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This prestigious ballet company for years made available headphones with audio descriptions so that visually impaired viewers could follow the performance on stage. Now, in a revolutionary new work, the complete gathering will hear such commentary within a production that examines how visual impairment can transform our perceptions to experience, sound and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Works with Celebrated Dance Creators

The blind artist, a blind creator, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in producing a new ballet company production that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared this week.

Within her creative practice, the artist is guided by a ambition to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an unique mode of awareness for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the score, establishes the center of the performance on stage.

"Making top-tier ballet and opera for all" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's leader, the troupe is concentrating on "complete inclusion – encouraging creators and audiences to encounter dance in revolutionary innovative methods," he said.

Various Dance Creators Collaborate on Fresh Performance

The fresh production is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, every one partnering with Healey.

Robert Binet, the director of this commission, stated: "International Ballet Day was established on the concept of access. After a ten years, we're extending that idea further to examine how disabled perspectives can shape our performance style, and welcome patrons of diverse capacities and backgrounds to experience dance in new ways."

After collaborating with Healey in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he recognized that sighted people who had experienced Healey’s spoken descriptions felt it helped them understand ballet, which can look so complex.

Moving Collaboration Of Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from childhood and who had long assumed that dance was "mostly for individuals with vision". But the dancer has realized that it in fact "includes a lot of sensation and emotions" and activates senses, "sight-based and other sensory".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of once getting lost on his way home and using the sun to guide his way back had motivated a performance in which the professional dancer represents the "gentle warmth of the sun around Kikuchi as they move together," Malcomson stated.

"It was during the day and I had a sense that the sun should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the sunlight itself, I could feel the heat … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a powerful symbol. So the tale originated from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Special Connection with Motion

The blind artist, an academic of disability research at the University of Toronto, said: "Blindness and lacking sight invites a dynamic bond with movement in a way that is like a expert performer's bond with their body and movement."

In working with the performers, she was striving to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not available through sight," she explained. "I speak with the dancers to get a understanding of how they’re feeling in their body, where their respiration is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are experiencing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] costume, lighting, stage design and music artists, the viewpoints and innovation of blindness are constantly visible as we, blind and seeing people, build a rapport through our love of motion and performance. It is this innovation and affection that I try to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a partnership of the faculties directed by visual impairment."

The artist added: "Although the sight of the ballet, the beautiful spectacle, is there facing the viewers, there is so much that they miss or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging seeing and visually impaired viewers alike into the hidden. What I wish 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 new and active ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

Richter, whose compositions have gathered more than billions of digital listens, stated the descriptive commentary established a relationship between visual impairment and sight "via a audio environment, giving voice to that which remains unseen". He continued: "This isn't simply a description of a show. This is performance."

International Ballet Event Collaborators

The company's international partners for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will also provide access to exclusive video, practice sessions and freshly produced works – transmitted in real-time via the event website.