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This prestigious ballet company has long offered headphones with spoken commentary so that visually impaired audience members could understand the action on stage. Now, in a revolutionary performance, the complete audience will experience such descriptions within a work that examines how visual impairment can reshape our reactions to sensation, audio and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Renowned Dance Creators

The blind artist, a blind artist, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in creating a new ballet company work that will debut on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared recently.

In her art, the artist is driven by a wish to show how blindness and disability can provide an unique type of awareness for all people. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the composition, establishes the heart of the production on stage.

"Creating world-class dance and opera for each person" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's director, the company is focusing on "total access – encouraging creators and viewers to encounter dance in life-changing innovative methods," he said.

Multiple Dance Creators Partner on New Performance

The fresh production is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, each partnering with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the curator of this production, commented: "World Ballet Day was founded on the idea of accessibility. Following a decade, we're expanding that notion further to examine how impaired outlooks can influence our performance style, and invite patrons of all abilities and experiences to encounter dance in innovative methods."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator understood that those with vision who had heard the artist's spoken descriptions felt it aided them grasp ballet, which can appear so unclear.

Moving Partnership Between Professional and Amateur Dancers

In one performance, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from childhood and who had previously believed that ballet was "primarily for sighted people". But Kikuchi has discovered that it truly "involves a lot of feeling and sentiments" and taps into faculties, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's personal story of previously getting lost on his way home and relying on the sunlight to direct his way back had inspired a duet in which the professional dancer embodies the "warm breath of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they move together," Malcomson stated.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the light itself, I could perceive the warmth … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a good guide to me. The sun could be a good metaphor. So the narrative developed from there."

Blindness Presents Special Connection with Movement

Healey, an scholar of disability research at the University of Toronto, said: "Blindness and being blind encourages a vibrant connection with motion in a way that is like a expert performer's relationship with their body and motion."

In working with the performers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she explained. "I talk with the performers to get a feeling of how they are in their body, where their respiration is, what they consider, how their body are feeling.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] attire, lighting, scenery and audio creators, the understandings and innovation of visual impairment are always there as we, blind and seeing persons, establish a connection through our love of dance and performance. It is this artistry and love that I strive to weave into the spoken commentary. It is a partnership of the senses led by visual impairment."

The artist noted: "Although the vision of the dance, the stunning display, is there in front of the audience, there is so much that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is encouraging sighted and blind patrons both into the hidden. What I desire is that, when viewers leave, they experience ballet in a different way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and listening to the understandings of, blindness in fresh and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

Richter, whose works have gathered more than billions of digital listens, stated the spoken narration created a relationship between visual impairment and vision "via a audio environment, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He noted: "It is not just a explanation of a performance. It is the art."

World Ballet Event Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide partners for International Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will additionally offer access to exclusive footage, rehearsals and freshly produced pieces – streamed live via the event website.