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The Royal Ballet traditionally offered audio devices with descriptive narration so that visually impaired audience members could track the action on stage. Presently, via a groundbreaking production, the whole crowd will experience such narration within a work that examines how visual impairment can reshape our responses to sensation, music and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Artist Works with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in developing a new Royal Ballet work that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as announced this week.

Within her creative practice, Healey is guided by a ambition to show how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an unique form of understanding for all people. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the music, establishes the core of the show on stage.

"Making world-class ballet and opera for each person" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the organization is concentrating on "complete inclusion – encouraging creators and patrons to encounter ballet in revolutionary innovative methods," he explained.

Several Choreographers Partner on New Work

The fresh production is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all partnering with Healey.

The curator, the director of this production, commented: "International Ballet Day was created on the idea of access. After a decade, we're expanding that concept more to examine how disabled outlooks can shape our creative medium, and encourage patrons of diverse capacities and experiences to experience dance in new ways."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australia, he understood that those with vision who had experienced the artist's spoken descriptions believed it assisted them comprehend dance, which can seem so unclear.

Inspiring Partnership Of Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one performance, the company's performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from childhood and who had long assumed that dance was "primarily for those who can see". But Kikuchi has realized that it truly "entails a lot of sensation and sentiments" and activates faculties, "sight-based and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s personal story of previously losing his way on his way home and depending on the sunlight to guide his way back had inspired a duet in which Dixon represents the "soothing presence of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson stated.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the light itself, I could feel the temperature … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It led me home. The sun was a great helper to me. The sun could be a good metaphor. So the narrative developed from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Distinct Relationship with Dance

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, stated: "Visual impairment and lacking sight invites a active relationship with motion in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and movement."

In working with the dancers, she was striving to communicate what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not accessible through looking," she said. "I talk with the dancers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their body, where their respiration is, what they think, how their muscles are feeling.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] attire, lighting, stage design and sound artists, the perceptions and innovation of visual impairment are ever present as we, visually impaired and seeing people, build a connection through our love of dance and performance. It is this artistry and love that I attempt to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a cooperation of the perceptions guided by blindness."

The artist continued: "Although the view of the dance, the beautiful visual feast, is available in front of the audience, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is encouraging sighted and blind patrons equally into the hidden. What I hope is that, when audience members depart, they sense ballet in a new way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and perceiving the understandings of, visual impairment in new and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Narration

Richter, whose works have gathered more than 3.5bn digital listens, commented the spoken narration formed a relationship between blindness and sight "by means of a audio environment, providing expression to that which is not always visible". He noted: "This isn't simply a description of a performance. It is performance."

World Dance Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for International Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will furthermore supply access to exclusive video, rehearsals and recently created works – transmitted live via online channels.