A Cooperation between Our Senses: Royal Ballet Partners alongside Visually Impaired Artist for Groundbreaking New Production

The Royal Ballet has long made available audio devices with descriptive narration so that sightless viewers could track the movement on stage. Currently, through a innovative production, the entire crowd will experience such narration within a piece that investigates how blindness can transform our perceptions to feeling, sound and dramatic expression.

Blind Creator Works with Celebrated Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired professional, is partnering with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a new Royal Ballet production that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as declared on Thursday.

Through her work, the artist is motivated by a wish to show how blindness and physical challenge can offer an alternative mode of perception for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the score, creates the core of the production on stage.

"Making world-class dance and opera for all" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under the director, the company's leader, the company is zeroing in on "complete inclusion – inviting creators and viewers to experience dance in transformative new ways," he explained.

Multiple Dance Creators Work on New Production

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

The curator, the director of this work, commented: "International Ballet Day was established on the concept of accessibility. Following a decade, we're expanding that idea more to examine how disabled viewpoints can mold our performance style, and invite patrons of every capability and experiences to encounter dance in innovative methods."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he realized that those with vision who had heard Healey’s spoken descriptions believed it assisted them understand dance, which can seem so unclear.

Moving Collaboration Of Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from childhood and who had always thought that dance was "mainly for sighted people". But the dancer has understood that it actually "includes a lot of feeling and sentiments" and engages perceptions, "sight-based and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sunlight to direct his way back had influenced a performance in which the professional dancer represents the "warm breath of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," Malcomson explained.

"It was during the day and I had a sense that the sunlight should be shining from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the light itself, I could feel the warmth … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great guide to me. The sunlight could be a good representation. So the story emerged from there."

Blindness Provides Unique Relationship with Movement

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, stated: "Blindness and being blind invites a vibrant connection with dance in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's relationship with their physical self and dance."

In partnering with the performers, she was seeking to express what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not available through vision," she noted. "I converse with the performers to get a sense of how they feel in their body, where their breath is, what they consider, how their muscles are feeling.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] costume, stage lights, set and audio artists, the perceptions and creativity of visual impairment are ever present as we, visually impaired and seeing persons, establish a rapport through our affection of dance and performance. It is this creativity and affection that I try to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the senses guided by blindness."

The artist added: "Although the view of the performance, the beautiful visual feast, is there before the viewers, there is a great deal that they miss or appreciating, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and visually impaired patrons both into the hidden. What I wish is that, when viewers depart, they feel performance in a different way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and hearing the understandings of, visual impairment in new and active ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose recordings have gathered more than 3.5bn online plays, said the spoken narration formed a connection between blindness and sight "by means of a musical landscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He added: "This isn't simply a narration of a performance. This is performance."

World Dance Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide collaborators for World Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will furthermore offer availability to exclusive video, rehearsals and recently created works – broadcast live via the event website.