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This prestigious ballet company has long made available audio devices with audio descriptions so that blind viewers could understand the action on stage. Now, through a groundbreaking new work, the complete audience will experience such narration within a production that investigates how visual impairment can transform our responses to experience, music and dramatic expression.

Blind Artist Partners with Renowned Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in producing a fresh Royal Ballet production that will debut on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared this week.

Within her creative practice, Healey is driven by a ambition to illustrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an different form of awareness for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, woven with the composition, establishes the heart of the show on stage.

"Creating world-class dance and opera for all" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the organization is focusing on "complete inclusion – welcoming creators and patrons to discover ballet in revolutionary new ways," he explained.

Multiple Dance Creators Collaborate on New Performance

The recent commission is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to Wayne McGregor, every one partnering with the blind artist.

The curator, the organizer of this production, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the principle of access. After a ten years, we're pushing that idea further to consider how impaired perspectives can shape our performance style, and welcome patrons of all abilities and histories to encounter ballet in new ways."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australia, he understood that those with vision who had experienced the artist's audio narration felt it aided them grasp dance, which can look so complex.

Touching Partnership Between Expert and Amateur Performers

In one performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from childhood and who had previously believed that dance was "mostly for those who can see". But Kikuchi has understood that it truly "includes a lot of emotion and sentiments" and taps into 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 motivated a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "gentle warmth of the sun around Kikuchi as they move together," the choreographer explained.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the sunlight itself, I could perceive the heat … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a good guide to me. The sun could be a good representation. So the story originated from there."

Blindness Provides Unique Relationship with Dance

The blind artist, an academic of disability research at the University of Toronto, stated: "Visual impairment and lacking sight encourages a vibrant bond with dance in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s connection with their body and motion."

In collaborating with the performers, the artist was attempting to convey what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she noted. "I talk with the dancers to get a sense of how they are in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are feeling.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] clothing, illumination, stage design and music designers, the perceptions and artistry of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted people, build a relationship through our love of dance and performance. It is this innovation and love that I try to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the faculties guided by visual impairment."

The artist added: "While the sight of the performance, the gorgeous visual feast, is present before the patrons, there is so much that they overlook or valuing, and it is blindness that is encouraging seeing and blind audience members equally into the invisible. What I hope is that, when audience members leave, they feel ballet in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and hearing the understandings of, visual impairment in fresh and dynamic ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose recordings have accumulated more than billions of streams, stated the spoken narration established a connection between blindness and vision "via a audio environment, providing expression to that which is not always visible". He noted: "It is not simply a description of a performance. This is performance."

International Ballet Event Partners

The company's global collaborators for International Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will also offer entry to behind-the-scenes footage, practice sessions and recently created pieces – streamed as it happens via the event website.