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The Royal Ballet for years offered audio devices with audio descriptions so that sightless patrons could follow the action on stage. Now, in a groundbreaking performance, the whole gathering will hear such narration within a work that explores how lack of sight can redefine our perceptions to experience, sound and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Artist Partners with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in creating a fresh Royal Ballet production that will launch on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

Through her work, Healey is guided by a ambition to illustrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an unique type of understanding for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the music, establishes the center of the show on stage.

"Creating exceptional dance and opera for each person" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the troupe is concentrating on "radical accessibility – inviting artists and audiences to experience ballet in transformative innovative methods," he said.

Various Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Work

The recent commission is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, all working with Healey.

The curator, the organizer of this work, said: "International Ballet Day was founded on the principle of accessibility. Following a ten years, we're extending that idea more to explore how impaired outlooks can mold our creative medium, and encourage patrons of all abilities and histories to experience ballet in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, the curator understood that sighted people who had encountered Healey’s descriptive audio believed it helped them comprehend dance, which can seem so abstract.

Inspiring Collaboration Of Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one performance, the company's performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from birth and who had long assumed that ballet was "mostly for those who can see". But Kikuchi has realized that it truly "involves a lot of feeling and feelings" and activates senses, "visual and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s personal story of earlier losing his way on his way home and using the sunlight to direct his way back had influenced a performance in which the professional dancer embodies the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson stated.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could feel the heat … So I kept walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a great guide to me. The sun could be a powerful metaphor. So the tale developed from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Distinct Relationship with Motion

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the Toronto university, said: "Visual impairment and being blind encourages a vibrant relationship with dance in a way that is like a expert performer's relationship with their body and motion."

In working with the dancers, she was attempting to express what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not accessible through looking," she said. "I talk with the performers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they think, how their body are sensing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] attire, illumination, set and sound creators, the understandings and artistry of blindness are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and seeing people, establish a rapport through our passion of motion and performance. It is this creativity and affection that I strive to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the faculties led by visual impairment."

She continued: "Even though the sight of the performance, the beautiful visual feast, is available before the viewers, there is much that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging seeing and visually impaired audience members equally into the unseen. What I hope is that, when patrons exit, they experience dance in a distinct way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and hearing the viewpoints of, visual impairment in new and vibrant ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Narration

The composer, whose recordings have gathered more than billions of online plays, said the spoken narration formed a relationship between blindness and vision "via a audio environment, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He added: "This isn't just a description of a performance. This is performance."

International Dance Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will furthermore supply entry to behind-the-scenes video, practice sessions and newly commissioned productions – transmitted in real-time via the event website.