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The Royal Ballet traditionally made available audio devices with audio descriptions so that blind audience members could follow the action on stage. Now, through a groundbreaking production, the entire audience will hear such narration within a work that investigates how lack of sight can redefine our responses to experience, music and dramatic expression.

Blind Artist Works with Celebrated Dance Creators

The blind artist, a visually impaired creator, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in developing a recent ballet company work that will launch on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as declared recently.

Within her creative practice, Healey is driven by a desire to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an different type of perception for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the composition, forms the heart of the show on stage.

"Creating world-class ballet and musical theater for everyone" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the troupe is focusing on "radical accessibility – inviting artists and patrons to experience ballet in transformative innovative methods," he explained.

Multiple Choreographers Work on New Performance

The recent commission is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, every one partnering with the blind artist.

The curator, the organizer of this production, said: "World Ballet Day was created on the concept of inclusion. Following a ten years, we're expanding that idea further to examine how disabled viewpoints can influence our art form, and welcome audiences of diverse capacities and experiences to discover ballet in fresh approaches."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australia, he realized that those with vision who had heard the artist's descriptive audio believed it helped them comprehend dance, which can look so abstract.

Touching Collaboration Between Professional and Amateur Dancers

In one duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless since birth and who had always thought that ballet was "mostly for those who can see". But the dancer has realized that it in fact "includes a lot of sensation and feelings" and activates perceptions, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of earlier becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sun to orient his way back had inspired a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson stated.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sun should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the sunlight itself, I could sense the heat … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a good assistant to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the story originated from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Unique Connection with Motion

The blind artist, an scholar of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a vibrant relationship with movement in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's connection with their body and movement."

In working with the dancers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not available through vision," she noted. "I talk with the dancers to get a sense of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they think, how their physical form are sensing.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] attire, illumination, set and music designers, the viewpoints and creativity of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and seeing persons, establish a rapport through our affection of dance and dance. It is this creativity and affection that I attempt to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the faculties directed by blindness."

She continued: "Even though the view of the performance, the beautiful spectacle, is available in front of the viewers, there is much that they overlook or understanding, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging sighted and visually impaired audience members both into the invisible. What I hope is that, when patrons exit, they experience performance in a different way, and they’re also sensing the existence, and listening to the perceptions of, blindness in new and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Narration

Richter, whose compositions have gathered more than 3.5 billion online plays, commented the audio descriptions established a relationship between visual impairment and vision "by means of a soundscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He continued: "It is not merely a narration of a show. It is performance."

International Ballet Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide partners for International Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will furthermore offer access to behind-the-scenes video, rehearsals and newly commissioned productions – broadcast in real-time via online channels.