A Collaboration between the Senses: The Royal Ballet Teams Up with Blind Creator for Innovative New Performance

This prestigious ballet company for years offered audio devices with audio descriptions so that blind viewers could track the movement on stage. Now, in a revolutionary new work, the whole gathering will experience such narration within a production that explores how blindness can redefine our responses to feeling, audio and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Renowned Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired artist, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in producing a new ballet company work that will premiere on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

In her art, Healey is guided by a wish to illustrate how blindness and disability can present an alternative type of perception for all people. Her rich spoken descriptions, woven with the music, forms the center of the production on stage.

"Making exceptional ballet and musical theater for each person" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's leader, the company is focusing on "complete inclusion – inviting performers and audiences to encounter ballet in life-changing fresh approaches," he stated.

Multiple Choreographers Collaborate on Fresh Work

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

Robert Binet, the director of this commission, commented: "International Ballet Day was established on the idea of accessibility. After a decade, we're expanding that idea deeper to explore how challenged viewpoints can mold our performance style, and welcome patrons of every capability and experiences to encounter dance in innovative methods."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canada and Australia, the curator realized that sighted people who had encountered Healey’s audio narration felt it aided them comprehend dance, which can seem so abstract.

Touching Partnership Between Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In one dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from birth and who had long assumed that dance was "mostly for sighted people". But the dancer has realized that it in fact "includes a lot of feeling and emotions" and taps into perceptions, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sun to orient his way back had motivated a dance piece in which the professional dancer represents the "warm breath of the sunlight around his partner as they move together," Malcomson said.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be radiating from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a good helper to me. The sunlight could be a powerful metaphor. So the story emerged from there."

Blindness Provides Unique Connection with Movement

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability research at the University of Toronto, stated: "Blindness and lacking sight fosters a active bond with movement in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and dance."

In collaborating with the dancers, she was striving to express what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not accessible through vision," she said. "I converse with the dancers to get a sense of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are experiencing.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] attire, illumination, stage design and music designers, the viewpoints and creativity of blindness are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted individuals, build a connection through our passion of motion and performance. It is this innovation and passion that I try to integrate into the detailed narration. It is a partnership of the senses led by blindness."

She noted: "While the vision of the performance, the stunning display, is available facing the viewers, there is much that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging seeing and visually impaired patrons alike into the invisible. What I desire is that, when patrons leave, they feel performance in a distinct way, and they’re also feeling the being, and listening to the understandings of, visual impairment in fresh and vibrant ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Narration

The composer, whose recordings have amassed more than billions of streams, said the spoken narration formed a connection between blindness and vision "via a musical landscape, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He continued: "It is not simply a explanation of a performance. This is performance."

World Ballet Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s global partners for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also offer entry to exclusive footage, practice sessions and recently created works – transmitted as it happens via online channels.