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This prestigious ballet company has long provided audio devices with audio descriptions so that visually impaired patrons could understand the action on stage. Now, via a innovative production, the complete audience will hear such descriptions within a work that explores how visual impairment can transform our reactions to experience, audio and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Renowned Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind artist, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in developing a fresh ballet company commission that will launch on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as announced this week.

Through her work, the artist is motivated by a wish to show how blindness and physical challenge can present an unique form of understanding for everyone. Her rich spoken descriptions, woven with the composition, creates the core of the show on stage.

"Making exceptional ballet and opera for all" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under the director, the company's leader, the troupe is concentrating on "total access – welcoming creators and patrons to encounter dance in life-changing new ways," he stated.

Various Choreographers Work on Fresh Performance

The fresh production is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all collaborating with the blind artist.

The curator, the director of this production, commented: "World Ballet Day was founded on the concept of inclusion. After a decade, we're pushing that idea more to consider how disabled perspectives can mold our art form, and encourage patrons of all abilities and backgrounds to discover ballet in innovative methods."

Having worked with the artist in Canada and Australia, the curator realized that those with vision who had experienced Healey’s descriptive audio believed it aided them comprehend dance, which can appear so complex.

Inspiring Partnership Between Expert and Non-Professional Dancers

In one dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from birth and who had long assumed that ballet was "primarily for those who can see". But the dancer has discovered that it actually "entails a lot of feeling and emotions" and taps into senses, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of once losing his way on his way home and using the sun to direct his way back had motivated a dance piece in which the professional dancer represents the "soothing presence of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," the choreographer explained.

"It was during the day and I had a feeling that the sun should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could feel the heat … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It led me home. The sun was a excellent assistant to me. The sun could be a good representation. So the narrative emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Distinct Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an academic of disability research at the University of Toronto, said: "Visual impairment and lacking sight fosters a vibrant relationship with dance in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s connection with their physical self and motion."

In collaborating with the performers, the artist was striving to communicate what "they perceive in their physical being, something that’s just not available through vision," she explained. "I speak with the performers to get a sense of how they are in their body, where their breath is, what they think, how their body are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] costume, illumination, set and audio artists, the perceptions and artistry of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and sighted individuals, build a relationship through our love of movement and dance. It is this creativity and passion that I try to weave into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the senses guided by visual impairment."

She continued: "While the view of the dance, the gorgeous display, is there before the audience, there is much that they overlook or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging seeing and blind viewers alike into the unseen. What I wish is that, when patrons exit, they experience ballet in a different way, and they’re also sensing the presence, and listening to the understandings of, blindness in fresh and vibrant ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Narration

Richter, whose compositions have amassed more than billions of digital listens, said the descriptive commentary created a connection between blindness and sight "via a musical landscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He added: "This isn't simply a explanation of a performance. It is performance."

World Ballet Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for International Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will furthermore provide entry to exclusive material, rehearsals and newly commissioned works – broadcast in real-time via online channels.