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This prestigious ballet company traditionally provided audio devices with descriptive narration so that blind viewers could understand the performance on stage. Now, in a revolutionary new work, the complete gathering will hear such descriptions within a piece that examines how lack of sight can transform our reactions to experience, audio and storytelling.

Blind Creator Partners with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired creator, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in developing a recent Royal Ballet production that will premiere on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed recently.

Within her creative practice, the artist is driven by a ambition to illustrate how blindness and physical challenge can offer an unique form of understanding for each individual. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the music, creates the heart of the show on stage.

"Creating exceptional ballet and musical theater for everyone" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the company is concentrating on "complete inclusion – inviting creators and patrons to encounter ballet in revolutionary new ways," he said.

Various Choreographers Work on Fresh Work

The new work is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, all partnering with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the director of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was founded on the principle of accessibility. Following a ten years, we're expanding that idea deeper to explore how challenged viewpoints can shape our creative medium, and welcome viewers of diverse capacities and experiences to discover dance in new ways."

Following partnerships with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator understood that sighted people who had encountered Healey’s spoken descriptions felt it aided them understand dance, which can appear so complex.

Moving Collaboration Between Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In one performance, the company's performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from childhood and who had long assumed that ballet was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it truly "entails a lot of sensation and sentiments" and activates perceptions, "visual and other sensory".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sunlight to orient his way back had motivated a duet in which Dixon represents the "warm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," Malcomson said.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be shining from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could sense the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a excellent helper to me. The sun could be a good representation. So the narrative emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Unique Connection with Dance

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, stated: "Visual impairment and lacking sight encourages a active connection with movement in a way that is comparable to a expert performer's bond with their body and movement."

In partnering with the performers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not accessible through looking," she noted. "I talk with the dancers to get a sense of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their physical form are feeling.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] attire, illumination, stage design and music designers, the perceptions and artistry of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and seeing people, develop a relationship through our passion of dance and performance. It is this creativity and passion that I try to weave into the detailed narration. It is a partnership of the senses directed by blindness."

She added: "Although the view of the ballet, the beautiful display, is available in front of the audience, there is so much that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging seeing and blind viewers both into the unseen. What I hope is that, when viewers exit, they feel ballet in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and perceiving the perceptions of, blindness in new and active ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

The composer, whose compositions have amassed more than 3.5bn streams, stated the spoken narration formed a rapport between blindness and sight "by means of a audio environment, giving voice to that which remains unseen". He continued: "It is not simply a explanation of a production. It is the performance itself."

International Ballet Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for World Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will also supply access to behind-the-scenes material, practice sessions and recently created pieces – broadcast as it happens via their official platform.