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This prestigious ballet company traditionally offered headphones with spoken commentary so that visually impaired audience members could understand the movement on stage. Now, through a revolutionary performance, the whole crowd will experience such narration within a production that explores how lack of sight can redefine our reactions to sensation, music and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Partners with Celebrated Dance Creators

The blind artist, a visually impaired creator, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in developing a recent ballet company commission that will launch on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

Through her work, the artist is guided by a desire to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can provide an different type of awareness for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, blended with the score, forms the heart of the show on stage.

"Making world-class ballet and musical theater for all" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the company is concentrating on "radical accessibility – welcoming performers and viewers to discover dance in transformative fresh approaches," he explained.

Multiple Choreographers Work on New Production

The new work is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all working with Healey.

The curator, the organizer of this production, commented: "World Ballet Day was created on the idea of inclusion. Following a ten years, we're extending that idea further to consider how challenged outlooks can shape our creative medium, and encourage patrons of all abilities and backgrounds to experience dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with the artist in Canada and Australian locations, he understood that individuals who can see who had heard Healey’s spoken descriptions found it helped them grasp ballet, which can look so unclear.

Inspiring Partnership Between Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one performance, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from birth and who had long assumed that dance was "mostly for sighted people". But the dancer has realized that it actually "involves a lot of sensation and emotions" and engages senses, "sight-based and non-visual".

The dancer's unique narrative of previously losing his way on his way home and depending on the sun to guide his way back had inspired a duet in which Dixon embodies the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," the choreographer stated.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be beaming from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the sunlight itself, I could sense the warmth … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a good guide to me. The sun could be a good symbol. So the story developed from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Unique Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an scholar of disability studies at the Toronto university, stated: "Visual impairment and lacking sight invites a active relationship with motion in a way that is similar to a expert performer's connection with their physical self and motion."

In collaborating with the dancers, the artist was attempting to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not accessible through vision," she said. "I talk with the dancers to get a sense of how they feel in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their muscles are sensing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] costume, stage lights, stage design and audio creators, the viewpoints and innovation of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and seeing persons, develop a connection through our passion of dance and dance. It is this innovation and affection that I strive to blend into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the perceptions guided by visual impairment."

She noted: "Even though the view of the performance, the stunning display, is present facing the viewers, there is so much that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and blind viewers both into the unseen. What I hope is that, when patrons leave, they sense performance in a different way, and they’re also sensing the existence, and perceiving the viewpoints of, visual impairment in fresh and active ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Narration

Richter, whose compositions have gathered more than billions of streams, commented the descriptive commentary created a relationship between visual impairment and sight "through a soundscape, offering narration to that which remains unseen". He noted: "This isn't simply a narration of a production. This is the art."

World Ballet Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide collaborators for World Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will additionally provide entry to exclusive material, rehearsals and newly commissioned works – streamed in real-time via online channels.