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The Royal Ballet traditionally provided audio devices with audio descriptions so that sightless audience members could track the action on stage. Currently, via a groundbreaking new work, the whole audience will hear such commentary within a piece that investigates how visual impairment can reshape our responses to experience, audio and dramatic expression.

Blind Artist Partners with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in producing a new ballet company commission that will launch on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as declared this week.

Within her creative practice, Healey is guided by a wish to demonstrate how blindness and physical challenge can present an different type of awareness for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the music, creates the heart of the production on stage.

"Producing top-tier ballet and opera for everyone" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's director, the company is focusing on "complete inclusion – inviting performers and patrons to encounter dance in revolutionary fresh approaches," he said.

Various Dance Creators Partner on New Work

The recent commission is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to Wayne McGregor, each working with Healey.

The curator, the organizer of this work, said: "World Ballet Day was founded on the idea of inclusion. Following a decade, we're pushing that concept further to examine how challenged viewpoints can mold our performance style, and welcome viewers of diverse capacities and backgrounds to encounter dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australian locations, he understood that those with vision who had encountered the artist's spoken descriptions found it aided them grasp ballet, which can appear so abstract.

Inspiring Partnership Of Professional and Amateur Performers

In one performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from childhood and who had always thought that dance was "mainly for those who can see". But the dancer has discovered that it actually "involves a lot of emotion and feelings" and taps into senses, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of once getting lost on his way home and using the sunlight to guide his way back had motivated a dance piece in which the professional dancer represents the "soothing presence of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," the choreographer explained.

"This occurred during the day and I had a feeling that the sun should be radiating from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the light itself, I could feel the heat … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sun could be a good symbol. So the tale originated from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Special Connection with Dance

Healey, an academic of disability studies at the University of Toronto, commented: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and motion."

In collaborating with the dancers, the artist was seeking to communicate what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through vision," she explained. "I speak with the dancers to get a sense of how they feel in their physical self, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their muscles are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] clothing, illumination, scenery and sound artists, the perceptions and creativity of blindness are ever present as we, visually impaired and sighted persons, build a rapport through our love of movement and performance. It is this artistry and passion that I strive to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the perceptions guided by blindness."

She added: "Even though the vision of the dance, the beautiful visual feast, is present facing the viewers, there is much that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is blindness that is encouraging sighted and blind patrons equally into the invisible. What I wish is that, when viewers exit, they sense dance in a new way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and perceiving the understandings of, visual impairment in fresh and vibrant ways."

Musician The Composer on Audio Narration

Richter, whose recordings have accumulated more than billions of online plays, commented the audio descriptions formed a relationship between blindness and vision "through a soundscape, providing expression to that which does not always appear". He added: "It is not simply a description of a show. It is performance."

International Dance Day Partners

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide partners for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will furthermore supply entry to exclusive video, rehearsals and newly commissioned works – transmitted live via online channels.