A Collaboration of Our Senses: Royal Ballet Partners with Blind Creator for Pioneering New Performance

This prestigious ballet company has long provided headphones with descriptive narration so that visually impaired audience members could track the performance on stage. Presently, via a innovative new work, the entire crowd will experience such narration within a piece that examines how lack of sight can redefine our reactions to experience, music and narrative.

Visually Impaired Artist Collaborates with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind artist, is partnering with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in developing a fresh ballet company work that will premiere on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared this week.

In her art, the artist is driven by a desire to illustrate how blindness and disability can provide an different type of understanding for all people. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the composition, forms the heart of the show on stage.

"Creating exceptional dance and opera for each person" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the company is concentrating on "radical accessibility – encouraging artists and patrons to discover dance in transformative new ways," he explained.

Multiple Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Work

The new work is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, every one working with Healey.

The curator, the curator of this production, stated: "International Ballet Day was created on the idea of inclusion. Following a ten years, we're pushing that idea deeper to examine how challenged viewpoints can mold our creative medium, and welcome viewers of diverse capacities and experiences to encounter dance in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, he realized that sighted people who had experienced Healey’s descriptive audio felt it helped them understand ballet, which can appear so abstract.

Inspiring Partnership Between Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from birth and who had always thought that dance was "primarily for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has understood that it in fact "includes a lot of sensation and sentiments" and engages faculties, "sight-based and other sensory".

The dancer's unique narrative of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sun to direct his way back had motivated a dance piece in which the professional dancer becomes the "soothing presence of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they perform as one," Malcomson explained.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I kept walking to the west …. It led me home. The sunshine was a excellent guide to me. The sunlight could be a good representation. So the story originated from there."

Blindness Presents Special Connection with Dance

Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the Toronto university, stated: "Blindness and being blind invites a vibrant bond with movement in a way that is like a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and motion."

In collaborating with the performers, the artist was attempting to communicate what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not available through sight," she noted. "I converse with the dancers to get a feeling of how they feel in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their body are experiencing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] attire, illumination, stage design and music artists, the understandings and creativity of blindness are always there as we, blind and sighted individuals, establish a connection through our affection of motion and dance. It is this innovation and passion that I attempt to weave into the spoken commentary. It is a partnership of the senses directed by blindness."

She added: "While the sight of the ballet, the beautiful spectacle, is there in front of the patrons, there is a great deal that they miss or appreciating, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and blind audience members equally into the hidden. What I hope is that, when viewers depart, they sense ballet in a distinct way, and they’re also sensing the presence, and perceiving the perceptions of, visual impairment in innovative and vibrant ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose recordings have amassed more than 3.5 billion streams, said the spoken narration created a relationship between blindness and vision "by means of a musical landscape, providing expression to that which is not always visible". He added: "It is not just a description of a production. It is the performance itself."

International Ballet Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s international associates for International Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will also offer availability to behind-the-scenes footage, practice sessions and recently created works – streamed as it happens via the event website.