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This prestigious ballet company for years provided headphones with spoken commentary so that visually impaired audience members could track the performance on stage. Currently, in a innovative production, the whole crowd will listen to such narration within a piece that investigates how visual impairment can transform our reactions to experience, music and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Artist Works with Celebrated Dance Creators

The blind artist, a visually impaired professional, 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, World Ballet Day, as declared recently.

Within her creative practice, Healey is guided by a wish to illustrate how blindness and disability can present an alternative mode of perception for everyone. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the score, forms the center of the production on stage.

"Creating exceptional ballet and musical theater for all" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's leader, the company is focusing on "radical accessibility – encouraging artists and audiences to experience ballet in life-changing new ways," he stated.

Multiple Choreographers Partner on Fresh Work

The recent commission is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, each working with Healey.

The curator, the organizer of this commission, said: "World Ballet Day was established on the principle of access. Following a ten years, we're extending that notion more to consider how challenged outlooks can mold our art form, and welcome viewers of diverse capacities and experiences to experience ballet in innovative methods."

Having worked with the artist in Canada and Australian locations, he recognized that those with vision who had encountered the artist's spoken descriptions found it assisted them grasp ballet, which can look so complex.

Moving Partnership Of Expert and Amateur Dancers

In a particular performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from childhood and who had always thought that ballet was "mostly for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has realized that it truly "includes a lot of sensation and emotions" and taps into perceptions, "sight-based and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of earlier getting lost on his way home and depending on the sunlight to orient his way back had influenced a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "warm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer said.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could perceive the heat … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great helper to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the narrative emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Distinct Connection with Dance

Healey, an scholar of disability studies at the Toronto university, stated: "Blindness and being blind invites a vibrant bond with dance in a way that is similar to a expert performer's bond with their physical self and dance."

In working with the dancers, the artist was seeking to communicate what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not accessible through sight," she noted. "I speak with the dancers to get a sense of how they are in their body, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are feeling.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] clothing, stage lights, scenery and audio designers, the understandings and artistry of blindness are always there as we, visually impaired and seeing people, develop a connection through our affection of movement and performance. It is this artistry and passion that I strive to weave into the detailed narration. It is a partnership of the perceptions guided by visual impairment."

The artist added: "Even though the vision of the dance, the gorgeous display, is available in front of the patrons, there is so much that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is inviting sighted and blind audience members both into the invisible. What I wish is that, when viewers exit, they feel performance in a new way, and they’re also feeling the being, and perceiving the perceptions of, blindness in innovative and vibrant ways."

Composer The Composer on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose works have accumulated more than 3.5 billion streams, stated the descriptive commentary created a relationship between visual impairment and sight "via a musical landscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He added: "This isn't simply a narration of a show. It is the art."

International Ballet Day Collaborators

The company's global partners for International Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will also offer access to behind-the-scenes video, rehearsals and freshly produced pieces – streamed in real-time via their official platform.