A Partnership of Our Senses: Royal Ballet Partners with Blind Artist for Pioneering New Production

This prestigious ballet company for years made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that sightless viewers could track the action on stage. Now, through a innovative new work, the complete crowd will hear such descriptions within a piece that explores how visual impairment can redefine our reactions to feeling, sound and storytelling.

Blind Creator Partners with Renowned Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a visually impaired artist, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and musician the celebrated composer in creating a new ballet company commission that will launch on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

In her art, the artist is motivated by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and disability can provide an different mode of perception for each individual. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the score, creates the heart of the show on stage.

"Making exceptional dance and opera for each person" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's director, the troupe is focusing on "total access – inviting artists and audiences to experience dance in revolutionary fresh approaches," he explained.

Various Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Production

The new work is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, every one collaborating with Healey.

Robert Binet, the director of this production, commented: "World Ballet Day was founded on the principle of access. After a decade, we're extending that concept further to explore how challenged viewpoints can shape our art form, and invite patrons of diverse capacities and backgrounds to discover ballet in fresh approaches."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australia, he understood that those with vision who had encountered the artist's spoken descriptions found it helped them comprehend ballet, which can seem so unclear.

Touching Partnership Between Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless since birth and who had always thought that dance was "mostly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has realized that it actually "includes a lot of emotion and feelings" and taps into senses, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's individual experience of once becoming disoriented on his way home and using the sunlight to direct his way back had inspired a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "soothing presence of the sunlight around his partner as they perform as one," Malcomson explained.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be shining from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could feel the heat … So I continued moving to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a excellent helper to me. The sunlight could be a powerful symbol. So the narrative originated from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Unique Connection with Dance

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the Toronto university, said: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a active bond with dance in a way that is like a professional dancer’s bond with their body and motion."

In partnering with the dancers, she was seeking to communicate what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not available through looking," she explained. "I talk with the dancers to get a sense of how they feel in their physical self, where their breath is, what they consider, how their physical form are sensing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] attire, lighting, scenery and audio designers, the viewpoints and innovation of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, blind and seeing individuals, build a connection through our affection of dance and dance. It is this artistry and love that I attempt to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the perceptions led by blindness."

She added: "Even though the view of the dance, the gorgeous visual feast, is there before the patrons, there is much that they miss or appreciating, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and blind viewers both into the invisible. What I desire is that, when patrons depart, they feel dance in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and hearing the understandings of, visual impairment in new and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose works have accumulated more than billions of digital listens, said the audio descriptions established a relationship between visual impairment and sight "through a audio environment, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He noted: "It is not merely a description of a show. This is the performance itself."

International Dance Day Collaborators

The company's international partners for International Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will also offer access to behind-the-scenes footage, preparations and newly commissioned works – broadcast in real-time via their official platform.