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The Royal Ballet has long offered audio devices with audio descriptions so that visually impaired audience members could understand the action on stage. Now, via a groundbreaking production, the entire gathering will experience such descriptions within a production that investigates how blindness can reshape our reactions to sensation, sound and storytelling.

Blind Artist Partners with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and musician the celebrated composer in producing a fresh Royal Ballet commission that will premiere on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

Within her creative practice, the artist is motivated by a desire to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an different form of awareness for each individual. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the music, forms the core of the production on stage.

"Creating top-tier dance and opera for each person" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's director, the company is focusing on "radical accessibility – welcoming performers and audiences to discover dance in revolutionary fresh approaches," he said.

Several Choreographers Collaborate on New Production

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

The curator, the director of this work, stated: "International Ballet Day was founded on the idea of access. After a ten years, we're expanding that concept deeper to consider how impaired viewpoints can shape our art form, and invite patrons of every capability and histories to discover dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator realized that individuals who can see who had experienced the artist's audio narration believed it assisted them comprehend dance, which can seem so unclear.

Inspiring Collaboration Of Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In one performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from birth and who had always thought that dance was "primarily for individuals with vision". But the dancer has realized that it in fact "entails a lot of sensation and sentiments" and activates perceptions, "sight-based and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of previously losing his way on his way home and depending on the sun to direct his way back had influenced a dance piece in which the professional dancer embodies the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they perform as one," the choreographer explained.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could feel the warmth … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It led me home. The sun was a great guide to me. The sun could be a meaningful metaphor. So the story emerged from there."

Blindness Provides Special Connection with Dance

Healey, an assistant professor of disability research at the Toronto university, commented: "Visual impairment and lacking sight encourages a dynamic relationship with motion in a way that is like a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and movement."

In partnering with the performers, the artist was attempting to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she explained. "I talk with the dancers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their body are sensing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] costume, illumination, scenery and audio designers, the perceptions and artistry of blindness are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and seeing people, establish a rapport through our passion of motion and performance. It is this innovation and love that I strive to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the senses directed by visual impairment."

The artist continued: "Even though the sight of the ballet, the gorgeous visual feast, is available facing the viewers, there is a great deal that they miss or valuing, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging sighted and visually impaired audience members equally into the invisible. What I hope is that, when audience members exit, they experience ballet in a new way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and hearing the viewpoints of, visual impairment in fresh and active ways."

Musician The Composer on Sound Narration

The composer, whose works have gathered more than billions of streams, stated the audio descriptions formed a connection between visual impairment and vision "via a musical landscape, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He noted: "This isn't simply a narration of a show. This is the art."

World Ballet Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide associates for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will also offer availability to exclusive material, practice sessions and recently created pieces – broadcast live via their official platform.