🔗 Share this article

The Royal Ballet traditionally provided headphones with audio descriptions so that blind audience members could understand the action on stage. Now, in a revolutionary production, the whole crowd will experience such narration within a work that investigates how blindness can redefine our perceptions to experience, audio and dramatic expression.

Blind Artist Partners with Celebrated Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired creator, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in developing a new Royal Ballet commission that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

Within her creative practice, the artist is motivated by a desire to show how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an different type of understanding for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, blended with the composition, forms the core of the show on stage.

"Making exceptional ballet and opera for each person" is a motto of the the organization. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's leader, the troupe is zeroing in on "total access – welcoming artists and patrons to discover dance in revolutionary innovative methods," he explained.

Multiple Dance Creators Partner on New Work

The new work is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, every one partnering with the blind artist.

The curator, the director of this commission, said: "World Ballet Day was founded on the principle of accessibility. Following a ten years, we're expanding that idea more to examine how challenged outlooks can mold our art form, and invite audiences of every capability and backgrounds to encounter ballet in new ways."

Having worked with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, he understood that individuals who can see who had encountered Healey’s descriptive audio believed it helped them understand dance, which can seem so abstract.

Inspiring Partnership Between Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular performance, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from childhood and who had previously believed that dance was "primarily for individuals with vision". But the dancer has realized that it truly "entails a lot of feeling and feelings" and activates perceptions, "visual and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sun to orient his way back had influenced a performance in which the professional dancer represents the "warm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer explained.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be shining from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the sunlight itself, I could sense the heat … So I continued moving to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sun could be a good symbol. So the narrative emerged from there."

Blindness Presents Unique Connection with Movement

The blind artist, an scholar of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a vibrant connection with dance in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's bond with their physical self and dance."

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

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] attire, lighting, stage design and sound artists, the viewpoints and innovation of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and sighted persons, develop a rapport through our affection of motion and performance. It is this innovation and passion that I attempt to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the senses directed by blindness."

The artist added: "While the view of the ballet, the beautiful visual feast, is present facing the viewers, there is a great deal that they overlook or understanding, and it is visual impairment that is inviting sighted and visually impaired viewers alike into the invisible. What I hope is that, when patrons depart, they feel performance in a new way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and perceiving the viewpoints of, blindness in fresh and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

The composer, whose compositions have amassed more than 3.5 billion digital listens, commented the spoken narration formed a connection between blindness and vision "via a audio environment, providing expression to that which does not always appear". He added: "It is not merely a narration of a show. This is performance."

International Ballet Day Partners

The company's global partners for International Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will also supply availability to backstage material, preparations and newly commissioned works – broadcast as it happens via their official platform.