🔗 Share this article

The Royal Ballet has long made available audio devices with audio descriptions so that visually impaired patrons could track the action on stage. Now, in a innovative production, the entire audience will hear such narration within a work that investigates how visual impairment can redefine our responses to experience, sound and storytelling.

Blind Artist Works with Celebrated Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired creator, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in creating a fresh Royal Ballet production that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

Within her creative practice, Healey is driven by a desire to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an alternative type of perception for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, blended with the music, creates the center of the production on stage.

"Creating world-class ballet and musical theater for everyone" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the organization is concentrating on "complete inclusion – welcoming creators and patrons to experience dance in life-changing new ways," he stated.

Various Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Performance

The recent commission is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all working with the blind artist.

The curator, the director of this work, commented: "International Ballet Day was created on the idea of access. After a ten years, we're extending that concept further to consider how disabled outlooks can influence our performance style, and encourage patrons of every capability and backgrounds to encounter ballet in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with the artist in Canadian venues and Australia, he understood that those with vision who had experienced Healey’s audio narration found it assisted them understand dance, which can look so complex.

Inspiring Collaboration Between Professional and Amateur Performers

In a particular performance, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been visually impaired since birth and who had always thought that ballet was "mostly for those who can see". But the dancer has realized that it in fact "includes a lot of sensation and emotions" and engages faculties, "visual and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of previously getting lost on his way home and relying on the sunlight to guide his way back had motivated a duet in which Dixon embodies the "soothing presence of the sunlight around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson said.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could feel the warmth … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great assistant to me. The sun could be a powerful metaphor. So the narrative emerged from there."

Blindness Provides Special Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability research at the University of Toronto, commented: "Blindness and lacking sight invites a dynamic bond with dance in a way that is like a expert performer's connection with their body and motion."

In collaborating with the performers, the artist was seeking to express what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not accessible through sight," she noted. "I speak with the dancers to get a sense of how they’re feeling in their body, where their breathing is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are feeling.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] clothing, stage lights, scenery and audio designers, the viewpoints and creativity of blindness are ever present as we, visually impaired and sighted individuals, develop a rapport through our affection of movement and performance. It is this creativity and love that I attempt to blend into the detailed narration. It is a collaboration of the senses guided by blindness."

The artist added: "Even though the sight of the performance, the beautiful display, is there facing the audience, there is much that they miss or valuing, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and blind audience members equally into the hidden. What I desire is that, when audience members exit, they sense dance in a different way, and they’re also sensing the presence, and listening to the viewpoints of, visual impairment in fresh and dynamic ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Narration

The composer, whose works have gathered more than billions of streams, said the descriptive commentary created a rapport between blindness and vision "via a soundscape, providing expression to that which does not always appear". He continued: "This isn't just a narration of a show. It is the art."

World Ballet Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s global partners for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will furthermore supply availability to exclusive material, practice sessions and recently created productions – streamed as it happens via online channels.