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This prestigious ballet company for years offered headphones with audio descriptions so that blind viewers could track the performance on stage. Presently, through a revolutionary new work, the complete gathering will experience such commentary within a piece that investigates how visual impairment can transform our perceptions to experience, sound and narrative.

Blind Artist Partners with Renowned Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired artist, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in developing a new Royal Ballet commission that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

Through her work, the artist is motivated by a ambition to demonstrate how blindness and physical challenge can provide an unique mode of understanding for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the composition, establishes the core of the production on stage.

"Making top-tier ballet and musical theater for all" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under the director, the company's director, the troupe is focusing on "total access – inviting artists and viewers to encounter dance in transformative fresh approaches," he said.

Various Choreographers Work on Fresh Performance

The new work is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, each partnering with Healey.

The curator, the organizer of this commission, commented: "International Ballet Day was created on the principle of access. Following a ten years, we're pushing that concept deeper to consider how disabled perspectives can influence our performance style, and invite viewers of all abilities and experiences to discover ballet in new ways."

Having worked with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, he understood that sighted people who had encountered the artist's audio narration believed it helped them understand ballet, which can seem so abstract.

Touching Partnership Between Professional and Amateur Performers

In a particular duet, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from birth and who had previously believed that dance was "mainly for those who can see". But the dancer has understood that it truly "includes a lot of feeling and feelings" and taps into faculties, "sight-based and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of earlier losing his way on his way home and depending on the sunlight to direct his way back had inspired a dance piece in which the professional dancer becomes the "gentle warmth of the sun around Kikuchi as they move together," Malcomson said.

"It was during the day and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be radiating from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the sunlight itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a good helper to me. The sunlight could be a good symbol. So the tale developed from there."

Blindness Presents Unique Relationship with Dance

The blind artist, an scholar of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Visual impairment and lacking sight fosters a active connection with motion in a way that is similar to a expert performer's relationship with their body and motion."

In working with the dancers, the artist was seeking to express what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not available through sight," she noted. "I speak with the performers to get a feeling of how they are in their physical self, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their muscles are feeling.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] costume, illumination, scenery and sound designers, the viewpoints and creativity of blindness are always there as we, blind and sighted people, build a connection through our affection of movement and performance. It is this artistry and passion that I try to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the faculties guided by blindness."

The artist added: "Even though the vision of the performance, the beautiful visual feast, is present facing the viewers, there is so much that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and visually impaired audience members equally into the unseen. What I hope is that, when audience members depart, they feel performance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and perceiving the viewpoints of, blindness in innovative and dynamic ways."

Musician The Composer on Audio Narration

Richter, whose works have gathered more than 3.5bn digital listens, stated the spoken narration created a connection between visual impairment and sight "by means of a audio environment, providing expression to that which does not always appear". He continued: "This isn't merely a explanation of a production. This is performance."

World Dance Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s international associates for International Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will also supply access to behind-the-scenes footage, rehearsals and newly commissioned pieces – transmitted as it happens via the event website.