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The Royal Ballet has long offered headphones with descriptive narration so that visually impaired viewers could follow the action on stage. Currently, through a groundbreaking production, the whole crowd will hear such descriptions within a work that investigates how blindness can reshape our reactions to experience, music and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Celebrated Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in creating a fresh Royal Ballet production that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

Through her work, Healey is motivated by a wish to show how blindness and physical challenge can offer an alternative type of awareness for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, woven with the music, creates the heart of the performance on stage.

"Making world-class ballet and musical theater for everyone" is a motto of the the organization. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's director, the troupe is focusing on "complete inclusion – encouraging artists and viewers to discover ballet in transformative innovative methods," he stated.

Various Choreographers Partner on New Work

The recent commission is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside Wayne McGregor, each working with Healey.

Robert Binet, the curator of this commission, commented: "International Ballet Day was established on the idea of inclusion. After a ten years, we're extending that notion more to examine how challenged perspectives can mold our art form, and encourage patrons of every capability and backgrounds to experience ballet in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with the artist in Canada and Australia, he recognized that sighted people who had encountered the artist's spoken descriptions felt it helped them grasp ballet, which can appear so unclear.

Moving Partnership Between Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In a particular duet, the company's performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired since birth and who had always thought that ballet was "mainly for sighted people". But the dancer has discovered that it truly "entails a lot of feeling and emotions" and engages senses, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of once becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sunlight to direct his way back had influenced a dance piece in which the professional dancer embodies the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer stated.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the rays itself, I could perceive the warmth … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a excellent helper to me. The sun could be a powerful symbol. So the story developed from there."

Blindness Provides Special Relationship with Movement

Healey, an academic of disability research at the Toronto university, commented: "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 dancers, the artist was seeking to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she explained. "I speak with the performers to get a sense of how they are in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their body are sensing.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] clothing, stage lights, stage design and audio artists, the viewpoints and artistry of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and seeing persons, build a relationship through our passion of movement and dance. It is this creativity and love that I attempt to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a cooperation of the faculties guided by visual impairment."

The artist continued: "Even though the view of the ballet, the gorgeous visual feast, is available facing the viewers, there is much that they overlook or appreciating, and it is blindness that is encouraging sighted and blind audience members equally into the invisible. What I desire is that, when audience members depart, they experience performance in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the presence, and listening to the viewpoints of, blindness in new and active ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose compositions have accumulated more than 3.5 billion digital listens, commented the spoken narration formed a connection between visual impairment and sight "via a audio environment, giving voice to that which remains unseen". He noted: "This isn't just a narration of a show. This is the performance itself."

World Ballet Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global associates for International Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will also supply availability to backstage footage, practice sessions and newly commissioned productions – streamed live via online channels.