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The Royal Ballet for years offered headphones with audio descriptions so that visually impaired audience members could follow the performance on stage. Presently, via a revolutionary new work, the entire audience will listen to such descriptions within a piece that investigates how visual impairment can transform our reactions to sensation, sound and narrative.

Blind Artist Collaborates with Famous Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in producing a recent ballet company work that will premiere on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared recently.

Through her work, Healey is driven by a desire to illustrate how blindness and physical challenge can present an alternative type of understanding for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the music, forms the core of the show on stage.

"Producing exceptional dance and musical theater for each person" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's director, the company is concentrating on "total access – encouraging creators and viewers to experience ballet in transformative new ways," he explained.

Several Choreographers Collaborate on New Performance

The new work is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside Wayne McGregor, each working with Healey.

The curator, the organizer of this work, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the principle of access. Following a ten years, we're extending that concept more to consider how challenged outlooks can mold our art form, and welcome viewers of diverse capacities and backgrounds to experience dance in new ways."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canada and Australia, he understood that those with vision who had heard Healey’s descriptive audio found it aided them grasp dance, which can look so complex.

Moving Collaboration Of Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from birth and who had long assumed that ballet was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has realized that it truly "involves a lot of feeling and sentiments" and taps into senses, "sight-based and non-sight".

The dancer's personal story of once getting lost on his way home and relying on the sunlight to direct his way back had motivated a duet in which the professional dancer represents the "soothing presence of the sunlight around his partner as they move together," Malcomson said.

"It was during the day and I had a intuition that the sun should be shining from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the sunlight itself, I could sense the temperature … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It led me home. The sun was a excellent guide to me. The sun could be a meaningful symbol. So the tale developed from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Special Relationship with Dance

Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Blindness and lacking sight encourages a vibrant relationship with movement in a way that is similar to a expert performer's connection with their body and movement."

In working with the dancers, she was seeking to express what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not available through sight," she explained. "I converse with the dancers to get a feeling of how they are in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their body are feeling.

"Partnering with the dance creators [and] costume, illumination, scenery and audio designers, the viewpoints and innovation of blindness are always there as we, visually impaired and sighted persons, establish a relationship through our love of motion and performance. It is this creativity and affection that I strive to integrate into the detailed narration. It is a collaboration of the perceptions guided by visual impairment."

She noted: "While the vision of the performance, the gorgeous visual feast, is available facing the patrons, there is a great deal that they overlook or appreciating, and it is blindness that is encouraging seeing and blind viewers equally into the unseen. What I desire is that, when patrons leave, they feel performance in a distinct way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and hearing the perceptions of, blindness in new and active ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

The composer, whose recordings have accumulated more than 3.5bn streams, stated the spoken narration established a relationship between blindness and vision "via a audio environment, giving voice to that which is not always visible". He noted: "It is not merely a explanation of a show. It is the art."

International Ballet Event Partners

The company's worldwide partners for World Ballet Day comprise the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also offer access to behind-the-scenes footage, rehearsals and newly commissioned productions – streamed in real-time via the event website.