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The Royal Ballet traditionally offered audio devices with descriptive narration so that sightless patrons could track the movement on stage. Currently, through a revolutionary production, the whole audience will hear such descriptions within a production that examines how lack of sight can redefine our reactions to feeling, sound and narrative.

Visually Impaired Artist Works with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired creator, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in developing a fresh Royal Ballet production that will premiere on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

Within her creative practice, the artist is driven by a wish to demonstrate how blindness and physical challenge can offer an different form of understanding for each individual. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the score, creates the heart of the production on stage.

"Producing world-class ballet and musical theater for each person" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's director, the organization is zeroing in on "radical accessibility – welcoming artists and viewers to experience dance in revolutionary new ways," he explained.

Various Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Performance

The recent commission is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all partnering with the blind artist.

The curator, the organizer of this production, commented: "International Ballet Day was founded on the principle of inclusion. Following a decade, we're expanding that concept more to examine how disabled perspectives can shape our performance style, and encourage viewers of diverse capacities and backgrounds to encounter dance in new ways."

After collaborating with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator realized that sighted people who had experienced Healey’s spoken descriptions felt it helped them grasp dance, which can appear so unclear.

Inspiring Partnership Of Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In a particular performance, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from birth and who had long assumed that dance was "primarily for those who can see". But the dancer has understood that it actually "involves a lot of sensation and emotions" and engages perceptions, "visual and non-visual".

The dancer's unique narrative of once becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sunlight to guide his way back had inspired a performance in which Dixon represents the "warm breath of the sunlight around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson said.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sun should be radiating from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could sense the heat … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great guide to me. The sunlight could be a powerful symbol. So the story emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Unique Relationship with Motion

The blind artist, an scholar 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 expert performer's bond with their physical self and dance."

In collaborating with the dancers, she was attempting to convey what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, 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 respiration is, what they think, how their muscles are sensing.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] costume, lighting, scenery and music artists, the understandings and creativity of visual impairment are ever present as we, visually impaired and seeing persons, develop a relationship through our passion of motion and dance. It is this artistry and love that I try to blend into the detailed narration. It is a cooperation of the perceptions guided by blindness."

She noted: "Although the sight of the performance, the stunning visual feast, is there in front of the patrons, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and visually impaired patrons equally into the unseen. What I wish is that, when viewers depart, they feel ballet in a different way, and they’re also sensing the being, and perceiving the viewpoints of, blindness in innovative and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Narration

The composer, whose works have accumulated more than 3.5bn streams, commented the spoken narration formed a rapport between visual impairment and sight "through a soundscape, offering narration to that which is not always visible". He noted: "It is not merely a explanation of a production. This is the art."

World Dance Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global collaborators for International Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will furthermore provide availability to backstage footage, preparations and recently created productions – transmitted live via their official platform.