🔗 Share this article

This prestigious ballet company has long made available audio devices with spoken commentary so that sightless viewers could understand the action on stage. Currently, via a innovative performance, the entire audience will experience such narration within a production that explores how visual impairment can transform our perceptions to feeling, sound and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Partners with Celebrated Dance Creators

The blind artist, a visually impaired artist, is working with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in developing a new ballet company production that will debut on November 12th, International Ballet Day, as declared recently.

Through her work, Healey is driven by a ambition to demonstrate how visual impairment and physical challenge can offer an alternative type of perception for each individual. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the composition, creates the core of the show on stage.

"Creating exceptional ballet and musical theater for everyone" is a mission statement of the the organization. Under the director, the company's leader, the troupe is zeroing in on "total access – encouraging creators and viewers to discover ballet in life-changing new ways," he explained.

Various Dance Creators Work on New Work

The new work is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as Wayne McGregor, each partnering with Healey.

Robert Binet, the organizer of this production, stated: "International Ballet Day was founded on the principle of inclusion. After a ten years, we're expanding that idea deeper to explore how impaired perspectives can shape our creative medium, and encourage audiences of all abilities and backgrounds to discover ballet in fresh approaches."

Having worked with the artist in Canada and Australia, he recognized that those with vision who had heard Healey’s spoken descriptions found it aided them understand ballet, which can seem so complex.

Moving Partnership Of Professional and Non-Professional Dancers

In one performance, the company's performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been sightless from childhood and who had long assumed that ballet was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has realized that it truly "entails a lot of emotion and sentiments" and engages senses, "sight-based and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s personal story of once getting lost on his way home and using the sun to direct his way back had influenced a duet in which Dixon becomes the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around his partner as they dance in unison," the choreographer explained.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be radiating from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the rays itself, I could sense the warmth … So I continued moving to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a good guide to me. The sun could be a powerful metaphor. So the tale developed from there."

Blindness Provides Distinct Connection with Dance

Healey, an academic of disability research at the Toronto university, commented: "Blindness and being blind fosters a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is like a expert performer's connection with their body and movement."

In collaborating with the performers, she was attempting to express what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through sight," she noted. "I talk with the performers to get a sense of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are sensing.

"In collaboration with the dance creators [and] attire, illumination, scenery and sound designers, the perceptions and creativity of blindness are constantly visible as we, blind and seeing persons, establish a rapport through our affection of motion and performance. It is this innovation and passion that I strive to weave into the spoken commentary. It is a partnership of the perceptions guided by blindness."

The artist added: "Even though the vision of the ballet, the stunning visual feast, is there facing the viewers, there is a great deal that they’re not accessing or valuing, and it is blindness that is inviting seeing and visually impaired patrons alike into the invisible. What I wish is that, when viewers exit, they sense performance in a distinct way, and they’re also sensing the existence, and listening to the perceptions of, visual impairment in innovative and active ways."

Musician The Composer on Audio Descriptions

The composer, whose recordings have amassed more than 3.5 billion digital listens, stated the spoken narration established a rapport between visual impairment and vision "by means of a musical landscape, offering narration to that which remains unseen". He noted: "It is not merely a narration of a production. It is the performance itself."

World Dance Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s worldwide collaborators for World Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will furthermore supply access to backstage footage, practice sessions and freshly produced pieces – broadcast in real-time via online channels.