🔗 Share this article

This prestigious ballet company traditionally offered audio devices with descriptive narration so that sightless viewers could track the performance on stage. Presently, via a innovative performance, the entire audience will listen to such commentary within a work that investigates how blindness can redefine our perceptions to experience, sound and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Artist Works with Famous Choreographers

The blind artist, a blind professional, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in creating a recent ballet company commission that will debut on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as announced this week.

Through her work, the artist is driven by a desire to illustrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an alternative mode of awareness for each individual. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, blended with the composition, establishes the core of the show on stage.

"Making top-tier dance and musical theater for all" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's director, the company is focusing on "radical accessibility – inviting creators and viewers to encounter ballet in life-changing innovative methods," he said.

Several Dance Creators Work on Fresh Production

The recent commission is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside Wayne McGregor, each collaborating with Healey.

Robert Binet, the director of this production, said: "International Ballet Day was established on the idea of access. Following a decade, we're pushing that idea further to explore how challenged perspectives can influence our performance style, and invite viewers of diverse capacities and experiences to encounter dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator recognized that those with vision who had experienced the artist's descriptive audio believed it helped them understand ballet, which can appear so complex.

Touching Collaboration Of Expert and Amateur Performers

In one duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from childhood and who had long assumed that ballet was "mainly for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has understood that it truly "includes a lot of sensation and sentiments" and taps into perceptions, "visual and non-sight".

The dancer's personal story of earlier losing his way on his way home and relying on the sunlight to orient his way back had influenced a performance in which Dixon represents the "soothing presence of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," the choreographer said.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be radiating from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could sense the warmth … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a excellent helper to me. The sun could be a good representation. So the tale emerged from there."

Blindness Offers Unique Connection with Movement

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the University of Toronto, said: "Visual impairment and lacking sight invites a dynamic relationship with motion in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's connection with their physical self and motion."

In working with the dancers, she was attempting to convey what "they perceive in their physical being, something that’s just not available through looking," she said. "I speak with the dancers to get a feeling of how they feel in their body, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their physical form are sensing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] costume, lighting, scenery and audio artists, the viewpoints and artistry of blindness are always there as we, blind and sighted individuals, establish a connection through our love of dance and dance. It is this artistry and affection that I attempt to blend into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the faculties guided by visual impairment."

The artist continued: "Even though the view of the ballet, the beautiful spectacle, is there in front of the audience, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and visually impaired viewers equally into the invisible. What I wish is that, when viewers depart, they sense dance in a different way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and listening to the understandings of, visual impairment in innovative and vibrant ways."

Musician The Composer on Audio Descriptions

Richter, whose works have gathered more than 3.5 billion streams, said the audio descriptions created a connection between blindness and sight "through a audio environment, providing expression to that which does not always appear". He noted: "It is not just a explanation of a performance. It is the performance itself."

World Dance Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide collaborators for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also offer entry to backstage material, preparations and newly commissioned productions – broadcast live via the event website.