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This prestigious ballet company for years offered audio devices with spoken commentary so that sightless audience members could understand the action on stage. Now, in a groundbreaking production, the whole gathering will experience such commentary within a work that investigates how visual impairment can redefine our perceptions to experience, audio and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Famous Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is partnering with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a fresh ballet company production that will debut on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as announced recently.

Through her work, Healey is motivated by a desire to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can provide an alternative form of awareness for all people. Her rich spoken descriptions, woven with the score, establishes the heart of the performance on stage.

"Creating world-class ballet and musical theater for each person" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the troupe is concentrating on "total access – encouraging artists and viewers to experience ballet in life-changing new ways," he explained.

Various Dance Creators Collaborate on Fresh Performance

The fresh production is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, every one working with Healey.

Robert Binet, the curator of this production, said: "International Ballet Day was established on the concept of access. After a decade, we're extending that notion further to examine how challenged viewpoints can mold our creative medium, and invite patrons of all abilities and histories to encounter dance in new ways."

Having worked with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator understood that individuals who can see who had heard the artist's spoken descriptions felt it helped them grasp dance, which can look so unclear.

Touching Collaboration Between Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from birth and who had always thought that ballet was "mainly for those who can see". But the dancer has realized that it actually "entails a lot of sensation and emotions" and activates faculties, "sight-based and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sunlight to guide his way back had motivated a performance in which the professional dancer embodies the "warm breath of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer explained.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be radiating from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the sunlight itself, I could sense the heat … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the story emerged from there."

Blindness Presents Special Connection with Dance

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the University of Toronto, stated: "Blindness and being blind encourages a dynamic relationship with dance in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and movement."

In working with the dancers, she was seeking to express what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not available through looking," she said. "I talk with the performers to get a understanding of how they are in their body, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their body are feeling.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] clothing, illumination, stage design and audio designers, the perceptions and innovation of blindness are ever present as we, blind and seeing persons, develop a connection through our affection of movement and dance. It is this creativity and passion that I attempt to weave into the detailed narration. It is a partnership of the perceptions guided by visual impairment."

She continued: "While the vision of the dance, the stunning visual feast, is there facing the audience, there is much that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is visual impairment that is welcoming sighted and visually impaired audience members alike into the invisible. What I desire is that, when patrons exit, they sense dance in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the presence, and listening to the viewpoints of, visual impairment in fresh and dynamic ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose recordings have accumulated more than 3.5bn online plays, stated the spoken narration formed a rapport between blindness and sight "through a soundscape, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He continued: "This isn't merely a explanation of a production. This is the art."

World Ballet Day Partners

The company's global associates for International Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will furthermore supply entry to behind-the-scenes video, rehearsals and newly commissioned productions – broadcast live via the event website.