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The Royal Ballet has long offered headphones with audio descriptions so that sightless viewers could track the action on stage. Now, via a groundbreaking new work, the complete crowd will hear such narration within a piece that examines how lack of sight can redefine our responses to feeling, sound and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Artist Collaborates with Renowned Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired artist, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and musician the celebrated composer in developing a fresh ballet company production that will debut on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as declared this week.

In her art, Healey is guided by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and disability can provide an unique form of perception for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, woven with the composition, creates the core of the performance on stage.

"Producing top-tier ballet and musical theater for all" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the organization is zeroing in on "radical accessibility – encouraging creators and audiences to discover dance in transformative innovative methods," he said.

Various Choreographers Partner on Fresh Production

The fresh production is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, every one partnering with Healey.

Robert Binet, the curator of this work, said: "International Ballet Day was created on the principle of access. After a ten years, we're expanding that idea more to explore how challenged outlooks can shape our creative medium, and encourage viewers of diverse capacities and backgrounds to encounter dance in innovative methods."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australian locations, the curator understood that individuals who can see who had experienced the artist's spoken descriptions felt it helped them comprehend ballet, which can seem so unclear.

Inspiring Collaboration Between Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In one dance piece, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind since birth and who had always thought that dance was "primarily for those who can see". But Kikuchi has understood that it truly "includes a lot of sensation and emotions" and activates perceptions, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of earlier becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sun to orient his way back had influenced 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.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sun should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It led me home. The sunshine was a great assistant to me. The sun could be a powerful representation. So the narrative emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Distinct Relationship with Motion

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, commented: "Visual impairment and being blind fosters a vibrant bond with movement in a way that is similar to a expert performer's bond with their physical self and movement."

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

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] attire, lighting, scenery and sound creators, the understandings and creativity of blindness are constantly visible as we, blind and seeing persons, establish a rapport through our passion of movement and performance. It is this innovation and passion that I try to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the senses directed by blindness."

The artist continued: "While the sight of the dance, the beautiful display, is there before the viewers, there is so much that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is visual impairment that is inviting seeing and blind audience members both into the unseen. What I wish is that, when audience members exit, they experience dance in a different way, and they’re also sensing the presence, and hearing the perceptions of, visual impairment in fresh and vibrant ways."

Musician The Composer on Sound Narration

Richter, whose compositions have accumulated more than billions of digital listens, commented the spoken narration created a rapport between blindness and vision "by means of a audio environment, giving voice to that which remains unseen". He continued: "It is not merely a narration of a show. It is the art."

World Dance Event Collaborators

The company's global associates for International Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will furthermore offer access to backstage video, rehearsals and recently created works – broadcast in real-time via their official platform.