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The Royal Ballet has long made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that visually impaired audience members could understand the movement on stage. Presently, in a revolutionary performance, the complete audience will listen to such commentary within a piece that examines how blindness can transform our responses to sensation, sound and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Creator Partners with Renowned Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in creating a recent Royal Ballet commission that will debut on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as announced recently.

Through her work, the artist is guided by a ambition to illustrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an alternative form of awareness for everyone. Her rich spoken descriptions, integrated with the score, establishes the heart of the performance on stage.

"Creating world-class ballet and opera for all" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's director, the company is focusing on "complete inclusion – welcoming artists and audiences to encounter dance in transformative new ways," he said.

Multiple Choreographers Collaborate on New Work

The fresh production is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, each partnering with Healey.

Robert Binet, the curator of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was founded on the idea of access. After a decade, we're expanding that notion further to explore how challenged outlooks can influence our performance style, and welcome patrons of every capability and experiences to discover dance in fresh approaches."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator realized that those with vision who had encountered Healey’s audio narration believed it helped them understand dance, which can seem so complex.

Inspiring Partnership Between Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless since birth and who had always thought that dance was "mostly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it actually "involves a lot of feeling and emotions" and activates senses, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's individual experience of once becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sunlight to guide his way back had motivated a dance piece in which Dixon embodies the "gentle warmth of the sun around Kikuchi as they perform as one," the choreographer said.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be shining from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could sense the heat … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It led me home. The sunshine was a great helper to me. The sun could be a powerful metaphor. So the story emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Unique Connection with Motion

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the University of Toronto, commented: "Blindness and being blind encourages a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is like a professional dancer’s bond with their physical self and motion."

In partnering with the dancers, she was attempting to communicate what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not accessible through sight," she explained. "I talk with the performers to get a sense of how they are in their body, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their body are feeling.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] costume, stage lights, scenery and sound designers, the viewpoints and innovation of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted people, build a connection through our affection of dance and dance. It is this artistry and passion that I strive to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the perceptions guided by blindness."

She continued: "While the vision of the ballet, the gorgeous display, is available facing the patrons, there is a great deal that they overlook or understanding, and it is visual impairment that is inviting sighted and visually impaired audience members alike into the invisible. What I hope is that, when viewers depart, they sense ballet in a different way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and hearing the viewpoints of, blindness in new and dynamic ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

The composer, whose recordings have accumulated more than billions of digital listens, stated the spoken narration created a relationship between visual impairment and vision "by means of a soundscape, giving voice to that which remains unseen". He continued: "It is not simply a narration of a performance. This is the performance itself."

World Dance Event Collaborators

The company's worldwide partners for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will also provide availability to exclusive footage, preparations and newly commissioned pieces – broadcast in real-time via the event website.