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This prestigious ballet company has long provided headphones with descriptive narration so that blind patrons could understand the action on stage. Currently, in a groundbreaking new work, the entire audience will experience such commentary within a piece that examines how lack of sight can redefine our reactions to experience, sound and storytelling.

Blind Creator Partners with Famous Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in producing a recent Royal Ballet work that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as declared recently.

Through her work, Healey is driven by a desire to show how blindness and physical challenge can present an different type of understanding for everyone. Her rich spoken descriptions, integrated with the score, forms the core of the performance on stage.

"Making top-tier ballet and musical theater for each person" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the organization is focusing on "total access – inviting artists and audiences to discover ballet in transformative fresh approaches," he said.

Various Choreographers Partner on Fresh Production

The new work is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, every one working with Healey.

Robert Binet, the curator of this work, said: "International Ballet Day was established on the concept of inclusion. Following a decade, we're pushing that notion more to consider how challenged viewpoints can influence our art form, and encourage viewers of every capability and histories to encounter ballet in fresh approaches."

Having worked with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator realized that those with vision who had heard the artist's audio narration found it helped them comprehend ballet, which can appear so abstract.

Moving Partnership Of Expert and Amateur Dancers

In a particular performance, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from childhood and who had always thought that ballet was "mostly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it in fact "entails a lot of feeling and sentiments" and engages faculties, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's personal story of previously getting lost on his way home and using the sunlight to orient his way back had inspired a duet in which the professional dancer represents the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around his partner as they move together," Malcomson said.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be radiating from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the rays itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I kept walking to the west …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a good assistant to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful representation. So the narrative developed from there."

Blindness Presents Unique Relationship with Motion

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the Toronto university, commented: "Blindness and lacking sight invites a dynamic connection with movement in a way that is like a expert performer's connection with their body and movement."

In collaborating with the performers, the artist was striving to convey what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not available through looking," she explained. "I speak with the performers to get a sense of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their body are feeling.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] clothing, stage lights, stage design and sound designers, the understandings and creativity of blindness are ever present as we, visually impaired and seeing people, build a rapport through our affection of motion and performance. It is this innovation and affection that I try to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the senses led by blindness."

The artist added: "While the sight of the ballet, the stunning spectacle, is there before the audience, there is a great deal that they overlook or valuing, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and visually impaired audience members equally into the invisible. What I desire is that, when patrons depart, they experience dance in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and hearing the perceptions of, blindness in fresh and vibrant ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Narration

The composer, whose compositions have accumulated more than 3.5 billion digital listens, commented the descriptive commentary established a relationship between visual impairment and vision "through a soundscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He added: "It is not merely a explanation of a production. It is performance."

World Dance Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global associates for World Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will also provide entry to behind-the-scenes footage, practice sessions and newly commissioned productions – streamed live via the event website.