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This prestigious ballet company traditionally made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that sightless audience members could track the action on stage. Currently, in a groundbreaking new work, the entire audience will listen to such commentary within a work that explores how lack of sight can redefine our perceptions to feeling, audio and storytelling.

Blind Creator Works with Renowned Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is partnering with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in creating a new Royal Ballet work that will debut on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

Within her creative practice, Healey is driven by a desire to illustrate how blindness and physical challenge can offer an alternative form of understanding for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, blended with the score, creates the heart of the production on stage.

"Producing top-tier ballet and opera for all" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the troupe is focusing on "radical accessibility – encouraging artists and patrons to experience ballet in life-changing fresh approaches," he stated.

Multiple Dance Creators Work on New Production

The new work is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, all collaborating with Healey.

Robert Binet, the curator of this commission, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the concept of accessibility. Following a decade, we're pushing that concept further to explore how impaired perspectives can shape our performance style, and invite viewers of every capability and experiences to encounter dance in innovative methods."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he recognized that individuals who can see who had encountered Healey’s descriptive audio believed it assisted them understand ballet, which can seem so abstract.

Inspiring Collaboration Of Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In a particular dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from childhood and who had always thought that ballet was "mainly for those who can see". But the dancer has realized that it truly "involves a lot of feeling and emotions" and taps into senses, "sight-based and non-visual".

The dancer's unique narrative of earlier becoming disoriented on his way home and using the sunlight to direct his way back had motivated a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around his partner as they move together," Malcomson said.

"It was during the day and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be radiating from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the light itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It guided me home. The sun was a excellent guide to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the tale developed from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Distinct Connection with Movement

Healey, an academic of disability research at the Toronto university, stated: "Blindness and lacking sight fosters a dynamic bond with motion in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's connection with their body and dance."

In partnering with the dancers, the artist was attempting to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she noted. "I converse with the dancers to get a feeling of how they feel in their physical self, where their breath is, what they think, how their body are experiencing.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] attire, stage lights, stage design and audio creators, the understandings and creativity of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, blind and seeing individuals, establish a rapport through our affection of movement and performance. It is this artistry and love that I try to blend into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the perceptions guided by blindness."

The artist noted: "Although the sight of the dance, the beautiful spectacle, is present facing the viewers, there is much that they’re not accessing or valuing, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and visually impaired viewers both into the invisible. What I desire is that, when audience members exit, they sense ballet in a new way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and perceiving the viewpoints of, visual impairment in fresh and active ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Narration

The composer, whose recordings have accumulated more than billions of online plays, commented the audio descriptions created a relationship between visual impairment and sight "through a musical landscape, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He continued: "It is not merely a narration of a production. It is the performance itself."

World Dance Day Partners

The company's global associates for World Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will also offer entry to backstage footage, practice sessions and freshly produced works – broadcast live via their official platform.