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This prestigious ballet company traditionally offered headphones with audio descriptions so that sightless patrons could understand the performance on stage. Presently, via a revolutionary performance, the complete audience will listen to such narration within a work that explores how lack of sight can redefine our responses to experience, audio and storytelling.

Blind Artist Works with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind artist, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in producing a fresh Royal Ballet commission that will launch on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as announced recently.

Within her creative practice, the artist is guided by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and disability can offer an different form of perception for all people. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the composition, creates the heart of the show on stage.

"Making world-class ballet and musical theater for each person" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the company is focusing on "radical accessibility – encouraging artists and audiences to experience dance in life-changing innovative methods," he stated.

Several Choreographers Work on New Performance

The recent commission is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, each working with the blind artist.

The curator, the director of this commission, commented: "World Ballet Day was founded on the idea of accessibility. Following a ten years, we're expanding that notion further to explore how impaired perspectives can influence our art form, and invite audiences of every capability and histories to encounter ballet in innovative methods."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, he recognized that sighted people who had heard the artist's audio narration felt it aided them understand ballet, which can look so abstract.

Inspiring Partnership Of Professional and Amateur Performers

In one dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind since birth and who had long assumed that dance was "primarily for those who can see". But Kikuchi has discovered that it in fact "includes a lot of sensation and sentiments" and activates perceptions, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of once becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sunlight to direct his way back had influenced a performance in which Dixon embodies the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," the choreographer stated.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a sense that the sun should be radiating from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could feel the heat … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great assistant to me. The sun could be a meaningful representation. So the story originated from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Unique Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, stated: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a vibrant bond with motion in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s bond with their physical self and dance."

In collaborating with the dancers, the artist was attempting to communicate what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not available through vision," she noted. "I converse with the dancers to get a understanding of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they’re thinking, how their body are experiencing.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] costume, lighting, set and audio designers, the perceptions and innovation of blindness are ever present as we, visually impaired and seeing individuals, establish a connection through our love of dance and performance. It is this artistry and passion that I try to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the perceptions directed by visual impairment."

The artist added: "Although the vision of the ballet, the gorgeous display, is there in front of the viewers, there is a great deal that they overlook or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging sighted and visually impaired viewers alike into the unseen. What I wish is that, when audience members exit, they feel ballet in a distinct way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and hearing the viewpoints of, visual impairment in innovative and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

The composer, whose recordings have accumulated more than billions of streams, said the spoken narration created a connection between blindness and sight "via a soundscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He continued: "This isn't simply a explanation of a production. It is the performance itself."

World Dance Day Partners

The company's worldwide partners for International Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also offer availability to exclusive footage, preparations and freshly produced works – streamed live via their official platform.