🔗 Share this article

This prestigious ballet company for years offered headphones with spoken commentary so that visually impaired audience members could understand the movement on stage. Currently, through a revolutionary new work, the whole crowd will experience such commentary within a work that examines how visual impairment can transform our reactions to feeling, sound and dramatic expression.

Blind Artist Partners with Celebrated Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is partnering with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in producing a new ballet company commission that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as announced on Thursday.

In her art, Healey is guided by a ambition to demonstrate how blindness and physical challenge can provide an unique mode of perception for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, woven with the composition, creates the heart of the show on stage.

"Creating exceptional dance and musical theater for all" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the company is focusing on "radical accessibility – welcoming creators and audiences to discover dance in transformative fresh approaches," he stated.

Multiple Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Performance

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

The curator, the organizer of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was established on the principle of access. After a decade, we're pushing that idea further to examine how challenged perspectives can shape our performance style, and welcome patrons of every capability and backgrounds to experience dance in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with the artist in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator realized that those with vision who had heard the artist's audio narration believed it helped them comprehend ballet, which can appear so unclear.

Touching Partnership Of Professional and Amateur Performers

In one duet, 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 always thought that ballet was "primarily for sighted people". But the dancer has understood that it actually "involves a lot of emotion and sentiments" and taps into faculties, "sight-based and other sensory".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of once losing his way on his way home and relying on the sunlight to direct his way back had influenced a dance piece in which the professional dancer becomes the "warm breath of the sun around his partner as they perform as one," the choreographer explained.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a sense that the sun should be shining from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I wouldn’t see the rays itself, I could feel the warmth … So I continued moving to the west …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a excellent assistant to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the narrative emerged from there."

Blindness Presents Unique Connection with Movement

Healey, an assistant professor of disability research at the Toronto university, stated: "Visual impairment and being blind encourages a active connection with dance in a way that is similar to a expert performer's bond with their physical self and dance."

In working with the dancers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not accessible through sight," she noted. "I talk with the performers to get a feeling of how they feel in their body, where their breath is, what they think, how their muscles are experiencing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] clothing, lighting, stage design and sound artists, the viewpoints and creativity of blindness are always there as we, blind and sighted individuals, develop a relationship through our affection of movement and dance. It is this creativity and passion that I attempt to integrate into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the faculties guided by blindness."

The artist added: "Although the vision of the ballet, the stunning spectacle, is available before the audience, there is much that they’re not accessing or valuing, and it is blindness that is encouraging sighted and visually impaired patrons equally into the invisible. What I desire is that, when viewers leave, they experience ballet in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and perceiving the understandings of, blindness in innovative and active ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Narration

The composer, whose works have gathered more than 3.5 billion digital listens, stated the audio descriptions established a rapport between blindness and vision "via a audio environment, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He noted: "It is not merely a description of a production. This is performance."

International Ballet Event Collaborators

The company's global collaborators for International Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also supply entry to backstage video, practice sessions and newly commissioned pieces – broadcast as it happens via online channels.