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This prestigious ballet company traditionally provided audio devices with audio descriptions so that blind patrons could follow the movement on stage. Now, in a groundbreaking performance, the complete audience will listen to such commentary within a piece that explores how lack of sight can transform our perceptions to experience, sound and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Creator Partners with Renowned Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in developing a new ballet company commission that will premiere on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as declared this week.

In her art, Healey is motivated by a ambition to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an unique type of understanding for everyone. Her rich spoken descriptions, woven with the composition, creates the center of the show on stage.

"Making world-class ballet and musical theater for each person" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the troupe is focusing on "radical accessibility – inviting performers and viewers to experience ballet in revolutionary fresh approaches," he said.

Multiple Choreographers Work on New Performance

The recent commission is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, each working with the blind artist.

The curator, the director of this production, commented: "International Ballet Day was created on the concept of inclusion. After a decade, we're expanding that idea deeper to consider how disabled outlooks can shape our art form, and invite audiences of all abilities and experiences to experience ballet in new ways."

After collaborating with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, he understood that those with vision who had experienced Healey’s spoken descriptions found it assisted them comprehend dance, which can look so unclear.

Touching Partnership Of Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular dance piece, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from birth and who had previously believed that ballet was "primarily for sighted people". But the dancer has realized that it truly "involves a lot of sensation and feelings" and engages perceptions, "sight-based and non-visual".

The dancer's individual experience of once losing his way on his way home and using the sunlight to guide his way back had inspired a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "warm breath of the sun around his partner as they perform as one," Malcomson stated.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the sunlight itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sun was a excellent assistant to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the narrative originated from there."

Blindness Presents Special Relationship with Motion

Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Blindness and lacking sight fosters a active relationship with movement in a way that is like a professional dancer’s bond with their physical self and dance."

In collaborating with the dancers, she was seeking to convey what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not available through looking," she noted. "I converse with the performers to get a feeling of how they are in their physical self, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their body are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] costume, illumination, set and music creators, the viewpoints and innovation of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and seeing people, establish a relationship through our love of motion and performance. It is this artistry and passion that I try to weave into the detailed narration. It is a collaboration of the faculties directed by visual impairment."

The artist added: "Although the sight of the performance, the beautiful spectacle, is available before the viewers, there is so much that they miss or valuing, and it is visual impairment that is welcoming sighted and blind audience members alike into the hidden. What I wish is that, when viewers leave, they experience ballet in a distinct way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and listening to the perceptions of, blindness in innovative and active ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

The composer, whose compositions have gathered more than 3.5 billion streams, stated the audio descriptions established a relationship between visual impairment and sight "through a musical landscape, offering narration to that which is not always visible". He continued: "It is not just a explanation of a performance. It is the art."

World Dance Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s global collaborators for International Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will furthermore supply entry to backstage material, practice sessions and newly commissioned productions – transmitted live via the event website.