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This prestigious ballet company for years made available audio devices with descriptive narration so that sightless audience members could track the action on stage. Now, in a innovative production, the entire gathering will experience such descriptions within a production that examines how visual impairment can transform our responses to feeling, music and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Creator Partners with Famous Dance Creators

The blind artist, a blind artist, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in developing a fresh Royal Ballet work that will premiere on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

Through her work, Healey is motivated by a desire to show how blindness and disability can present an unique form of perception for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, blended with the composition, establishes the core of the production on stage.

"Making top-tier dance and musical theater for everyone" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's director, the troupe is zeroing in on "radical accessibility – welcoming performers and audiences to experience dance in revolutionary new ways," he explained.

Various Dance Creators Collaborate on Fresh Performance

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

Robert Binet, the curator of this work, said: "International Ballet Day was established on the idea of inclusion. Following a decade, we're expanding that idea further to examine how challenged perspectives can influence our creative medium, and encourage viewers of diverse capacities and backgrounds to discover dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australia, the curator recognized that sighted people who had encountered Healey’s spoken descriptions found it aided them grasp dance, which can appear so abstract.

Touching Collaboration Between Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one performance, the company's performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from birth and who had previously believed that dance was "mainly for those who can see". But the dancer has understood that it truly "includes a lot of feeling and feelings" and engages senses, "sight-based and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of previously getting lost on his way home and depending on the sunlight to orient his way back had influenced a performance in which Dixon becomes the "soothing presence of the sun around Kikuchi as they move together," Malcomson explained.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be radiating from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the sunlight itself, I could feel the temperature … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sun was a great guide to me. The sunlight could be a good representation. So the tale developed from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Unique Connection with Motion

The blind artist, an academic of disability studies at the Toronto university, said: "Blindness and being blind invites a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s relationship with their physical self and dance."

In working with the dancers, the artist was seeking to express what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not available through sight," she said. "I converse with the performers to get a understanding of how they feel in their body, where their breath is, what they think, how their muscles are feeling.

"Partnering with the choreographers [and] attire, stage lights, scenery and music artists, the understandings and innovation of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and sighted individuals, develop a rapport through our passion of motion and performance. It is this innovation and affection that I strive to integrate into the detailed narration. It is a cooperation of the faculties guided by blindness."

She noted: "Even though the sight of the dance, the beautiful visual feast, is there before the viewers, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and blind patrons equally into the hidden. What I wish is that, when patrons depart, they sense dance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and perceiving the perceptions of, blindness in fresh and active ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Narration

The composer, whose recordings have accumulated more than 3.5 billion streams, said the descriptive commentary established a connection between blindness and vision "via a musical landscape, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He continued: "This isn't simply a description of a show. This is the performance itself."

International Ballet Day Partners

The company's international partners for World Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will furthermore provide entry to behind-the-scenes footage, preparations and newly commissioned productions – transmitted live via online channels.