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This prestigious ballet company has long offered audio devices with descriptive narration so that sightless viewers could track the performance on stage. Currently, through a revolutionary new work, the complete crowd will listen to such narration within a production that examines how blindness can transform our responses to experience, sound and storytelling.

Blind Artist Collaborates with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind artist, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in producing a new Royal Ballet commission that will debut on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

In her art, Healey is guided by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and disability can offer an unique form of understanding for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the music, establishes the core of the show on stage.

"Producing world-class ballet and opera for each person" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's director, the troupe is focusing on "radical accessibility – welcoming artists and patrons to encounter ballet in life-changing new ways," he said.

Various Dance Creators Collaborate on New Performance

The recent commission is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all partnering with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the director of this work, said: "World Ballet Day was established on the principle of accessibility. After a decade, we're extending that concept more to explore how challenged perspectives can shape our performance style, and welcome viewers of diverse capacities and histories to experience ballet in fresh approaches."

Following partnerships with the artist in Canada and Australian locations, he recognized that sighted people who had experienced Healey’s descriptive audio found it helped them comprehend dance, which can look so unclear.

Inspiring Collaboration Of Expert and Amateur Dancers

In a particular dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from birth and who had long assumed that dance was "mostly for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has realized that it in fact "entails a lot of sensation and feelings" and taps into senses, "visual and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of earlier losing his way on his way home and using the sunlight to direct 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 stated.

"This occurred during the day and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be beaming from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could feel the heat … So I kept walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a good guide to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the story emerged from there."

Blindness Offers Unique Relationship with Motion

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Visual impairment and lacking sight fosters a vibrant relationship with movement in a way that is similar to a expert performer's bond with their body and movement."

In working with the performers, the artist was seeking to express what "they perceive in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she noted. "I converse with the dancers to get a feeling of how they are in their body, where their respiration is, what they’re thinking, how their body are experiencing.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] costume, lighting, scenery and audio creators, the understandings and artistry of blindness are always there as we, blind and seeing persons, establish a relationship through our passion of motion and performance. It is this creativity and affection that I strive to blend into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the senses guided by blindness."

The artist added: "While the vision of the ballet, the stunning spectacle, is there in front of the viewers, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is encouraging seeing and blind patrons alike into the hidden. What I wish is that, when viewers leave, they sense performance in a new way, and they’re also sensing the being, and hearing the perceptions of, visual impairment in innovative and dynamic ways."

Composer The Composer on Audio Narration

Richter, whose compositions have accumulated more than billions of streams, said the spoken narration formed a connection between blindness and vision "by means of a musical landscape, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He noted: "This isn't simply a description of a performance. This is the performance itself."

International Ballet Event Partners

The company's worldwide partners for International Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will also provide availability to behind-the-scenes material, rehearsals and freshly produced works – broadcast in real-time via the event website.