An Cooperation of Human Perception: Royal Ballet Joins with Visually Impaired Artist for Pioneering New Performance

This prestigious ballet company traditionally offered headphones with descriptive narration so that sightless viewers could follow the movement on stage. Now, in a groundbreaking performance, the entire audience will hear such narration within a production that examines how visual impairment can redefine our perceptions to experience, audio and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Renowned Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired creator, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in creating a fresh ballet company production that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared this week.

Within her creative practice, Healey is motivated by a wish to illustrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an alternative form of perception for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, woven with the music, forms the core of the performance on stage.

"Creating exceptional dance and opera for each person" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's director, the troupe is zeroing in on "radical accessibility – welcoming creators and audiences to experience dance in revolutionary innovative methods," he stated.

Various Choreographers Collaborate on Fresh Work

The recent commission is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, every one partnering with Healey.

The curator, the director of this production, commented: "International Ballet Day was established on the idea of access. After a ten years, we're extending that concept more to explore how impaired perspectives can mold our art form, and invite audiences of diverse capacities and histories to experience dance in new ways."

After collaborating with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he recognized that sighted people who had experienced Healey’s audio narration believed it aided them understand ballet, which can look so unclear.

Touching Collaboration Between Professional and Amateur Performers

In one duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless since birth and who had previously believed that ballet was "mainly for those who can see". But Kikuchi has discovered that it actually "involves a lot of feeling and emotions" and engages senses, "sight-based and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of previously getting lost on his way home and depending on the sunlight to guide his way back had influenced a performance in which the professional dancer becomes the "soothing presence of the sun around Kikuchi as they perform as one," Malcomson explained.

"This occurred during the day and I had a intuition that the sun should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could perceive the warmth … So I continued moving to the west …. It led me home. The sunshine was a great helper to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the narrative emerged from there."

Blindness Provides Distinct Connection with Dance

The blind artist, an academic of disability research at the University of Toronto, said: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a dynamic bond with motion in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s bond with their body and movement."

In partnering with the dancers, she was striving to communicate what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she explained. "I converse with the dancers to get a understanding of how they feel in their body, where their breath is, what they think, how their body are sensing.

"Partnering with the choreographers [and] attire, illumination, scenery and music artists, the perceptions and creativity of blindness are ever present as we, blind and seeing people, establish a rapport through our love of movement and dance. It is this innovation and love that I try to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the senses guided by blindness."

The artist continued: "Even though the vision of the ballet, the beautiful visual feast, is there in front of the patrons, there is much that they miss or appreciating, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and blind viewers both into the invisible. What I desire is that, when audience members leave, they experience dance in a different way, and they’re also feeling the being, and perceiving the perceptions of, visual impairment in new and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

The composer, whose compositions have gathered more than billions of online plays, said the audio descriptions formed a relationship between blindness and sight "by means of a soundscape, offering narration to that which is not always visible". He continued: "It is not simply a narration of a production. It is the performance itself."

World Dance Day Collaborators

The company's international partners for World Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will additionally offer entry to behind-the-scenes footage, preparations and recently created pieces – streamed live via online channels.