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This prestigious ballet company for years offered audio devices with descriptive narration so that blind audience members could follow the performance on stage. Currently, through a revolutionary production, the whole gathering will listen to such commentary within a piece that investigates how visual impairment can transform our responses to experience, sound and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Creator Works with Famous Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a new ballet company work that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

In her art, Healey is guided by a wish to show how blindness and physical challenge can provide an alternative form of understanding for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the music, establishes the heart of the show on stage.

"Creating top-tier dance and musical theater for everyone" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the company is concentrating on "complete inclusion – encouraging performers and audiences to experience dance in transformative innovative methods," he said.

Multiple Choreographers Partner on Fresh Work

The recent commission is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, all partnering with Healey.

The curator, the organizer of this work, stated: "International Ballet Day was founded on the idea of accessibility. Following a ten years, we're expanding that idea further to consider how disabled viewpoints can shape our performance style, and welcome audiences of all abilities and experiences to encounter dance in new ways."

After collaborating with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, he realized that those with vision who had heard Healey’s audio narration found it helped them grasp dance, which can seem so abstract.

Touching Collaboration Between Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In one performance, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind since birth and who had previously believed that dance was "mostly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has discovered that it truly "involves a lot of emotion and feelings" and activates perceptions, "visual and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of earlier becoming disoriented on his way home and using the sunlight to direct his way back had motivated a performance in which Dixon embodies the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they perform as one," the choreographer stated.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be shining from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the light itself, I could feel the warmth … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It led me home. The sunshine was a good assistant to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the tale developed from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Unique Relationship with Movement

Healey, an assistant professor of disability research at the Toronto university, commented: "Visual impairment and lacking sight invites a dynamic connection with motion in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's connection with their body and motion."

In working with the performers, she was striving to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not accessible through vision," she explained. "I speak with the performers to get a sense of how they are in their body, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their muscles are feeling.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] attire, illumination, stage design and music designers, the perceptions and artistry of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and seeing people, establish a rapport through our love of movement and dance. It is this innovation and affection that I try to weave into the detailed narration. It is a partnership of the perceptions guided by visual impairment."

The artist continued: "While the vision of the dance, the gorgeous visual feast, is present facing the viewers, there is a great deal that they overlook or appreciating, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and blind patrons both into the unseen. What I hope is that, when viewers exit, they sense performance in a different way, and they’re also feeling the being, and listening to the understandings of, visual impairment in new and active ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

Richter, whose recordings have gathered more than billions of digital listens, commented the audio descriptions created a relationship between blindness and sight "via a audio environment, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He noted: "It is not just a explanation of a production. This is the art."

World Dance Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide collaborators for International Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will also provide access to exclusive footage, preparations and freshly produced productions – broadcast as it happens via online channels.