breath is, what they consider, how their physical form are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] attire, lighting, stage design and music designers, the understandings and artistry of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and seeing individuals, establish a connection through our passion of dance and performance. It is this innovation and passion that I strive to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the perceptions directed by blindness."

The artist noted: "Even though the vision of the dance, the beautiful spectacle, is present facing the patrons, there is a great deal that they overlook or understanding, and it is visual impairment that is welcoming seeing and blind audience members equally into the unseen. What I desire is that, when viewers depart, they feel ballet in a distinct way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and hearing the perceptions of, blindness in new and vibrant ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose compositions have accumulated more than 3.5 billion online plays, said the spoken narration formed a relationship between blindness and sight "via a audio environment, providing expression to that which is not always visible". He added: "It is not merely a description of a show. This is the performance itself."

International Dance Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for World Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will additionally offer entry to backstage footage, practice sessions and freshly produced pieces – broadcast as it happens via online channels.