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This prestigious ballet company for years made available audio devices with audio descriptions so that blind audience members could follow the action on stage. Currently, through a innovative performance, the complete audience will hear such narration within a piece that examines how blindness can redefine our perceptions to sensation, music and storytelling.

Blind Artist Collaborates with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind artist, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in producing a new Royal Ballet production that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as announced recently.

In her art, Healey is guided by a desire to demonstrate how blindness and disability can present an different form of understanding for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the composition, forms the center of the performance on stage.

"Producing exceptional ballet and opera for each person" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the company is focusing on "complete inclusion – encouraging performers and viewers to discover ballet in revolutionary fresh approaches," he stated.

Various Dance Creators Work on Fresh Work

The new work is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside Wayne McGregor, all collaborating with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the director of this work, stated: "International Ballet Day was established on the principle of inclusion. After a ten years, we're pushing that notion deeper to explore how disabled perspectives can influence our performance style, and encourage patrons of every capability and histories to discover ballet in fresh approaches."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canada and Australia, the curator understood that sighted people who had heard Healey’s descriptive audio found it helped them comprehend ballet, which can look so complex.

Touching Partnership Between Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from childhood and who had long assumed that dance was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has realized that it truly "includes a lot of sensation and sentiments" and engages senses, "sight-based and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sun to guide his way back had inspired a duet in which Dixon represents the "warm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," Malcomson said.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be shining from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a good helper to me. The sun could be a powerful symbol. So the tale originated from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Unique Relationship with Motion

Healey, an academic of disability studies at the University of Toronto, commented: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a active bond with dance in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s bond with their physical self and dance."

In collaborating with the dancers, she was striving to communicate what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not available through looking," she noted. "I talk with the performers to get a sense of how they are in their physical self, where their breath is, what they think, how their muscles are sensing.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] clothing, stage lights, stage design and music creators, the perceptions and artistry of visual impairment are always there as we, blind and seeing individuals, develop a rapport through our love of dance and performance. It is this creativity and passion that I try to integrate into the detailed narration. It is a cooperation of the faculties guided by visual impairment."

She continued: "Even though the view of the dance, the beautiful display, is available facing the viewers, there is much that they miss or valuing, and it is visual impairment that is welcoming sighted and blind patrons both into the hidden. What I desire is that, when audience members leave, they sense ballet in a new way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and listening to the perceptions of, visual impairment in fresh and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Narration

The composer, whose works have accumulated more than billions of digital listens, stated the audio descriptions formed a relationship between visual impairment and sight "by means of a musical landscape, offering narration to that which remains unseen". He continued: "It is not just a narration of a show. This is the art."

World Dance Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for World Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will additionally offer availability to behind-the-scenes video, preparations and recently created productions – broadcast live via their official platform.