🔗 Share this article

This prestigious ballet company traditionally provided headphones with spoken commentary so that visually impaired patrons could understand the action on stage. Now, via a revolutionary new work, the entire gathering will experience such commentary within a piece that examines how visual impairment can transform our reactions to feeling, audio and dramatic expression.

Blind Artist Works with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in creating a new ballet company work that will premiere on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared recently.

In her art, Healey is guided by a ambition to demonstrate how visual impairment and disability can offer an unique form of understanding for each individual. Her rich spoken descriptions, woven with the music, establishes the center of the show on stage.

"Making world-class ballet and opera for everyone" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's director, the company is concentrating on "total access – inviting creators and audiences to encounter dance in life-changing innovative methods," he said.

Several Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Production

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

Robert Binet, the curator of this production, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the idea of accessibility. Following a ten years, we're expanding that idea further to explore how disabled outlooks can shape our performance style, and welcome audiences of every capability and experiences to encounter ballet in fresh approaches."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator understood that sighted people who had heard the artist's descriptive audio believed it helped them understand dance, which can seem so unclear.

Touching Partnership Between Professional and Amateur Performers

In one dance piece, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind since birth and who had long assumed that dance was "mainly for those who can see". But the dancer has discovered that it actually "includes a lot of emotion and sentiments" and activates perceptions, "sight-based and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and using the sunlight to orient his way back had motivated a duet in which the professional dancer becomes the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they perform as one," the choreographer said.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be shining from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the light itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I continued moving to the west …. It guided me home. The sun was a excellent guide to me. The sunlight could be a powerful metaphor. So the narrative emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Special Connection with Dance

The blind artist, an academic of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Blindness and lacking sight invites a vibrant relationship with motion in a way that is similar to a expert performer's connection with their body and dance."

In partnering with the performers, she was seeking to convey what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through vision," she noted. "I speak with the dancers to get a understanding of how they are in their body, where their breathing is, what they’re thinking, how their muscles are experiencing.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] attire, illumination, scenery and sound artists, the perceptions and innovation of blindness are ever present as we, blind and sighted individuals, build a rapport through our love of dance and performance. It is this innovation and love that I attempt to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the faculties directed by blindness."

She continued: "Even though the view of the ballet, the gorgeous spectacle, is there before the audience, there is so much that they overlook or valuing, and it is visual impairment that is inviting seeing and visually impaired audience members equally into the invisible. What I wish is that, when audience members depart, they feel dance in a different way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and listening to the perceptions of, blindness in innovative and active ways."

Musician The Composer on Sound Narration

Richter, whose works have accumulated more than 3.5 billion online plays, said the spoken narration formed a connection between blindness and sight "by means of a audio environment, offering narration to that which remains unseen". He continued: "This isn't merely a narration of a production. It is the art."

International Dance Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international associates for International Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also offer entry to exclusive material, preparations and freshly produced pieces – streamed as it happens via online channels.