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This prestigious ballet company traditionally offered headphones with descriptive narration so that visually impaired patrons could follow the performance on stage. Now, via a innovative performance, the complete gathering will hear such commentary within a work that investigates how blindness can reshape our responses to feeling, music and narrative.

Visually Impaired Artist Collaborates with Renowned Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired artist, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in producing a new ballet company production that will launch on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as declared this week.

Within her creative practice, Healey is guided by a ambition to show how visual impairment and physical challenge can provide an different form of understanding for all people. Her detailed audio narration, blended with the composition, creates the center of the production on stage.

"Producing world-class dance and musical theater for each person" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's director, the company is focusing on "complete inclusion – welcoming artists and viewers to encounter ballet in revolutionary fresh approaches," he said.

Various Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Work

The fresh production is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to Wayne McGregor, each working with Healey.

The curator, the curator of this commission, commented: "World Ballet Day was established on the principle of inclusion. After a ten years, we're extending that idea further to consider how disabled perspectives can mold our creative medium, and invite audiences of diverse capacities and experiences to experience dance in innovative methods."

Having worked with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, he realized that sighted people who had heard Healey’s audio narration found it helped them understand ballet, which can seem so abstract.

Moving Partnership Of Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from childhood and who had previously believed that dance was "mostly for sighted people". But the dancer has realized that it truly "entails a lot of emotion and sentiments" and activates perceptions, "sight-based and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of previously losing his way on his way home and relying on the sunlight to orient his way back had inspired a dance piece in which the professional dancer embodies the "soothing presence of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they perform as one," the choreographer explained.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be shining from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a great guide to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the narrative originated from there."

Blindness Presents Special Relationship with Motion

The blind artist, an scholar of disability studies at the University of Toronto, commented: "Blindness and being blind fosters a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is similar to a expert performer's connection with their body and motion."

In working with the dancers, the artist was striving to express what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she explained. "I talk with the dancers to get a sense of how they feel in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they’re thinking, how their body are sensing.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] attire, stage lights, set and sound creators, the understandings and artistry of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and seeing individuals, establish a connection through our love of motion and dance. It is this creativity and passion that I strive to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the faculties guided by visual impairment."

She continued: "While the sight of the ballet, the gorgeous spectacle, is present before the patrons, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and blind audience members both into the invisible. What I hope is that, when audience members leave, they sense performance in a new way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and perceiving the viewpoints of, visual impairment in fresh and dynamic ways."

Musician The Composer on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose works have gathered more than 3.5bn online plays, commented the spoken narration created a relationship between visual impairment and sight "via a audio environment, providing expression to that which does not always appear". He noted: "It is not just a narration of a production. It is the art."

International Ballet Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide collaborators for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also provide availability to backstage footage, rehearsals and recently created productions – streamed in real-time via the event website.