🔗 Share this article

This prestigious ballet company traditionally offered audio devices with spoken commentary so that blind patrons could track the action on stage. Now, via a groundbreaking production, the whole gathering will experience such descriptions within a work that explores how lack of sight can redefine our perceptions to feeling, audio and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Artist Partners with Famous Dance Creators

The blind artist, a visually impaired professional, is working with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in developing a new ballet company commission that will launch on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as announced this week.

Within her creative practice, Healey is guided by a wish to show how visual impairment and disability can present an unique form of awareness for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, blended with the music, forms the center of the performance on stage.

"Making world-class ballet and opera for all" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's director, the organization is zeroing in on "radical accessibility – welcoming performers and audiences to experience ballet in revolutionary innovative methods," he stated.

Several Dance Creators Work on New Performance

The new work is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, each collaborating with Healey.

The curator, the director of this production, said: "International Ballet Day was created on the idea of access. After a ten years, we're extending that concept deeper to consider how disabled outlooks can mold our performance style, and encourage patrons of all abilities and histories to experience dance in innovative methods."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australian locations, the curator realized that individuals who can see who had experienced the artist's audio narration believed it aided them comprehend dance, which can look so abstract.

Inspiring Partnership Between Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one dance piece, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from birth and who had previously believed that ballet was "mainly for sighted people". But the dancer has discovered that it truly "entails a lot of sensation and feelings" and engages faculties, "sight-based and non-visual".

The dancer's personal story of previously losing his way on his way home and using the sunlight to orient his way back had influenced a dance piece in which Dixon embodies the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," the choreographer said.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be shining from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could feel the temperature … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a excellent helper to me. The sun could be a powerful metaphor. So the story originated from there."

Blindness Offers Special Connection with Movement

Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, stated: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a vibrant bond with movement in a way that is similar to a expert performer's bond with their body and dance."

In collaborating with the performers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not available through looking," she said. "I converse with the dancers to get a understanding of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they’re thinking, how their body are sensing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] costume, lighting, stage design and music artists, the understandings and innovation of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and seeing individuals, build a rapport through our affection of dance and performance. It is this creativity and love that I attempt to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the senses directed by blindness."

She noted: "Even though the view of the performance, the stunning visual feast, is present before the viewers, there is much that they overlook or appreciating, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and blind patrons alike into the unseen. What I desire is that, when audience members leave, they sense ballet in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and hearing the viewpoints of, blindness in fresh and vibrant ways."

Musician The Composer on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose works have amassed more than 3.5 billion digital listens, said the spoken narration created a rapport between blindness and sight "via a musical landscape, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He continued: "It is not merely a narration of a show. It is performance."

International Dance Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s global collaborators for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will furthermore offer access to behind-the-scenes footage, preparations and recently created productions – transmitted as it happens via the event website.