🔗 Share this article

The Royal Ballet traditionally provided audio devices with descriptive narration so that blind viewers could follow the movement on stage. Currently, in a groundbreaking new work, the entire audience will hear such descriptions within a piece that investigates how blindness can transform our reactions to sensation, music and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Artist Works with Celebrated Dance Creators

The blind artist, a blind professional, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in developing a new ballet company commission that will debut on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as declared recently.

Through her work, the artist is guided by a desire to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can provide an unique mode of perception for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, woven with the score, forms the center of the performance on stage.

"Producing world-class dance and musical theater for all" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the company is concentrating on "total access – inviting artists and audiences to experience dance in revolutionary innovative methods," he said.

Several Dance Creators Work on New Performance

The new work is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, all working with the blind artist.

The curator, the curator of this commission, said: "International Ballet Day was founded on the idea of access. Following a decade, we're extending that notion more to examine how challenged perspectives can influence our performance style, and welcome audiences of every capability and backgrounds to discover dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australia, he recognized that individuals who can see who had heard Healey’s audio narration believed it helped them understand dance, which can appear so abstract.

Touching Partnership Of Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one dance piece, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from birth and who had long assumed that dance was "primarily for individuals with vision". But the dancer has realized that it truly "entails a lot of feeling and emotions" and engages perceptions, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's personal story of earlier getting lost on his way home and relying on the sunlight to direct his way back had influenced a performance in which Dixon embodies the "warm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they perform as one," the choreographer said.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the sunlight itself, I could sense the heat … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a excellent assistant to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the story emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Special Connection with Motion

Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, commented: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a dynamic connection with motion in a way that is similar to a expert performer's relationship with their physical self and dance."

In partnering with the dancers, the artist was attempting to convey what "they perceive in their physical being, something that’s just not available through vision," 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 consider, how their physical form are sensing.

"Partnering with the choreographers [and] costume, lighting, stage design and audio creators, the perceptions and innovation of blindness are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted individuals, build a connection through our passion of movement and dance. It is this artistry and passion that I strive to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the faculties led by blindness."

The artist noted: "While the vision of the dance, the beautiful display, is available facing the audience, there is much that they miss or valuing, and it is visual impairment that is welcoming seeing and blind viewers both into the unseen. What I desire is that, when viewers depart, they sense ballet in a distinct way, and they’re also feeling the being, and perceiving the viewpoints of, blindness in fresh and active ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

The composer, whose works have amassed more than 3.5 billion digital listens, commented the audio descriptions established a connection between visual impairment and vision "via a audio environment, offering narration to that which remains unseen". He continued: "It is not simply a narration of a show. It is the art."

World Ballet Day Collaborators

The company's international partners for World Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will furthermore offer availability to behind-the-scenes material, rehearsals and freshly produced productions – streamed in real-time via online channels.