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This prestigious ballet company for years provided audio devices with spoken commentary so that sightless viewers could understand the action on stage. Presently, through a groundbreaking new work, the complete audience will listen to such narration within a production that explores how blindness can transform our perceptions to sensation, audio and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Celebrated Dance Creators

The blind artist, a visually impaired professional, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a fresh Royal Ballet production that will launch on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as announced this week.

Through her work, the artist is driven by a wish to illustrate how blindness and disability can present an alternative form of understanding for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, blended with the composition, creates the core of the production on stage.

"Producing exceptional ballet and musical theater for all" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's leader, the organization is focusing on "radical accessibility – inviting performers and audiences to discover ballet in transformative innovative methods," he explained.

Various Choreographers Partner on Fresh Production

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

Robert Binet, the curator of this work, commented: "International Ballet Day was founded on the principle of accessibility. After a decade, we're pushing that idea deeper to consider how impaired perspectives can shape our performance style, and welcome patrons of every capability and experiences to encounter ballet in fresh approaches."

Having worked with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator realized that sighted people who had heard the artist's descriptive audio felt it assisted them grasp dance, which can seem so abstract.

Touching Collaboration Between Professional and Amateur Performers

In a particular duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from childhood and who had long assumed that dance was "mainly for individuals with vision". But the dancer has realized that it truly "includes a lot of emotion and feelings" and engages faculties, "sight-based and other sensory".

The dancer's individual experience of earlier becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sunlight to guide his way back had motivated a dance piece in which the professional dancer becomes the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around his partner as they dance in unison," the choreographer explained.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be shining from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the sunlight itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It led me home. The sunshine was a good helper to me. The sunlight could be a good symbol. So the tale emerged from there."

Blindness Offers Unique Connection with Movement

Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the Toronto university, said: "Visual impairment and being blind encourages a dynamic connection with dance in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s relationship with their physical self and dance."

In partnering with the performers, the artist was seeking to express what "they perceive 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’re feeling in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they think, how their muscles are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] clothing, stage lights, scenery and music creators, the understandings and innovation of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted persons, establish a connection through our love of movement and performance. It is this artistry and passion that I attempt to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the faculties led by blindness."

The artist added: "Even though the sight of the ballet, the stunning visual feast, is available facing the viewers, there is a great deal that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is inviting seeing and visually impaired viewers both into the hidden. What I wish is that, when patrons leave, they experience ballet in a new way, and they’re also feeling the being, and hearing the viewpoints of, blindness in fresh and active ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Narration

The composer, whose compositions have gathered more than billions of streams, stated the spoken narration created a rapport between blindness and sight "by means of a musical landscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He added: "It is not simply a explanation of a performance. It is the art."

World Ballet Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also offer availability to backstage material, practice sessions and recently created pieces – transmitted as it happens via online channels.