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This prestigious ballet company traditionally made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that sightless viewers could understand the performance on stage. Now, in a groundbreaking production, the whole audience will listen to such commentary within a piece that investigates how lack of sight can transform our reactions to feeling, sound and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Creator Partners with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is partnering with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in producing a recent ballet company work that will debut on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

Through her work, the artist is motivated by a desire to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can present an different form of awareness for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the music, creates the center of the show on stage.

"Creating exceptional ballet and opera for everyone" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's leader, the company is focusing on "radical accessibility – welcoming creators and audiences to encounter dance in life-changing new ways," he said.

Various Dance Creators Work on New Work

The fresh production is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, every one partnering with the blind artist.

The curator, the curator of this production, said: "International Ballet Day was established on the principle of inclusion. After a decade, we're expanding that idea further to consider how impaired outlooks can shape our performance style, and invite patrons of every capability and histories to experience dance in fresh approaches."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canada and Australian locations, he recognized that sighted people who had experienced the artist's descriptive audio felt it aided them grasp dance, which can appear so complex.

Inspiring Collaboration Between Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one duet, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from birth and who had previously believed that dance was "primarily for sighted people". But Kikuchi has realized that it truly "involves a lot of emotion and sentiments" and engages faculties, "sight-based and non-visual".

The dancer's individual experience of once losing his way on his way home and depending on the sun to guide his way back had influenced a duet in which the professional dancer becomes the "soothing presence of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer said.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be radiating from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the rays itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a excellent guide to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the tale emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Special Connection with Dance

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the University of Toronto, commented: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a vibrant relationship with movement in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's connection with their physical self and movement."

In partnering with the dancers, the artist was attempting to convey what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not accessible through vision," she explained. "I speak with the dancers to get a sense of how they are in their body, where their breath is, what they think, how their body are feeling.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] costume, illumination, scenery and audio creators, the understandings and artistry of blindness are constantly visible as we, blind and seeing persons, develop a rapport through our passion of movement and performance. It is this artistry and passion that I try to blend into the detailed narration. It is a cooperation of the faculties guided by blindness."

The artist continued: "Even though the view of the dance, the beautiful display, is available before the patrons, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and blind patrons equally into the hidden. What I desire is that, when viewers exit, they feel performance in a distinct way, and they’re also feeling the being, and perceiving the perceptions of, blindness in fresh and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

Richter, whose recordings have amassed more than billions of online plays, said the descriptive commentary formed a connection between visual impairment and vision "by means of a musical landscape, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He continued: "This isn't just a explanation of a production. It is the art."

World Dance Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide partners for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will additionally supply availability to backstage video, preparations and recently created productions – broadcast as it happens via online channels.