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This prestigious ballet company traditionally provided audio devices with descriptive narration so that blind viewers could follow the action on stage. Currently, via a innovative performance, the complete audience will listen to such commentary within a piece that explores how visual impairment can reshape our reactions to feeling, music and narrative.

Visually Impaired Artist Partners with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired artist, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in producing a new ballet company production that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

Through her work, the artist is driven by a desire to illustrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can provide an unique type of awareness for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the music, forms the heart of the show on stage.

"Producing top-tier ballet and opera for each person" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the troupe is focusing on "complete inclusion – inviting performers and patrons to discover dance in life-changing new ways," he stated.

Several Choreographers Collaborate on Fresh Performance

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

Robert Binet, the organizer of this commission, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the principle of access. Following a decade, we're extending that idea more to explore how challenged perspectives can shape our creative medium, and invite viewers of every capability and backgrounds to encounter dance in innovative methods."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, the curator understood that individuals who can see who had experienced Healey’s audio narration found it assisted them understand dance, which can appear so abstract.

Inspiring Collaboration Of Professional and Amateur Performers

In a particular dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from birth and who had long assumed that ballet was "mostly for sighted people". But the dancer has understood that it truly "involves a lot of sensation and feelings" and taps into perceptions, "sight-based and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sun to direct his way back had inspired a duet in which Dixon becomes the "gentle warmth of the sun around Kikuchi as they move together," the choreographer explained.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could sense the heat … So I continued moving to the west …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a great guide to me. The sun could be a powerful representation. So the story developed from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Unique Relationship with Motion

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability research at the Toronto university, said: "Visual impairment 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 movement."

In partnering with the dancers, the artist was seeking to communicate what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not available through sight," she noted. "I converse with the dancers to get a feeling of how they are in their body, where their breath is, what they think, how their muscles are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] costume, illumination, set and music artists, the perceptions and creativity of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and seeing individuals, develop a rapport through our love of dance and performance. It is this creativity and passion that I attempt to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a partnership of the senses led by visual impairment."

She added: "While the view of the ballet, the stunning spectacle, is there before the patrons, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and visually impaired patrons both into the invisible. What I hope is that, when patrons leave, they sense dance in a new way, and they’re also sensing the being, and listening to the perceptions of, visual impairment in new and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose works have gathered more than 3.5 billion digital listens, commented the audio descriptions formed a connection between blindness and sight "by means of a musical landscape, offering narration to that which is not always visible". He noted: "This isn't simply a narration of a performance. It is the art."

World Ballet Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global collaborators for World Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will additionally supply entry to backstage footage, practice sessions and newly commissioned productions – streamed as it happens via the event website.