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This prestigious ballet company has long made available headphones with descriptive narration so that visually impaired viewers could follow the performance on stage. Now, via a innovative performance, the whole audience will experience such descriptions within a work that investigates how visual impairment can transform our perceptions to sensation, sound and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Creator Works with Renowned Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in creating a fresh Royal Ballet work that will premiere on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as announced this week.

In her art, the artist is guided by a wish to illustrate how blindness and physical challenge can provide an different mode of perception for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the composition, creates the center of the production on stage.

"Creating exceptional dance and musical theater for each person" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the organization is concentrating on "total access – encouraging creators and viewers to experience dance in transformative innovative methods," he stated.

Multiple Choreographers Collaborate on Fresh Performance

The new work is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, all collaborating with Healey.

Robert Binet, the organizer of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the principle of inclusion. Following a decade, we're extending that notion deeper to consider how disabled perspectives can influence our creative medium, and encourage viewers of every capability and backgrounds to encounter dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australian locations, the curator recognized that sighted people who had experienced the artist's descriptive audio believed it aided them grasp dance, which can look so unclear.

Inspiring Partnership Of Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In one dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from birth and who had long assumed that dance was "primarily for sighted people". But the dancer has discovered that it actually "involves a lot of emotion and emotions" and taps into senses, "visual and other sensory".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of earlier getting lost on his way home and using the sun to orient his way back had inspired a duet in which Dixon becomes the "gentle warmth of the sun around Kikuchi as they perform as one," the choreographer said.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the light itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It led me home. The sun was a good guide to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the story originated from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Unique Connection with Motion

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the Toronto university, stated: "Blindness and being blind invites a active relationship with movement in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's connection with their body and movement."

In partnering with the dancers, she was seeking to express what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not available through looking," she noted. "I talk with the performers to get a feeling of how they are in their body, where their respiration is, what they think, how their physical form are experiencing.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] attire, stage lights, stage design and sound creators, the understandings and innovation of blindness are always there as we, blind and seeing persons, build a relationship through our passion of motion and dance. It is this innovation and affection that I strive to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the perceptions led by blindness."

The artist noted: "While the vision of the dance, the gorgeous spectacle, is present before the audience, there is a great deal that they miss or valuing, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and visually impaired viewers both into the invisible. What I hope is that, when viewers depart, they feel dance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the presence, and hearing the perceptions of, visual impairment in innovative and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

Richter, whose compositions have gathered more than 3.5bn digital listens, stated the audio descriptions established a relationship between visual impairment and vision "via a audio environment, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He noted: "This isn't merely a narration of a show. This is the art."

World Ballet Day Partners

The company's global collaborators for International Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will also provide entry to behind-the-scenes footage, practice sessions and newly commissioned productions – transmitted as it happens via their official platform.