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This prestigious ballet company traditionally made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that visually impaired viewers could follow the action on stage. Now, through a groundbreaking production, the entire audience will listen to such commentary within a work that investigates how blindness can redefine our perceptions to experience, audio and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Artist Partners with Renowned Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired professional, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in creating a recent ballet company production that will debut on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

Within her creative practice, the artist is motivated by a desire to show how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an different type of awareness for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, blended with the composition, forms the heart of the performance on stage.

"Producing exceptional dance and musical theater for all" is a guiding principle of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the organization is concentrating on "complete inclusion – welcoming creators and audiences to discover dance in life-changing fresh approaches," he said.

Various Dance Creators Work on Fresh Performance

The fresh production is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, each working with Healey.

Robert Binet, the director of this work, said: "International Ballet Day was established on the idea of accessibility. Following a decade, we're pushing that idea deeper to explore how impaired viewpoints can influence our art form, and welcome audiences of all abilities and experiences to discover dance in innovative methods."

Following partnerships with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he recognized that sighted people who had experienced the artist's spoken descriptions felt it helped them comprehend ballet, which can appear so abstract.

Inspiring Partnership Between Expert and Amateur Dancers

In a particular performance, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been visually impaired from birth and who had long assumed that dance was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has discovered that it in fact "includes a lot of feeling and sentiments" and taps into faculties, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's individual experience of earlier getting lost on his way home and using the sun to orient his way back had influenced a duet in which the professional dancer represents the "soothing presence of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," the choreographer stated.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the rays itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It led me home. The sunshine was a good guide to me. The sunlight could be a good symbol. So the tale originated from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Unique Connection with Motion

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the Toronto university, stated: "Blindness and lacking sight fosters a dynamic relationship with dance in a way that is comparable to a professional dancer’s bond with their physical self and movement."

In working with the performers, the artist was attempting to express what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not accessible through vision," she said. "I speak with the dancers to get a understanding of how they’re feeling in their body, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their physical form are feeling.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] clothing, illumination, scenery and audio designers, the understandings and innovation of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and seeing people, develop a connection through our affection of motion and performance. It is this creativity and love that I try to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a cooperation of the senses guided by visual impairment."

She added: "Even though the view of the ballet, the gorgeous spectacle, is present before the audience, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or understanding, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and visually impaired audience members equally into the hidden. What I hope is that, when audience members exit, they sense performance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and perceiving the perceptions of, visual impairment in new and dynamic ways."

Composer The Composer on Audio Narration

The composer, whose recordings have accumulated more than 3.5bn online plays, stated the spoken narration created a connection between blindness and vision "via a musical landscape, providing expression to that which is not always visible". He noted: "This isn't simply a explanation of a performance. This is the art."

World Dance Event Collaborators

The company's international associates for International Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will also supply entry to behind-the-scenes material, preparations and newly commissioned productions – transmitted live via the event website.