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This prestigious ballet company for years made available headphones with audio descriptions so that visually impaired viewers could understand the action on stage. Currently, through a groundbreaking production, the entire crowd will listen to such descriptions within a work that investigates how blindness can transform our perceptions to feeling, sound and storytelling.

Blind Creator Works with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired professional, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other dance creators, and musician Max Richter in developing a fresh ballet company commission that will premiere on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as announced recently.

In her art, Healey is driven by a ambition to demonstrate how blindness and physical challenge can present an different mode of awareness for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, blended with the music, forms the center of the show on stage.

"Producing world-class dance and opera for all" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's leader, the organization is focusing on "complete inclusion – inviting artists and audiences to experience dance in life-changing fresh approaches," he said.

Multiple Dance Creators Work on New Production

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

The curator, the curator of this commission, commented: "World Ballet Day was established on the principle of inclusion. Following a ten years, we're pushing that concept deeper to explore how challenged outlooks can mold our art form, and invite viewers of diverse capacities and backgrounds to encounter ballet in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator understood that sighted people who had experienced Healey’s audio narration felt it helped them grasp dance, which can seem so abstract.

Touching Partnership Of Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In a particular performance, the Royal Ballet performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from childhood and who had previously believed that ballet was "primarily for sighted people". But the dancer has realized that it actually "includes a lot of emotion and feelings" and engages faculties, "visual and other sensory".

Kikuchi’s personal story of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and using the sun to orient his way back had influenced a duet in which Dixon represents the "soothing presence of the sunlight around his partner as they dance in unison," the choreographer said.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be beaming from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could feel the warmth … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a excellent helper to me. The sun could be a meaningful symbol. So the story originated from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Distinct Relationship with Motion

Healey, an scholar of disability studies at the Toronto university, stated: "Blindness and being blind invites a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s connection with their physical self and movement."

In partnering with the dancers, she was striving to communicate what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not available through looking," she explained. "I talk with the dancers to get a understanding of how they’re feeling in their body, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their body are feeling.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] costume, stage lights, scenery and sound designers, the understandings and artistry of visual impairment are always there as we, visually impaired and seeing people, build a relationship through our love of movement and performance. It is this artistry and affection that I attempt to integrate into the detailed narration. It is a cooperation of the faculties guided by visual impairment."

She noted: "Even though the vision of the performance, the gorgeous spectacle, is there before the audience, there is much that they’re not accessing or valuing, and it is blindness that is encouraging seeing and blind patrons equally into the unseen. What I desire is that, when audience members depart, they sense ballet in a distinct way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and perceiving the understandings of, blindness in new and dynamic ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose works have accumulated more than 3.5bn online plays, said the audio descriptions established a connection between visual impairment and sight "via a musical landscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear". He noted: "It is not simply a narration of a show. This is the art."

International Ballet Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s global collaborators for World Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will also supply access to exclusive material, preparations and recently created pieces – transmitted live via the event website.