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This prestigious ballet company for years made available audio devices with descriptive narration so that sightless viewers could follow the action on stage. Now, via a innovative new work, the entire audience will experience such descriptions within a piece that explores how visual impairment can redefine our responses to feeling, sound and storytelling.

Blind Creator Partners with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired creator, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and composer Max Richter in developing a new ballet company work that will debut on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as announced recently.

Through her work, the artist is driven by a wish to illustrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an different mode of awareness for all people. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the score, forms the heart of the show on stage.

"Making top-tier ballet and opera for each person" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's director, the organization is zeroing in on "complete inclusion – inviting artists and patrons to encounter ballet in life-changing fresh approaches," he said.

Various Choreographers Work on Fresh Work

The new work is being choreographed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, all collaborating with the blind artist.

The curator, the organizer of this commission, said: "World Ballet Day was founded on the principle of inclusion. After a decade, we're extending that concept deeper to explore how disabled perspectives can influence our art form, and encourage viewers of every capability and backgrounds to encounter dance in innovative methods."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canada and Australia, he recognized that those with vision who had experienced the artist's spoken descriptions believed it assisted them understand dance, which can look so abstract.

Touching Collaboration Of Professional and Amateur Dancers

In one duet, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind from birth and who had always thought that dance was "primarily for individuals with vision". But the dancer has realized that it actually "entails a lot of emotion and feelings" and activates faculties, "visual and non-visual".

The dancer's individual experience of previously losing his way on his way home and depending on the sunlight to direct his way back had motivated a duet in which the professional dancer embodies the "soothing presence of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," Malcomson explained.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a sense that the sun should be shining from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could perceive the warmth … So I continued moving to the west …. It guided me home. The sun was a great assistant to me. The sunlight could be a powerful representation. So the tale developed from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Special Connection with Movement

The blind artist, an scholar of disability research at the Toronto university, stated: "Visual impairment and being blind fosters a vibrant connection with dance in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s relationship with their physical self and movement."

In working with the performers, the artist was attempting to communicate what "they feel in their physical being, something that’s just not available through looking," she noted. "I talk with the performers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their respiration is, what they think, how their physical form are feeling.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] costume, lighting, stage design and music designers, the viewpoints and creativity of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and sighted persons, establish a rapport through our passion of dance and performance. It is this creativity and passion that I attempt to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the senses guided by blindness."

She added: "Although the view of the performance, the beautiful display, is available facing the audience, there is a great deal that they overlook or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is welcoming sighted and visually impaired audience members both into the unseen. What I wish is that, when patrons leave, they feel dance in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and hearing the understandings of, blindness in new and vibrant ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Narration

The composer, whose compositions have accumulated more than 3.5bn digital listens, commented the spoken narration created a rapport between visual impairment and vision "via a audio environment, offering narration to that which remains unseen". He added: "This isn't simply a description of a production. It is performance."

International Ballet Day Collaborators

The company's global associates for World Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will also offer availability to behind-the-scenes material, practice sessions and recently created works – broadcast as it happens via online channels.