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This prestigious ballet company has long made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that sightless audience members could understand the performance on stage. Now, through a groundbreaking new work, the complete gathering will experience such commentary within a work that examines how blindness can transform our perceptions to feeling, sound and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Partners with Renowned Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and musician the celebrated composer in developing a new ballet company production that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

Within her creative practice, the artist is guided by a ambition to demonstrate how blindness and physical challenge can present an unique type of understanding for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, blended with the music, forms the center of the performance on stage.

"Producing top-tier dance and musical theater for each person" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the organization is focusing on "complete inclusion – welcoming artists and viewers to discover dance in transformative fresh approaches," he explained.

Various Choreographers Collaborate on New Work

The recent commission is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, every one partnering with Healey.

Robert Binet, the director of this work, said: "International Ballet Day was founded on the concept of accessibility. After a decade, we're pushing that notion more to examine how impaired perspectives can influence our performance style, and welcome patrons of all abilities and backgrounds to experience dance in new ways."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australia, he understood that sighted people who had experienced the artist's spoken descriptions believed it helped them grasp ballet, which can seem so complex.

Moving Partnership Of Professional and Amateur Performers

In one dance piece, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from birth and who had previously believed that dance was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has discovered that it truly "entails a lot of feeling and feelings" and engages faculties, "sight-based and other sensory".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of earlier getting lost on his way home and relying on the sunlight to guide his way back had motivated a dance piece in which Dixon becomes the "warm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they perform as one," Malcomson stated.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be shining from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could sense the heat … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a great guide to me. The sun could be a meaningful metaphor. So the tale emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Unique Relationship with Movement

Healey, an academic of disability research at the Toronto university, said: "Visual impairment and lacking sight encourages a active connection with dance in a way that is like a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and dance."

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

"Working together with the choreographers [and] costume, illumination, stage design and music designers, the perceptions and artistry of visual impairment are always there as we, blind and sighted persons, develop a relationship through our love of movement and performance. It is this creativity and affection that I strive to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a cooperation of the faculties led by blindness."

The artist continued: "Although the vision of the ballet, the gorgeous display, is present in front of the audience, there is a great deal that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is inviting seeing and visually impaired audience members alike into the hidden. What I desire is that, when audience members leave, they feel dance in a different way, and they’re also sensing the being, and hearing the perceptions of, blindness in innovative and active ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose recordings have accumulated more than billions of streams, stated the spoken narration formed a rapport between blindness and vision "by means of a musical landscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He added: "It is not simply a description of a production. This is performance."

International Dance Day Collaborators

The company's international collaborators for World Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will also provide availability to exclusive material, preparations and newly commissioned pieces – streamed as it happens via their official platform.