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The Royal Ballet has long made available headphones with descriptive narration so that blind viewers could track the performance on stage. Presently, through a groundbreaking production, the whole crowd will experience such descriptions within a piece that investigates how blindness can transform our reactions to experience, audio and storytelling.

Blind Artist Partners with Celebrated Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired creator, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in creating a fresh Royal Ballet commission that will debut on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

In her art, Healey is driven by a desire to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can offer an unique type of awareness for each individual. Her rich spoken descriptions, integrated with the composition, establishes the core of the performance on stage.

"Producing top-tier dance and musical theater for all" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the troupe is concentrating on "total access – welcoming artists and viewers to experience ballet in transformative new ways," he said.

Several Dance Creators Collaborate on Fresh Production

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

The curator, the curator of this production, said: "World Ballet Day was founded on the idea of inclusion. After a decade, we're pushing that idea more to examine how challenged perspectives can influence our art form, and encourage patrons of every capability and histories to encounter dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with the artist in Canada and Australia, he understood that those with vision who had heard Healey’s spoken descriptions found it assisted them understand ballet, which can seem so complex.

Touching Collaboration Of Professional and Amateur Performers

In one duet, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from childhood and who had always thought that ballet was "mostly for those who can see". But Kikuchi has understood that it actually "involves a lot of feeling and emotions" and taps into faculties, "visual and non-visual".

The dancer's unique narrative of earlier becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sunlight to orient his way back had motivated a performance in which the professional dancer embodies the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson explained.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be beaming from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the light itself, I could perceive the warmth … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a good helper to me. The sunlight could be a good symbol. So the story emerged from there."

Blindness Provides Unique Connection with Dance

Healey, an academic of disability studies at the University of Toronto, commented: "Blindness and lacking sight invites a vibrant bond with dance in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's relationship with their body and movement."

In partnering with the performers, she was striving to communicate what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she said. "I converse with the performers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breath is, what they think, how their physical form are feeling.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] costume, illumination, set and music designers, the understandings and innovation of visual impairment are ever present as we, visually impaired and sighted people, build a connection through our affection of motion and performance. It is this creativity and affection that I attempt to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the perceptions led by blindness."

She noted: "While the view of the performance, the stunning spectacle, is present facing the patrons, there is much that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and blind viewers alike into the hidden. What I wish is that, when patrons depart, they experience ballet in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and listening to the viewpoints of, blindness in new and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

Richter, whose compositions have gathered more than billions of streams, said the descriptive commentary formed a rapport between visual impairment and vision "by means of a audio environment, providing expression to that which does not always appear". He continued: "It is not merely a narration of a show. This is the art."

World Ballet Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global associates for International Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will also provide entry to exclusive video, rehearsals and recently created works – transmitted in real-time via their official platform.