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This prestigious ballet company has long provided headphones with audio descriptions so that blind audience members could track the movement on stage. Now, through a groundbreaking performance, the complete audience will listen to such narration within a work that explores how blindness can redefine our perceptions to sensation, music and narrative.

Blind Creator Partners with Celebrated Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a fresh ballet company production that will debut on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

Through her work, the artist is motivated by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an unique type of awareness for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the score, establishes the core of the performance on stage.

"Creating exceptional ballet and opera for everyone" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's director, the troupe is zeroing in on "radical accessibility – inviting artists and audiences to encounter ballet in transformative innovative methods," he said.

Various Choreographers Collaborate on New Production

The new work is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, each working with Healey.

The curator, the director of this production, stated: "International Ballet Day was created on the concept of access. Following a ten years, we're expanding that concept deeper to consider how challenged outlooks can influence our performance style, and encourage patrons of every capability and backgrounds to encounter ballet in new ways."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator understood that sighted people who had heard the artist's descriptive audio believed it helped them comprehend ballet, which can look so unclear.

Touching Partnership Between Expert and Amateur Performers

In a particular performance, the company's performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from birth and who had long assumed that dance was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it in fact "includes a lot of emotion and feelings" and engages perceptions, "visual and other sensory".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of once becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sun to direct his way back had motivated a performance in which the professional dancer embodies the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around his partner as they move together," the choreographer stated.

"This occurred during the day and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be shining from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the sunlight itself, I could sense the temperature … So I kept walking to the west …. It guided me home. The sun was a good assistant to me. The sun could be a good symbol. So the story developed from there."

Blindness Offers Unique Connection with Movement

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the Toronto university, stated: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a dynamic bond with movement in a way that is like a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and dance."

In working with the performers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not available through sight," she explained. "I converse with the dancers to get a understanding of how they feel in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their physical form are experiencing.

"Partnering with the choreographers [and] costume, lighting, set and music designers, the perceptions and creativity of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and sighted persons, develop a relationship through our love of motion and performance. It is this innovation and affection that I strive to blend into the detailed narration. It is a cooperation of the perceptions guided by visual impairment."

She noted: "Even though the vision of the ballet, the gorgeous display, is available in front of the audience, there is so much that they miss or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is welcoming sighted and blind viewers both into the invisible. What I hope is that, when patrons depart, they sense performance in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the presence, and listening to the understandings of, blindness in innovative and dynamic ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Narration

Richter, whose recordings have amassed more than 3.5bn digital listens, stated the spoken narration established a connection between blindness and sight "by means of a audio environment, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He added: "This isn't just a description of a production. It is performance."

International Dance Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide partners for International Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The troupes will furthermore provide access to behind-the-scenes video, practice sessions and newly commissioned pieces – broadcast as it happens via online channels.