🔗 Share this article

The Royal Ballet has long provided headphones with spoken commentary so that blind viewers could track the performance on stage. Currently, through a innovative new work, the entire crowd will experience such narration within a piece that examines how visual impairment can reshape our reactions to feeling, music and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in creating a recent Royal Ballet production that will premiere on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as declared recently.

Within her creative practice, the artist is guided by a desire to illustrate how blindness and disability can provide an alternative mode of understanding for everyone. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the score, forms the heart of the production on stage.

"Making exceptional dance and opera for everyone" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the company is zeroing in on "total access – inviting creators and viewers to discover dance in revolutionary new ways," he stated.

Several Choreographers Partner on Fresh Production

The fresh production is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to Wayne McGregor, all partnering with Healey.

The curator, the director of this production, said: "World Ballet Day was founded on the idea of access. After a decade, we're pushing that idea further to explore how disabled perspectives can shape our performance style, and encourage viewers of diverse capacities and experiences to discover dance in innovative methods."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, he understood that sighted people who had encountered the artist's descriptive audio found it aided them understand dance, which can seem so complex.

Inspiring Collaboration Between Professional and Amateur Dancers

In a particular performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from childhood and who had previously believed that dance was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has discovered that it actually "involves a lot of emotion and feelings" and taps into perceptions, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's unique narrative of once getting lost on his way home and relying on the sun to guide his way back had motivated a duet in which the professional dancer represents the "warm breath of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," the choreographer explained.

"This occurred during the day and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could sense the warmth … So I kept walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a good symbol. So the narrative developed from there."

Blindness Provides Special Relationship with Dance

The blind artist, an academic of disability research at the Toronto university, stated: "Visual impairment and being blind fosters a active bond with dance in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and dance."

In collaborating with the dancers, she was attempting to express what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through vision," she noted. "I converse with the dancers to get a sense of how they’re feeling in their body, where their breathing is, what they think, how their muscles are feeling.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] costume, illumination, stage design and audio artists, the understandings and innovation of blindness are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and seeing people, build a relationship through our love of motion and dance. It is this artistry and love that I strive to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the faculties directed by visual impairment."

The artist continued: "Although the vision of the dance, the beautiful visual feast, is present before the patrons, there is so much that they’re not accessing or valuing, and it is blindness that is inviting seeing and blind patrons equally into the hidden. What I hope is that, when patrons exit, they sense performance in a different way, and they’re also sensing the being, and listening to the perceptions of, blindness in fresh and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

The composer, whose recordings have accumulated more than billions of online plays, stated the audio descriptions established a rapport between visual impairment and vision "via a soundscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He added: "This isn't just a narration of a production. This is the art."

International Ballet Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s global partners for World Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will additionally offer entry to behind-the-scenes footage, preparations and newly commissioned pieces – broadcast as it happens via the event website.