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This prestigious ballet company traditionally offered audio devices with audio descriptions so that blind audience members could understand the action on stage. Now, in a groundbreaking new work, the whole gathering will hear such narration within a work that examines how visual impairment can transform our responses to feeling, audio and narrative.

Blind Creator Partners with Famous Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in producing a fresh Royal Ballet work that will premiere on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as announced on Thursday.

Within her creative practice, Healey is driven by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an alternative type of awareness for each individual. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the composition, creates the center of the show on stage.

"Making exceptional dance and musical theater for all" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the organization is focusing on "radical accessibility – welcoming artists and viewers to discover dance in revolutionary new ways," he stated.

Various Dance Creators Collaborate on Fresh Performance

The fresh production is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all partnering with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the curator of this production, stated: "World Ballet Day was founded on the principle of accessibility. Following a ten years, we're pushing that idea deeper to explore how disabled perspectives can influence our creative medium, and encourage audiences of all abilities and experiences to discover ballet in innovative methods."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australian locations, the curator recognized that sighted people who had experienced the artist's audio narration felt it assisted them understand ballet, which can seem so unclear.

Touching Partnership Between Expert and Non-Professional Dancers

In one performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer 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 "involves a lot of sensation and sentiments" and taps into faculties, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of once losing his way on his way home and relying on the sunlight to direct his way back had motivated a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "soothing presence of the sunlight around his partner as they dance in unison," the choreographer stated.

"This occurred during the day and I had a feeling that the sun should be radiating 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 continued moving to the western direction …. It led me home. The sun was a good guide to me. The sun could be a powerful metaphor. So the narrative originated from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Special Connection with Motion

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the University of Toronto, commented: "Blindness and being blind encourages a vibrant connection with motion in a way that is like a expert performer's bond with their physical self and dance."

In working with the performers, she was seeking to express what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she noted. "I speak with the performers to get a feeling of how they are in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they’re thinking, how their body are sensing.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] clothing, stage lights, scenery and audio artists, the understandings and creativity of visual impairment are ever present as we, visually impaired and seeing people, build a rapport through our affection of movement and performance. It is this artistry and passion that I try to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the faculties guided by visual impairment."

She continued: "Even though the sight of the dance, the gorgeous spectacle, is available before the audience, there is much that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and visually impaired audience members both into the hidden. What I hope is that, when patrons leave, they sense ballet in a different way, and they’re also feeling the being, and hearing the perceptions of, blindness in innovative and dynamic ways."

Composer The Composer on Audio Narration

The composer, whose compositions have accumulated more than 3.5 billion digital listens, commented the descriptive commentary established a connection between visual impairment and vision "by means of a audio environment, offering narration to that which is not always visible". He continued: "This isn't just a explanation of a production. This is the performance itself."

World Ballet Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide partners for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will furthermore provide entry to behind-the-scenes video, preparations and freshly produced works – streamed in real-time via their official platform.