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This prestigious ballet company for years provided headphones with descriptive narration so that sightless patrons could understand the action on stage. Presently, via a groundbreaking performance, the whole audience will hear such narration within a work that examines how lack of sight can reshape our perceptions to sensation, music and narrative.

Blind Artist Collaborates with Renowned Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired professional, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in developing a fresh Royal Ballet work that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

In her art, the artist is guided by a wish to demonstrate how blindness and disability can present an different type of perception for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the score, forms the heart of the production on stage.

"Making world-class dance and musical theater for each person" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the troupe is focusing on "total access – inviting creators and audiences to discover ballet in revolutionary innovative methods," he said.

Multiple Dance Creators Collaborate on Fresh Performance

The new work is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, each partnering with Healey.

Robert Binet, the director of this production, stated: "International Ballet Day was established on the principle of access. After a decade, we're expanding that concept more to consider how impaired perspectives can shape our performance style, and encourage audiences of every capability and histories to experience dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator realized that individuals who can see who had heard Healey’s spoken descriptions believed it aided them understand dance, which can seem so abstract.

Touching Partnership Between Professional and Amateur Dancers

In a particular dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from childhood and who had always thought that dance was "mainly for sighted people". But the dancer has discovered that it actually "involves a lot of emotion and emotions" and activates senses, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of earlier getting lost on his way home and relying on the sunlight to guide his way back had inspired a dance piece in which the professional dancer embodies the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they perform as one," Malcomson said.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could feel the heat … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a great helper to me. The sunlight could be a powerful metaphor. So the narrative developed from there."

Blindness Offers Special Relationship with Movement

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the Toronto university, commented: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a vibrant bond with motion in a way that is like a professional dancer’s connection with their physical self and dance."

In working with the performers, the artist was seeking to express what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she explained. "I converse with the dancers to get a understanding of how they’re feeling in their body, where their respiration is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are experiencing.

"Partnering with the choreographers [and] attire, stage lights, set and audio creators, the perceptions and creativity of blindness are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and seeing individuals, develop a connection through our passion of motion and dance. It is this creativity and affection that I strive to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a cooperation of the perceptions led by visual impairment."

She noted: "Even though the sight of the dance, the gorgeous spectacle, is present before the patrons, there is much that they overlook or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging sighted and visually impaired viewers equally into the hidden. What I wish is that, when patrons leave, they feel ballet in a different way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and perceiving the viewpoints of, blindness in fresh and dynamic ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

The composer, whose recordings have gathered more than 3.5 billion streams, commented the audio descriptions formed a relationship between visual impairment and sight "through a musical landscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He added: "It is not merely a narration of a performance. It is the performance itself."

International Ballet Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global collaborators for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will furthermore provide entry to exclusive footage, preparations and freshly produced pieces – streamed in real-time via online channels.