An Partnership of Our Senses: Royal Ballet Teams Up with Visually Impaired Creator for Pioneering New Production

This prestigious ballet company for years provided headphones with spoken commentary so that blind patrons could track the movement on stage. Presently, via a revolutionary production, the entire audience will listen to such descriptions within a piece that examines how lack of sight can redefine our responses to feeling, audio and dramatic expression.

Blind Creator Collaborates with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a recent Royal Ballet work that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as announced on Thursday.

Through her work, Healey is driven by a desire to show how visual impairment and physical challenge can provide an different form of perception for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the score, creates the core of the show on stage.

"Making exceptional ballet and opera for everyone" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the company is focusing on "complete inclusion – welcoming artists and viewers to discover ballet in life-changing fresh approaches," he said.

Several Dance Creators Collaborate on New Production

The new work is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, all working with the blind artist.

The curator, the organizer of this commission, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the idea of inclusion. After a ten years, we're extending that idea further to examine how challenged viewpoints can influence our performance style, and welcome patrons of all abilities and experiences to discover dance in fresh approaches."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canada and Australian locations, the curator realized that sighted people who had experienced Healey’s descriptive audio felt it helped them grasp ballet, which can appear so abstract.

Inspiring Collaboration Between Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In one duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from childhood and who had long assumed that ballet was "mostly for sighted people". But the dancer has understood that it actually "involves a lot of feeling and emotions" and engages faculties, "visual and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of previously getting lost on his way home and relying on the sun to orient his way back had influenced a dance piece in which Dixon represents the "soothing presence of the sunlight around his partner as they perform as one," Malcomson said.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could perceive the heat … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a good guide to me. The sun could be a powerful representation. So the story emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Special Relationship with Motion

Healey, an academic of disability studies at the Toronto university, said: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a dynamic connection with movement in a way that is like a professional dancer’s bond with their body and dance."

In collaborating with the performers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she noted. "I talk with the performers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their body, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their muscles are sensing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] clothing, illumination, stage design and music creators, the viewpoints and innovation of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and seeing persons, build a relationship through our love of motion and dance. It is this artistry and affection that I attempt to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the perceptions led by blindness."

The artist continued: "While the sight of the dance, the stunning visual feast, is available before the audience, there is so much that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and blind viewers equally into the invisible. What I desire is that, when audience members depart, they experience ballet in a different way, and they’re also experiencing the presence, and hearing the understandings of, blindness in innovative and active ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

Richter, whose compositions have gathered more than billions of streams, stated the audio descriptions formed a rapport between visual impairment and vision "through a soundscape, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He added: "It is not just a narration of a show. This is performance."

World Dance Day Collaborators

The company's international collaborators for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will additionally offer access to behind-the-scenes video, practice sessions and recently created works – transmitted as it happens via online channels.