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The Royal Ballet traditionally offered audio devices with descriptive narration so that sightless audience members could track the action on stage. Now, via a groundbreaking production, the whole crowd will listen to such descriptions within a piece that investigates how visual impairment can transform our reactions to sensation, music and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Works with Celebrated Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind artist, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in creating a fresh Royal Ballet production that will launch on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

In her art, the artist is motivated by a wish to illustrate how blindness and physical challenge can offer an unique form of understanding for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, woven with the music, establishes the heart of the production on stage.

"Creating exceptional dance and opera for all" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the organization is concentrating on "radical accessibility – welcoming performers and patrons to experience ballet in revolutionary innovative methods," he said.

Multiple Choreographers Collaborate on New Work

The fresh production is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside Wayne McGregor, every one working with Healey.

Robert Binet, the curator of this commission, said: "World Ballet Day was founded on the concept of inclusion. After a decade, we're extending that idea more to consider how disabled outlooks can influence our creative medium, and encourage viewers of all abilities and histories to discover dance in innovative methods."

After collaborating with the artist in Canada and Australia, the curator realized that those with vision who had experienced the artist's descriptive audio found it helped them comprehend dance, which can seem so complex.

Touching Partnership Of Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular duet, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless since birth and who had long assumed that ballet was "mostly for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has discovered that it truly "entails a lot of sensation and sentiments" and activates perceptions, "sight-based and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s personal story of once getting lost on his way home and depending on the sunlight to direct his way back had influenced a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "warm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they perform as one," Malcomson stated.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be beaming from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the light itself, I could sense the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It led me home. The sun was a good helper to me. The sun could be a powerful symbol. So the story emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Special Connection with Movement

Healey, an academic of disability studies at the University of Toronto, commented: "Blindness and lacking sight fosters a active connection with movement in a way that is similar to a expert performer's relationship with their body and movement."

In partnering with the dancers, she was seeking to express what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not accessible through sight," she explained. "I talk with the dancers to get a understanding of how they feel in their physical self, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are feeling.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] attire, illumination, stage design and audio artists, the perceptions and creativity of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and seeing individuals, establish a rapport through our passion of dance and performance. It is this innovation and love that I strive to blend into the detailed narration. It is a collaboration of the faculties led by blindness."

She noted: "Even though the sight of the ballet, the beautiful visual feast, is available facing the patrons, there is much that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is blindness that is encouraging seeing and blind viewers alike into the hidden. What I wish is that, when audience members exit, they feel dance in a distinct way, and they’re also sensing the existence, and perceiving the viewpoints of, blindness in new and vibrant ways."

Musician The Composer on Audio Narration

The composer, whose works have accumulated more than 3.5 billion digital listens, commented the audio descriptions formed a rapport between visual impairment and sight "via a musical landscape, providing expression to that which does not always appear". He continued: "This isn't just a explanation of a production. It is the art."

World Ballet Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide partners for World Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will also supply entry to backstage material, rehearsals and freshly produced productions – transmitted as it happens via the event website.