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The Royal Ballet has long made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that visually impaired patrons could understand the performance on stage. Now, in a groundbreaking new work, the whole crowd will hear such narration within a work that investigates how lack of sight can reshape our perceptions to experience, music and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Partners with Renowned Dance Creators

The blind artist, a blind artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in developing a new Royal Ballet commission that will launch on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as announced recently.

Within her creative practice, Healey is motivated by a wish to show how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an alternative mode of understanding for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the score, establishes the center of the show on stage.

"Making world-class dance and musical theater for all" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the organization is concentrating on "radical accessibility – inviting creators and patrons to experience dance in transformative new ways," he explained.

Various Dance Creators Collaborate on New Performance

The fresh production is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, each collaborating with the blind artist.

The curator, the organizer of this work, commented: "World Ballet Day was created on the idea of inclusion. Following a decade, we're extending that idea further to examine how challenged viewpoints can shape our art form, and invite patrons of every capability and experiences to experience dance in innovative methods."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator understood that sighted people who had experienced the artist's spoken descriptions found it assisted them understand dance, which can seem so unclear.

Touching Collaboration Between Expert and Amateur Dancers

In a particular performance, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from childhood and who had previously believed that ballet was "mainly for sighted people". But the dancer has realized that it actually "includes a lot of sensation and emotions" and engages senses, "sight-based and non-visual".

The dancer's personal story of once getting lost on his way home and relying on the sun to orient his way back had influenced a dance piece in which the professional dancer becomes the "soothing presence of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson stated.

"This occurred during the day and I had a feeling that the sun should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could sense the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a good helper to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the tale emerged from there."

Blindness Offers Special Relationship with Dance

Healey, an assistant professor of disability research at the Toronto university, said: "Visual impairment and lacking sight invites a active connection with movement in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s bond with their body and movement."

In working with the performers, the artist was striving to express what "they perceive in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through vision," she explained. "I speak with the dancers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they’re thinking, how their body are feeling.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] costume, stage lights, set and audio artists, the understandings and innovation of blindness are ever present as we, blind and seeing people, establish a relationship through our affection of movement and dance. It is this artistry and love that I try to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the perceptions led by blindness."

She continued: "Even though the sight of the dance, the gorgeous visual feast, is there before the audience, there is so much that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is encouraging sighted and visually impaired viewers both into the hidden. What I hope is that, when patrons depart, they sense ballet in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the presence, and listening to the understandings of, visual impairment in new and vibrant ways."

Musician The Composer on Audio Narration

The composer, whose works have accumulated more than billions of online plays, said the descriptive commentary created a connection between visual impairment and sight "through a musical landscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He added: "This isn't just a narration of a show. This is performance."

International Ballet Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global collaborators for International Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will additionally offer entry to backstage footage, rehearsals and recently created pieces – broadcast in real-time via their official platform.