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The Royal Ballet for years made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that sightless audience members could track the performance on stage. Currently, via a innovative new work, the whole crowd will hear such commentary within a work that explores how lack of sight can redefine our responses to experience, audio and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Works with Celebrated Choreographers

The blind artist, a blind professional, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and musician the celebrated composer in creating a fresh Royal Ballet production that will debut on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

In her art, the artist is motivated by a ambition to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can provide an alternative form of perception for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the music, creates the center of the production on stage.

"Making top-tier ballet and musical theater for each person" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the company is focusing on "radical accessibility – inviting performers and audiences to discover ballet in revolutionary innovative methods," he stated.

Multiple Dance Creators Partner on New Work

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

The curator, the organizer of this commission, stated: "World Ballet Day was established on the idea of accessibility. After a decade, we're pushing that idea more to explore how impaired outlooks can mold our art form, and invite audiences of every capability and backgrounds to discover ballet in new ways."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, the curator recognized that sighted people who had experienced Healey’s descriptive audio found it helped them grasp ballet, which can seem so complex.

Touching Collaboration Between Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one performance, 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 dance was "mostly for those who can see". But the dancer has understood that it actually "involves a lot of feeling and feelings" and engages senses, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of previously losing his way on his way home and using the sunlight to direct his way back had inspired a duet in which Dixon represents the "soothing presence of the sunlight around Kikuchi 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 wouldn’t see the rays itself, I could feel the temperature … So I kept walking to the west …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful symbol. So the story developed from there."

Blindness Offers Distinct Relationship with Movement

Healey, an assistant professor of disability research at the Toronto university, stated: "Blindness and lacking sight fosters a vibrant relationship with motion in a way that is similar to a expert performer's bond with their body and motion."

In working with the dancers, the artist was striving to convey what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she noted. "I talk with the dancers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their body, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their physical form are sensing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] attire, stage lights, stage design and sound designers, the understandings and creativity of blindness are always there as we, visually impaired and sighted individuals, establish a connection through our passion of movement and performance. It is this innovation and affection that I attempt to weave into the detailed narration. It is a collaboration of the senses guided by visual impairment."

She continued: "Although the view of the dance, the stunning display, is there in front of the audience, there is much that they miss or valuing, and it is blindness that is encouraging sighted and blind viewers alike into the hidden. What I wish is that, when patrons exit, they feel dance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and listening to the viewpoints of, visual impairment in fresh and active ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

The composer, whose compositions have accumulated more than 3.5 billion streams, commented the spoken narration formed a connection between visual impairment and sight "through a musical landscape, offering narration to that which remains unseen". He noted: "It is not simply a explanation of a show. This is performance."

World Ballet Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global associates for World Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will furthermore supply availability to exclusive video, rehearsals and freshly produced productions – transmitted as it happens via their official platform.