🔗 Share this article

The Royal Ballet for years offered headphones with audio descriptions so that blind viewers could track the performance on stage. Now, in a revolutionary production, the complete audience will hear such descriptions within a production that investigates how blindness can redefine our perceptions to feeling, audio and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Famous Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in producing a recent ballet company work that will premiere on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

Through her work, Healey is guided by a ambition to show how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an alternative form of perception for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, blended with the music, forms the center of the performance on stage.

"Making world-class dance and musical theater for each person" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the organization is concentrating on "total access – welcoming creators and patrons to experience dance in transformative fresh approaches," he explained.

Multiple Choreographers Partner on New Performance

The recent commission is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all collaborating with Healey.

Robert Binet, the organizer of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the concept of access. After a ten years, we're pushing that notion more to examine how disabled viewpoints can mold our performance style, and invite audiences of all abilities and experiences to experience dance in new ways."

After collaborating with Healey in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator realized that individuals who can see who had heard Healey’s descriptive audio believed it assisted them understand ballet, which can seem so abstract.

Inspiring Partnership Of Professional and Amateur Dancers

In one performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind since birth and who had always thought that dance was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has realized that it in fact "involves a lot of feeling and emotions" and activates perceptions, "visual and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s personal story of earlier becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sunlight to guide his way back had motivated a dance piece in which Dixon embodies the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer explained.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be shining from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could sense the warmth … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great assistant to me. The sun could be a good representation. So the tale originated from there."

Blindness Provides Distinct Connection with Motion

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

In collaborating with the performers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they perceive in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she said. "I converse with the performers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breath is, what they think, how their physical form are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] costume, illumination, stage design and sound creators, the understandings and innovation of blindness are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted people, build a connection through our passion of motion and performance. It is this artistry and passion that I try to blend into the detailed narration. It is a partnership of the senses guided by visual impairment."

She noted: "While the vision of the dance, the gorgeous visual feast, is present before the viewers, there is a great deal that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is inviting seeing and blind audience members alike into the hidden. What I wish is that, when audience members depart, they sense dance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and perceiving the perceptions of, visual impairment in innovative and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

Richter, whose recordings have gathered more than billions of digital listens, stated the spoken narration formed a relationship between blindness and sight "through a soundscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He noted: "It is not simply a explanation of a production. It is the art."

International Dance Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s international collaborators for World Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will also offer access to behind-the-scenes material, rehearsals and newly commissioned pieces – transmitted in real-time via the event website.