🔗 Share this article

This prestigious ballet company for years offered headphones with audio descriptions so that sightless patrons could follow the movement on stage. Currently, in a revolutionary new work, the entire audience will experience such narration within a piece that explores how lack of sight can redefine our responses to sensation, audio and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Creator Works with Famous Choreographers

The blind artist, a blind professional, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in producing a recent Royal Ballet production that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

Through her work, Healey is driven by a wish to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can present an unique mode of understanding for each individual. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the music, establishes the core of the show on stage.

"Producing exceptional dance and opera for everyone" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the company is concentrating on "complete inclusion – encouraging artists and viewers to encounter ballet in life-changing innovative methods," he said.

Various Choreographers Partner on Fresh Production

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

The curator, the director of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was founded on the idea of inclusion. Following a decade, we're expanding that concept deeper to explore how challenged outlooks can shape our performance style, and welcome viewers of every capability and backgrounds to encounter ballet in innovative methods."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australian locations, he realized that those with vision who had experienced Healey’s audio narration felt it aided them understand dance, which can look so abstract.

Touching Collaboration Between Professional and Amateur Performers

In a particular duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been visually impaired from birth and who had always thought that dance was "primarily for those who can see". But the dancer has understood that it in fact "includes a lot of feeling and sentiments" and engages senses, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of previously getting lost on his way home and using the sun to guide his way back had inspired a dance piece in which the professional dancer represents the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around his partner as they move together," the choreographer explained.

"It was during the day and I had a sense that the sun should be shining from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could feel the heat … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a good guide to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the narrative developed from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Distinct Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an scholar of disability studies at the Toronto university, stated: "Visual impairment and being blind invites a dynamic bond with dance in a way that is like a professional dancer’s connection with their body and motion."

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

"Partnering with the choreographers [and] costume, illumination, stage design and sound creators, the understandings and creativity of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and seeing persons, establish a connection through our love of movement and dance. It is this artistry and love that I try to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the perceptions led by visual impairment."

She continued: "While the vision of the performance, the gorgeous spectacle, is available in front of the patrons, there is a great deal that they overlook or appreciating, and it is blindness that is inviting seeing and visually impaired patrons both into the invisible. What I hope is that, when audience members exit, they sense ballet in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and perceiving the understandings of, blindness in new and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

Richter, whose recordings have amassed more than 3.5bn streams, commented the descriptive commentary established a connection between blindness and sight "by means of a soundscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He added: "This isn't merely a description of a performance. It is performance."

World Dance Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international collaborators for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will also provide access to exclusive footage, rehearsals and freshly produced pieces – transmitted live via their official platform.