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This prestigious ballet company traditionally provided headphones with spoken commentary so that sightless viewers could track the performance on stage. Now, through a groundbreaking production, the entire crowd will listen to such narration within a production that investigates how blindness can redefine our responses to experience, audio and dramatic expression.

Blind Artist Works with Renowned Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in producing a fresh Royal Ballet production that will debut on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared on Thursday.

Through her work, the artist is driven by a desire to show how visual impairment and disability can provide an unique form of perception for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the score, forms the center of the show on stage.

"Producing exceptional ballet and opera for each person" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under the director, the company's leader, the company is zeroing in on "total access – welcoming creators and viewers to discover ballet in transformative innovative methods," he stated.

Multiple Dance Creators Work on Fresh Production

The recent commission is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, every one working with Healey.

The curator, the director of this work, said: "World Ballet Day was established on the principle of inclusion. After a ten years, we're expanding that idea deeper to examine how disabled viewpoints can shape our art form, and encourage patrons of diverse capacities and experiences to experience dance in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with the artist in Canada and Australian locations, he realized that sighted people who had encountered Healey’s audio narration believed it helped them understand ballet, which can appear so complex.

Moving Partnership Of Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular dance piece, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been visually impaired since birth and who had long assumed that dance was "mostly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it in fact "includes a lot of sensation and emotions" and activates faculties, "sight-based and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of once losing his way on his way home and depending on the sun to orient his way back had influenced a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "soothing presence of the sun around his partner as they perform as one," the choreographer stated.

"This occurred during the day and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the sunlight itself, I could sense the temperature … So I continued moving to the west …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a good assistant to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the story emerged from there."

Blindness Provides Distinct Connection with Dance

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the University of Toronto, stated: "Visual impairment and being blind fosters a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's bond with their physical self and movement."

In working with the dancers, she was striving to communicate what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she noted. "I converse with the performers to get a feeling of how they feel in their body, where their breathing is, what they’re thinking, how their muscles are sensing.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] costume, lighting, stage design and audio artists, the viewpoints and innovation of blindness are ever present as we, blind and sighted persons, build a connection through our affection of motion and dance. It is this innovation and passion that I attempt to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a cooperation of the faculties led by visual impairment."

She continued: "Even though the vision of the performance, the beautiful display, is available before the patrons, there is much that they’re not accessing or valuing, and it is visual impairment that is inviting sighted and blind viewers alike into the unseen. What I hope is that, when audience members leave, they feel ballet in a different way, and they’re also experiencing the presence, and listening to the viewpoints of, visual impairment in fresh and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose works have accumulated more than 3.5bn online plays, said the audio descriptions established a connection between visual impairment and sight "by means of a musical landscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He continued: "This isn't simply a narration of a production. This is the performance itself."

World Ballet Event Collaborators

The company's global associates for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will also supply access to exclusive video, rehearsals and freshly produced works – broadcast as it happens via online channels.