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This prestigious ballet company for years provided audio devices with audio descriptions so that sightless viewers could track the action on stage. Now, via a innovative performance, the whole gathering will hear such descriptions within a piece that investigates how visual impairment can redefine our perceptions to experience, sound and storytelling.

Blind Creator Works with Celebrated Dance Creators

The blind artist, a visually impaired artist, is partnering with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a recent ballet company work that will launch on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

In her art, Healey is motivated by a desire to illustrate how blindness and physical challenge can provide an different mode of perception for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the score, establishes the center of the production on stage.

"Creating world-class dance and musical theater for all" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the company is concentrating on "radical accessibility – encouraging creators and patrons to experience dance in revolutionary fresh approaches," he said.

Several Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Production

The recent commission is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, each partnering with Healey.

Robert Binet, the curator of this commission, stated: "World Ballet Day was established on the concept of access. Following a decade, we're expanding that concept further to consider how challenged viewpoints can shape our art form, and welcome viewers of all abilities and histories to encounter ballet in fresh approaches."

Following partnerships with the artist in Canadian venues and Australia, he recognized that those with vision who had encountered the artist's audio narration believed it aided them understand dance, which can look so complex.

Moving Partnership Between Professional and Amateur Performers

In a particular duet, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from birth and who had long assumed that dance was "mostly for those who can see". But the dancer has discovered that it actually "entails a lot of feeling and sentiments" and engages senses, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's individual experience of once losing his way on his way home and relying on the sunlight to guide his way back had inspired a duet in which Dixon embodies the "warm breath of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," the choreographer stated.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the rays itself, I could perceive the heat … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the tale emerged from there."

Blindness Presents Special Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an academic of disability studies at the University of Toronto, stated: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a active bond with dance in a way that is similar to a expert performer's bond with their physical self and movement."

In partnering with the performers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she noted. "I converse with the performers to get a understanding of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they think, how their physical form are feeling.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] attire, illumination, set and audio artists, the perceptions and artistry of blindness are always there as we, visually impaired and sighted individuals, build a connection through our passion of motion and performance. It is this innovation and passion that I strive to weave into the detailed narration. It is a collaboration of the senses led by blindness."

The artist continued: "While the vision of the performance, the beautiful visual feast, is present before the patrons, there is a great deal that they miss or valuing, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and blind patrons alike into the hidden. What I wish is that, when viewers leave, they feel performance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and perceiving the perceptions of, visual impairment in innovative and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

Richter, whose compositions have amassed more than 3.5 billion online plays, said the descriptive commentary established a relationship between blindness and vision "through a audio environment, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He noted: "It is not merely a explanation of a show. This is performance."

World Dance Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international associates for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will also offer entry to behind-the-scenes video, practice sessions and freshly produced pieces – broadcast live via online channels.