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This prestigious ballet company traditionally provided audio devices with audio descriptions so that sightless audience members could understand the performance on stage. Now, in a innovative performance, the complete crowd will hear such descriptions within a work that examines how lack of sight can redefine our reactions to sensation, sound and storytelling.

Blind Creator Collaborates with Famous Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in producing a recent ballet company commission that will premiere on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

Within her creative practice, Healey is motivated by a ambition to demonstrate how blindness and physical challenge can offer an unique form of perception for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the score, creates the center of the production on stage.

"Producing exceptional dance and opera for each person" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's leader, the company is concentrating on "complete inclusion – encouraging artists and patrons to encounter dance in life-changing innovative methods," he stated.

Various Choreographers Work on New Production

The new work is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, each partnering with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the director of this work, commented: "International Ballet Day was created on the principle of access. Following a ten years, we're extending that idea more to examine how disabled outlooks can influence our creative medium, and welcome viewers of diverse capacities and backgrounds to encounter ballet in innovative methods."

After collaborating with the artist in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator understood that individuals who can see who had experienced Healey’s audio narration felt it helped them understand dance, which can look so abstract.

Inspiring Collaboration Between Expert and Amateur Performers

In one duet, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been visually impaired from childhood and who had always thought that dance was "primarily for those who can see". But the dancer has understood that it actually "entails a lot of feeling and sentiments" and activates perceptions, "sight-based and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s personal story of earlier losing his way on his way home and relying on the sunlight to orient his way back had motivated a duet in which Dixon becomes the "warm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," Malcomson explained.

"It was during the day and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could feel the heat … So I continued moving to the west …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great helper to me. The sun could be a good metaphor. So the narrative originated from there."

Blindness Provides Unique Connection with Motion

The blind artist, an academic of disability studies at the Toronto university, said: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a vibrant bond with motion in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s bond with their physical self and dance."

In collaborating with the performers, the artist was striving to convey what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through vision," she said. "I speak with the dancers to get a feeling of how they are in their body, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their body are experiencing.

"Partnering with the choreographers [and] clothing, stage lights, scenery and sound designers, the understandings and creativity of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and sighted people, establish a connection through our passion of movement and dance. It is this artistry and affection that I try to weave into the detailed narration. It is a cooperation of the senses directed by blindness."

The artist noted: "Although the sight of the ballet, the gorgeous visual feast, is present facing the viewers, there is much that they’re not accessing or valuing, and it is visual impairment that is inviting seeing and blind patrons equally into the hidden. What I hope is that, when viewers depart, they sense ballet in a different way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and listening to the perceptions of, visual impairment in new and active ways."

Musician The Composer on Sound Narration

The composer, whose works have gathered more than 3.5 billion digital listens, commented the descriptive commentary created a rapport between blindness and vision "by means of a soundscape, providing expression to that which does not always appear". He noted: "This isn't merely a narration of a production. It is the art."

World Dance Event Collaborators

The company's global collaborators for World Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will furthermore offer availability to exclusive video, practice sessions and freshly produced pieces – broadcast as it happens via their official platform.