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This prestigious ballet company for years made available headphones with descriptive narration so that visually impaired viewers could understand the movement on stage. Presently, through a revolutionary performance, the complete audience will experience such commentary within a work that explores how lack of sight can reshape our reactions to sensation, audio and narrative.

Blind Creator Partners with Renowned Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired creator, is partnering with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in developing a fresh ballet company commission that will launch on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as declared recently.

Within her creative practice, the artist is driven by a ambition to demonstrate how blindness and disability can provide an alternative type of awareness for each individual. Her rich spoken descriptions, integrated with the music, establishes the core of the performance on stage.

"Creating top-tier ballet and opera for all" is a motto of the the organization. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's director, the organization is concentrating on "complete inclusion – inviting artists and patrons to discover ballet in transformative new ways," he stated.

Multiple Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Work

The fresh production is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, each working with Healey.

Robert Binet, the curator of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was founded on the idea of inclusion. After a decade, we're extending that concept more to examine how impaired outlooks can mold our art form, and invite audiences of all abilities and backgrounds to experience ballet in new ways."

After collaborating with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator recognized that sighted people who had experienced Healey’s descriptive audio felt it helped them understand dance, which can seem so abstract.

Touching Partnership Between Professional and Amateur Dancers

In one dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from childhood and who had long assumed that dance was "primarily for those who can see". But Kikuchi has understood that it actually "involves a lot of emotion and sentiments" and engages faculties, "visual and non-sight".

The dancer's unique narrative of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and using the sun to guide his way back had inspired a duet in which the professional dancer embodies the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around his partner as they move together," the choreographer explained.

"It was during the day and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be shining from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could sense the warmth … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sun could be a powerful symbol. So the narrative developed from there."

Blindness Provides Unique Connection with Movement

Healey, an scholar of disability studies at the Toronto university, commented: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a active connection with movement in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and motion."

In collaborating with the dancers, she was attempting to express what "they perceive in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she said. "I talk with the performers to get a understanding of how they feel in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they think, how their physical form are feeling.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] attire, stage lights, set and audio creators, the perceptions and creativity of blindness are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted people, develop a connection through our love of movement and dance. It is this innovation and love that I try to blend into the detailed narration. It is a collaboration of the perceptions led by blindness."

The artist continued: "While the sight of the performance, the gorgeous spectacle, is there before the patrons, there is so much that they’re not accessing or valuing, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and blind audience members alike into the hidden. What I hope is that, when viewers depart, they feel ballet in a new way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and perceiving the perceptions of, blindness in new and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose recordings have amassed more than billions of online plays, commented the descriptive commentary established a relationship between visual impairment and sight "by means of a musical landscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He continued: "It is not simply a explanation of a show. It is the performance itself."

International Ballet Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global associates for World Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will furthermore provide access to exclusive material, rehearsals and recently created pieces – streamed in real-time via the event website.