🔗 Share this article

This prestigious ballet company has long made available audio devices with audio descriptions so that sightless audience members could understand the movement on stage. Currently, through a groundbreaking new work, the entire audience will experience such descriptions within a work that investigates how blindness can reshape our responses to experience, audio and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Renowned Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in producing a fresh Royal Ballet production that will debut on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

In her art, Healey is driven by a desire to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can present an different type of awareness for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the score, forms the center of the production on stage.

"Creating world-class dance and musical theater for everyone" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under the director, the company's leader, the company is zeroing in on "complete inclusion – welcoming performers and audiences to discover ballet in revolutionary innovative methods," he stated.

Various Dance Creators Work on Fresh Production

The fresh production is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all working with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the curator of this commission, said: "International Ballet Day was created on the principle of access. Following a ten years, we're extending that idea further to consider how disabled outlooks can mold our art form, and welcome patrons of all abilities and backgrounds to encounter ballet in innovative methods."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, the curator realized that individuals who can see who had heard the artist's descriptive audio felt it aided them understand ballet, which can look so unclear.

Touching Partnership Of Professional and Amateur Dancers

In one duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired since birth and who had long assumed that dance was "primarily for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it actually "includes a lot of emotion and sentiments" and activates perceptions, "visual and non-sight".

The dancer's unique narrative of once getting lost on his way home and depending on the sunlight to orient his way back had inspired a performance in which the professional dancer represents the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they perform as one," the choreographer explained.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a sense that the sun should be shining from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the sunlight itself, I could perceive the warmth … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It led me home. The sunshine was a good assistant to me. The sun could be a meaningful metaphor. So the narrative originated from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Distinct Relationship with Dance

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the University of Toronto, said: "Visual impairment and lacking sight fosters a vibrant relationship with dance in a way that is like a professional dancer’s bond with their body and movement."

In collaborating with the dancers, she was striving to express what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through vision," she explained. "I converse with the performers to get a understanding of how they are in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they think, how their muscles are sensing.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] costume, lighting, stage design and sound creators, the understandings and creativity of blindness are always there as we, blind and seeing persons, develop a connection through our passion of dance and dance. It is this artistry and passion that I try to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the senses led by visual impairment."

She noted: "While the view of the performance, the stunning display, is present facing the patrons, there is so much that they miss or valuing, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and visually impaired patrons equally into the hidden. What I desire is that, when patrons depart, they sense ballet in a different way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and listening to the understandings of, blindness in innovative and dynamic ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose works have accumulated more than 3.5bn streams, stated the descriptive commentary created a connection between blindness and sight "through a soundscape, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He added: "This isn't just a narration of a show. It is performance."

World Ballet Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s global associates for International Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also offer availability to backstage footage, preparations and newly commissioned pieces – transmitted in real-time via the event website.