🔗 Share this article

The Royal Ballet traditionally provided audio devices with spoken commentary so that blind audience members could track the performance on stage. Currently, in a groundbreaking new work, the entire gathering will experience such commentary within a piece that explores how visual impairment can transform our responses to experience, music and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Artist Works with Celebrated Dance Creators

The blind artist, a blind creator, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in producing a recent Royal Ballet commission that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as announced this week.

In her art, the artist is driven by a ambition to show how visual impairment and disability can provide an alternative type of understanding for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, blended with the composition, creates the heart of the production on stage.

"Making top-tier ballet and opera for everyone" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the company is focusing on "total access – encouraging creators and viewers to experience ballet in life-changing innovative methods," he stated.

Multiple Choreographers Partner on Fresh Performance

The new work is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, each working with Healey.

The curator, the organizer of this production, said: "International Ballet Day was founded on the concept of inclusion. Following a ten years, we're pushing that concept further to consider how disabled perspectives can shape our art form, and invite viewers of all abilities and histories to experience ballet in innovative methods."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australian locations, the curator realized that sighted people who had encountered Healey’s descriptive audio believed it helped them understand ballet, which can appear so complex.

Touching Partnership Between Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In one performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from childhood and who had always thought that ballet was "mainly for sighted people". But the dancer has realized that it actually "involves a lot of sensation and sentiments" and engages perceptions, "sight-based and non-visual".

The dancer's unique narrative of previously getting lost on his way home and using the sunlight to orient his way back had influenced a dance piece in which the professional dancer becomes the "warm breath of the sunlight around his partner as they move together," the choreographer said.

"It was during the day and I had a intuition that the sun should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could sense the warmth … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a excellent assistant to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful representation. So the narrative originated from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Distinct Relationship with Motion

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability research at the University of Toronto, stated: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a vibrant connection with movement in a way that is like a expert performer's connection with their body and dance."

In working with the performers, the artist was striving to express what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not available through looking," she said. "I talk 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 body are sensing.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] attire, lighting, stage design and audio creators, the perceptions and artistry of visual impairment are ever present as we, visually impaired and sighted people, build a relationship through our affection of movement and dance. It is this creativity and affection that I try to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the perceptions guided by visual impairment."

She added: "Although the vision of the dance, the beautiful display, is there facing the patrons, there is much that they overlook or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging seeing and visually impaired audience members equally into the unseen. What I desire is that, when audience members leave, they feel performance in a different way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and listening to the understandings of, visual impairment in innovative and dynamic ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose compositions have gathered more than 3.5bn streams, commented the spoken narration established a connection between visual impairment and sight "by means of a audio environment, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He continued: "It is not just a narration of a performance. It is the art."

International Dance Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide partners for World Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will additionally offer availability to behind-the-scenes material, practice sessions and newly commissioned works – streamed as it happens via their official platform.