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The Royal Ballet for years provided audio devices with audio descriptions so that sightless viewers could understand the action on stage. Now, through a innovative performance, the entire audience will hear such descriptions within a work that examines how blindness can transform our responses to feeling, audio and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Works with Famous Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in producing a new ballet company work that will premiere on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as declared this week.

Within her creative practice, Healey is driven by a ambition to illustrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an different mode of perception for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, blended with the composition, forms the heart of the show on stage.

"Making exceptional ballet and opera for each person" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the company is focusing on "radical accessibility – welcoming creators and audiences to encounter ballet in revolutionary new ways," he said.

Multiple Dance Creators Work on New Work

The recent commission is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, every one collaborating with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the director of this commission, said: "International Ballet Day was created on the idea of access. Following a ten years, we're extending that notion more to examine how disabled viewpoints can influence our performance style, and invite viewers of diverse capacities and backgrounds to encounter ballet in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator recognized that sighted people who had heard Healey’s descriptive audio found it aided them understand dance, which can look so unclear.

Touching Collaboration Of Professional and Amateur Performers

In one dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from birth and who had always thought that dance was "mostly for individuals with vision". But the dancer has realized that it actually "entails a lot of sensation and sentiments" and engages senses, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of earlier getting lost on his way home and relying on the sunlight to direct his way back had influenced a dance piece in which Dixon embodies the "soothing presence of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," the choreographer said.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be radiating from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the sunlight itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sun was a excellent helper to me. The sun could be a meaningful representation. So the tale developed from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Special Connection with Movement

Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the Toronto university, said: "Blindness and being blind encourages a dynamic relationship with motion in a way that is like a expert performer's bond with their body and dance."

In partnering with the performers, the artist was striving to communicate what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not accessible through looking," she noted. "I converse with the dancers to get a sense of how they are in their body, where their breath is, what they think, how their physical form are sensing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] clothing, illumination, stage design and sound designers, the understandings and creativity of blindness are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted people, build a relationship through our love of dance and dance. It is this creativity and love that I attempt to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the faculties directed by blindness."

She continued: "While the sight of the performance, the gorgeous display, is available in front of the viewers, there is a great deal that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and visually impaired audience members equally into the unseen. What I hope is that, when patrons exit, they experience dance in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and perceiving the understandings of, blindness in new and dynamic ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose recordings have gathered more than billions of streams, commented the descriptive commentary created a relationship between blindness and vision "through a audio environment, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He added: "It is not merely a narration of a show. This is the art."

World Ballet Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s global associates for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will furthermore supply entry to backstage material, practice sessions and freshly produced works – broadcast as it happens via their official platform.