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This prestigious ballet company traditionally provided audio devices with audio descriptions so that sightless patrons could follow the movement on stage. Currently, through a groundbreaking performance, the whole crowd will experience such descriptions within a piece that examines how lack of sight can reshape our responses to feeling, audio and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Celebrated Choreographers

The blind artist, a blind creator, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in producing a recent ballet company production that will launch on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

Through her work, the artist is motivated by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an different form of understanding for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, blended with the music, establishes the center of the performance on stage.

"Creating top-tier ballet and musical theater for all" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the organization is focusing on "radical accessibility – inviting creators and patrons to experience ballet in life-changing innovative methods," he said.

Various Dance Creators Partner on New Performance

The new work is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, all working with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the curator of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was established on the principle of inclusion. After a ten years, we're expanding that notion deeper to examine how disabled viewpoints can influence our art form, and encourage viewers of all abilities and experiences to discover dance in fresh approaches."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he understood that those with vision who had experienced Healey’s spoken descriptions believed it aided them grasp ballet, which can seem so abstract.

Inspiring Collaboration Between Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In one performance, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired since birth and who had long assumed that dance was "mainly for individuals with vision". But Kikuchi has realized that it actually "entails a lot of feeling and sentiments" and activates faculties, "sight-based and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of previously losing his way on his way home and depending on the sun to direct his way back had motivated a dance piece in which Dixon becomes the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they perform as one," the choreographer said.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be shining from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could sense the warmth … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great guide to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the tale originated from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Special Relationship with Motion

Healey, an academic of disability studies at the Toronto university, said: "Blindness and being blind invites a vibrant relationship with movement in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and movement."

In working with the dancers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she noted. "I talk with the performers to get a feeling of how they are in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their muscles are feeling.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] costume, stage lights, scenery and music designers, the viewpoints and creativity of blindness are ever present as we, visually impaired and sighted individuals, develop a relationship through our affection of dance and performance. It is this creativity and affection that I try to integrate into the detailed narration. It is a collaboration of the faculties directed by blindness."

She continued: "Although the vision of the performance, the stunning visual feast, is available in front of the audience, there is so much that they’re not accessing or valuing, and it is visual impairment that is welcoming sighted and visually impaired patrons equally into the hidden. What I wish is that, when viewers depart, they experience dance in a new way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and perceiving the understandings of, blindness in fresh and vibrant ways."

Composer The Composer on Audio Narration

The composer, whose works have gathered more than billions of streams, commented the spoken narration created a connection between visual impairment and sight "via a audio environment, offering narration to that which does not always appear". He added: "It is not simply a explanation of a production. It is the performance itself."

International Ballet Event Collaborators

The company's worldwide partners for World Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will also supply access to backstage material, rehearsals and freshly produced productions – broadcast in real-time via the event website.