A Cooperation between the Senses: Royal Ballet Teams Up alongside Blind Artist for Pioneering Fresh Production

This prestigious ballet company has long provided audio devices with descriptive narration so that blind viewers could follow the action on stage. Currently, in a innovative performance, the whole audience will hear such descriptions within a production that examines how visual impairment can redefine our responses to experience, music and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Partners with Renowned Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired professional, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in creating a new Royal Ballet commission that will launch on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as declared on Thursday.

In her art, the artist is guided by a desire to show how blindness and physical challenge can offer an different form of perception for everyone. Her rich spoken descriptions, integrated with the composition, forms the heart of the performance on stage.

"Creating top-tier ballet and opera for everyone" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the company is zeroing in on "radical accessibility – welcoming creators and audiences to experience dance in revolutionary new ways," he said.

Several Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Production

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

The curator, the director of this production, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the idea of inclusion. Following a ten years, we're pushing that notion more to examine how disabled viewpoints can mold our creative medium, and welcome viewers of diverse capacities and backgrounds to encounter dance in innovative methods."

Having worked with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator recognized that sighted people who had encountered the artist's spoken descriptions believed it helped them grasp dance, which can look so complex.

Moving Collaboration Of Expert and Amateur Performers

In one performance, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless since birth and who had previously believed that ballet was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it truly "involves a lot of emotion and feelings" and taps into perceptions, "visual and non-visual".

The dancer's unique narrative of earlier losing his way on his way home and relying on the sunlight to direct his way back had motivated a duet in which the professional dancer becomes the "soothing presence of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," the choreographer explained.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a sense that the sun should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the rays itself, I could sense the temperature … So I kept walking to the west …. It led me home. The sun was a good assistant to me. The sun could be a powerful symbol. So the narrative developed from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Special Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an academic of disability research at the University of Toronto, stated: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is like a professional dancer’s bond with their body and dance."

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

"Working together with the choreographers [and] attire, stage lights, set and audio designers, the perceptions and creativity of visual impairment are always there as we, blind and seeing people, develop a relationship through our affection of dance and dance. It is this innovation and affection that I strive to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the perceptions led by blindness."

She continued: "Even though the view of the performance, the gorgeous display, is available in front of the audience, there is much that they miss or understanding, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging seeing and visually impaired patrons alike into the invisible. What I wish is that, when audience members leave, they experience ballet in a different way, and they’re also sensing the existence, and hearing the viewpoints of, blindness in new and active ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose compositions have gathered more than 3.5bn digital listens, stated the spoken narration established a connection between blindness and vision "via a soundscape, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He continued: "It is not simply a description of a performance. This is the art."

International Ballet Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international collaborators for World Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will also supply entry to exclusive video, practice sessions and freshly produced productions – streamed as it happens via the event website.