A Partnership between the Senses: The Royal Ballet Partners with Visually Impaired Creator for Innovative Fresh Performance

This prestigious ballet company traditionally made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that visually impaired patrons could track the movement on stage. Currently, in a innovative production, the whole crowd will hear such descriptions within a production that examines how visual impairment can transform our reactions to feeling, music and dramatic expression.

Blind Artist Collaborates with Famous Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in developing a new ballet company work that will premiere on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as announced recently.

Through her work, the artist is driven by a wish to show how blindness and disability can present an different form of awareness for each individual. Her rich spoken descriptions, woven with the score, forms the core of the performance on stage.

"Creating top-tier dance and musical theater for each person" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the organization is concentrating on "complete inclusion – inviting creators and patrons to experience dance in transformative new ways," he said.

Several Choreographers Partner on Fresh Performance

The recent commission is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, each collaborating with the blind artist.

The curator, the organizer of this work, commented: "World Ballet Day was established on the idea of inclusion. After a decade, we're extending that notion more to explore how challenged viewpoints can mold our art form, and encourage audiences of diverse capacities and backgrounds to discover ballet in new ways."

Having worked with the artist in Canada and Australia, he understood that sighted people who had heard Healey’s descriptive audio felt it assisted them grasp dance, which can look so unclear.

Moving Collaboration Between Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular dance piece, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from childhood and who had always thought that ballet was "mostly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it actually "involves a lot of sensation and sentiments" and taps into faculties, "visual and non-sight".

The dancer's unique narrative of once becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sunlight to guide his way back had influenced a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," the choreographer said.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be shining from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the sunlight itself, I could feel the temperature … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It led me home. The sunshine was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a powerful representation. So the story developed from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Distinct Relationship with Dance

Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the Toronto university, commented: "Visual impairment and being blind encourages a dynamic connection with movement in a way that is like a expert performer's relationship with their physical self and dance."

In working with the performers, the artist was attempting to express what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not accessible through vision," she explained. "I speak with the dancers to get a understanding of how they are in their body, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their body are experiencing.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] costume, stage lights, scenery and audio artists, the viewpoints and innovation of blindness are ever present as we, visually impaired and sighted persons, develop a rapport through our passion of movement and performance. It is this innovation and affection that I attempt to weave into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the senses directed by blindness."

She continued: "While the view of the ballet, the gorgeous display, is present before the audience, there is so much that they miss or appreciating, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and blind viewers equally into the hidden. What I wish is that, when audience members leave, they experience dance in a different way, and they’re also sensing the existence, and hearing the understandings of, blindness in new and vibrant ways."

Musician The Composer on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose works have gathered more than billions of streams, said the spoken narration formed a rapport between visual impairment and vision "via a soundscape, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He added: "This isn't just a description of a performance. It is performance."

World Ballet Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for World Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The companies will furthermore supply access to exclusive footage, rehearsals and newly commissioned works – broadcast live via online channels.