An Collaboration between Our Senses: Royal Ballet Partners with Visually Impaired Artist for Groundbreaking Fresh Production

This prestigious ballet company for years offered headphones with descriptive narration so that blind viewers could track the action on stage. Now, via a innovative production, the entire gathering will hear such narration within a production that examines how lack of sight can transform our perceptions to feeling, audio and narrative.

Visually Impaired Artist Collaborates with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in developing a fresh ballet company commission that will launch on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

In her art, the artist is motivated by a ambition to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can provide an alternative form of understanding for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the score, establishes the core of the show on stage.

"Creating top-tier ballet and musical theater for each person" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the troupe is focusing on "radical accessibility – inviting creators and viewers to encounter ballet in transformative fresh approaches," he said.

Various Dance Creators Work on New Work

The new work is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, each partnering with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the director of this work, said: "World Ballet Day was established on the concept of accessibility. Following a decade, we're pushing that idea further to consider how impaired perspectives can shape our art form, and welcome audiences of every capability and experiences to encounter ballet in new ways."

Following partnerships with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he understood that sighted people who had heard Healey’s spoken descriptions found it aided them grasp ballet, which can seem so abstract.

Touching Collaboration Between Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular duet, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind since birth and who had always thought that ballet was "mainly for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has realized that it actually "involves a lot of feeling and feelings" and engages perceptions, "visual and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sunlight to orient his way back had motivated a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "gentle warmth of the sun around Kikuchi as they perform as one," Malcomson said.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the sunlight itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It led me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the narrative developed from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Special Connection with Movement

The blind artist, an academic of disability studies at the Toronto university, said: "Blindness and being blind invites a dynamic bond with movement in a way that is like a expert performer's bond with their body and movement."

In working with the dancers, she was striving to express what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through vision," she said. "I speak with the performers to get a feeling of how they feel in their body, where their breathing is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are feeling.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] clothing, illumination, set and music designers, the perceptions and creativity of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and sighted people, develop a rapport through our affection of movement and dance. It is this innovation and love that I try to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the faculties directed by blindness."

She added: "Although the sight of the performance, the beautiful spectacle, is present facing the viewers, there is so much that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and blind patrons both into the hidden. What I desire is that, when viewers exit, they experience dance in a new way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and hearing the viewpoints of, blindness in innovative and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Narration

The composer, whose recordings have gathered more than 3.5bn digital listens, said the spoken narration created a rapport between visual impairment and vision "through a musical landscape, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He added: "It is not simply a narration of a production. This is the performance itself."

World Ballet Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s global associates for International Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will additionally supply access to behind-the-scenes material, preparations and freshly produced works – transmitted live via the event website.