🔗 Share this article

The Royal Ballet has long offered audio devices with descriptive narration so that blind patrons could follow the movement on stage. Currently, in a groundbreaking new work, the entire audience will listen to such commentary within a piece that investigates how visual impairment can redefine our reactions to sensation, music and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Artist Collaborates with Renowned Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in creating a fresh ballet company work that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared this week.

Through her work, Healey is driven by a wish to illustrate how blindness and physical challenge can provide an alternative mode of perception for everyone. Her rich spoken descriptions, integrated with the score, forms the center of the show on stage.

"Making top-tier dance and musical theater for each person" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's leader, the organization is zeroing in on "complete inclusion – encouraging creators and audiences to experience ballet in revolutionary fresh approaches," he explained.

Several Choreographers Collaborate on New Production

The new work is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside Wayne McGregor, each partnering with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the director of this work, said: "World Ballet Day was created on the concept of accessibility. After a decade, we're expanding that notion deeper to explore how challenged outlooks can mold our performance style, and invite patrons of every capability and histories to experience dance in new ways."

Having worked with Healey in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator understood that sighted people who had heard the artist's descriptive audio felt it helped them understand ballet, which can look so complex.

Moving Collaboration Between Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In one dance piece, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from childhood and who had long assumed that ballet was "primarily for those who can see". But Kikuchi has understood that it truly "entails a lot of emotion and emotions" and engages perceptions, "sight-based and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s personal story of previously getting lost on his way home and depending on the sunlight to orient his way back had influenced a dance piece in which the professional dancer represents the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," the choreographer said.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the sunlight itself, I could feel the heat … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a great guide to me. The sunlight could be a powerful representation. So the tale originated from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Special Connection with Dance

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a active connection with movement in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and movement."

In working with the performers, she was attempting to convey what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she said. "I speak with the dancers to get a feeling of how they are in their body, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their physical form are experiencing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] clothing, stage lights, stage design and sound designers, the perceptions and artistry of blindness are ever present as we, blind and seeing persons, establish a connection through our affection of motion and performance. It is this innovation and love that I attempt to blend into the detailed narration. It is a cooperation of the perceptions led by visual impairment."

The artist added: "Although the vision of the ballet, the stunning visual feast, is present before the patrons, there is so much that they miss or valuing, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging sighted and blind patrons alike into the invisible. What I hope is that, when viewers depart, they feel dance in a new way, and they’re also sensing the existence, and hearing the perceptions of, blindness in new and dynamic ways."

Composer The Composer on Audio Descriptions

The composer, whose recordings have amassed more than 3.5 billion online plays, commented the spoken narration created a rapport between visual impairment and vision "through a musical landscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He added: "It is not simply a description of a show. It is the performance itself."

World Ballet Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international associates for World Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will additionally offer availability to backstage video, rehearsals and freshly produced pieces – streamed live via the event website.