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This prestigious ballet company for years provided audio devices with spoken commentary so that visually impaired patrons could follow the movement on stage. Currently, in a revolutionary new work, the whole crowd will experience such commentary within a production that explores how blindness can transform our reactions to feeling, audio and narrative.

Visually Impaired Artist Partners with Renowned Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind artist, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in producing a recent ballet company work that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

In her art, Healey is guided by a wish to show how blindness and disability can offer an alternative form of perception for all people. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the score, creates the core of the performance on stage.

"Making world-class ballet and opera for each person" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the company is zeroing in on "complete inclusion – inviting artists and patrons to encounter ballet in transformative new ways," he explained.

Multiple Dance Creators Collaborate on New Performance

The recent commission is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, all partnering with Healey.

The curator, the organizer of this production, said: "World Ballet Day was created on the principle of inclusion. Following a ten years, we're expanding that idea deeper to explore how impaired perspectives can shape our performance style, and invite patrons of diverse capacities and backgrounds to experience ballet in innovative methods."

Following partnerships with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he understood that those with vision who had encountered the artist's audio narration believed it assisted them grasp dance, which can appear so complex.

Moving Partnership Of Professional and Amateur Performers

In a particular dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind since birth and who had previously believed that ballet was "mainly for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has understood that it truly "entails a lot of feeling and feelings" and engages perceptions, "sight-based and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of earlier getting lost on his way home and relying on the sunlight to guide his way back had inspired a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "soothing presence of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," Malcomson explained.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could perceive the warmth … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a good helper to me. The sun could be a powerful representation. So the narrative developed from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Special Connection with Motion

The blind artist, an scholar of disability research at the Toronto university, stated: "Visual impairment and lacking sight encourages a vibrant connection with motion in a way that is like a professional dancer’s connection with their physical self and movement."

In collaborating with the dancers, the artist was attempting to communicate what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not accessible through sight," she noted. "I speak with the dancers to get a feeling of how they feel in their body, where their respiration is, what they’re thinking, how their muscles are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] clothing, lighting, scenery and music artists, the perceptions and artistry of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and sighted people, develop a connection through our love of motion and performance. It is this creativity and affection that I strive to weave into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the perceptions directed by visual impairment."

She noted: "Even though the sight of the performance, the gorgeous visual feast, is present before the audience, there is so much that they miss or valuing, and it is blindness that is encouraging seeing and blind audience members alike into the unseen. What I desire is that, when audience members leave, they feel dance in a different way, and they’re also feeling the being, and hearing the understandings of, visual impairment in innovative and active ways."

Musician The Composer on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose recordings have amassed more than 3.5 billion online plays, commented the spoken narration created a relationship between visual impairment and vision "by means of a soundscape, offering narration to that which remains unseen". He added: "This isn't simply a explanation of a show. This is the art."

International 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 organizations will furthermore provide access to behind-the-scenes material, practice sessions and newly commissioned productions – transmitted live via the event website.