A Cooperation of Human Perception: The Royal Ballet Joins alongside Visually Impaired Creator for Groundbreaking Fresh Show

This prestigious ballet company traditionally made available headphones with descriptive narration so that blind patrons could track the action on stage. Now, through a revolutionary performance, the whole crowd will hear such commentary within a production that examines how lack of sight can transform our reactions to sensation, music and narrative.

Blind Creator Works with Celebrated Choreographers

The blind artist, a blind creator, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in developing a new Royal Ballet work that will launch on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as declared on Thursday.

In her art, the artist is motivated by a ambition to show how blindness and disability can present an alternative form of awareness for each individual. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the score, forms the core of the performance on stage.

"Creating world-class ballet and musical theater for each person" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the company is zeroing in on "total access – encouraging artists and audiences to discover ballet in revolutionary innovative methods," he stated.

Multiple Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Performance

The new work is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, all partnering with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the organizer of this commission, said: "International Ballet Day was created on the idea of inclusion. After a ten years, we're pushing that idea deeper to consider how impaired viewpoints can mold our creative medium, and welcome patrons of diverse capacities and histories to experience ballet in innovative methods."

Following partnerships with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator realized that those with vision who had encountered Healey’s spoken descriptions felt it assisted them understand ballet, which can appear so complex.

Touching Collaboration Between Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In one performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from birth and who had previously believed that dance was "primarily for those who can see". But Kikuchi has understood that it in fact "involves a lot of feeling and sentiments" and engages senses, "visual and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s personal story of earlier losing his way on his way home and depending on the sunlight to guide his way back had influenced a duet in which the professional dancer becomes the "warm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer explained.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be radiating from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the sunlight itself, I could perceive the heat … So I kept walking to the west …. It guided me home. The sun was a good helper to me. The sun could be a meaningful symbol. So the story emerged from there."

Blindness Provides Special Connection with Dance

Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Visual impairment and lacking sight fosters a dynamic connection with movement in a way that is like a expert performer's connection with their physical self and dance."

In collaborating with the performers, she was striving to communicate what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not available through looking," she explained. "I talk with the performers to get a feeling of how they are in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they think, how their body are feeling.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] clothing, illumination, stage design and sound creators, the understandings and creativity of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and sighted persons, establish a connection through our love of movement and performance. It is this creativity and love that I strive to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the faculties directed by visual impairment."

She continued: "Although the vision of the ballet, the stunning display, is present in front of the patrons, there is much that they overlook or understanding, and it is visual impairment that is inviting seeing and visually impaired audience members both into the hidden. What I hope is that, when viewers exit, they experience dance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and hearing the understandings of, visual impairment in new and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

The composer, whose compositions have gathered more than 3.5 billion online plays, commented the descriptive commentary created a relationship between blindness and vision "by means of a soundscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He noted: "It is not merely a narration of a performance. This is the performance itself."

International Ballet Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international collaborators for International Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will also provide entry to exclusive footage, preparations and freshly produced works – streamed live via the event website.