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This prestigious ballet company traditionally made available headphones with spoken commentary so that visually impaired patrons could understand the movement on stage. Now, through a innovative production, the complete audience will listen to such descriptions within a piece that investigates how lack of sight can transform our perceptions to sensation, sound and narrative.

Blind Creator Works with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a blind professional, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other dance creators, and musician the celebrated composer in developing a new Royal Ballet work that will debut on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as announced this week.

In her art, Healey is motivated by a ambition to show how visual impairment and physical challenge can present an different form of understanding for everyone. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the composition, creates the center of the production on stage.

"Making exceptional ballet and opera for everyone" is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the organization is concentrating on "total access – inviting performers and audiences to experience ballet in life-changing fresh approaches," he explained.

Multiple Dance Creators Collaborate on New Work

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

The curator, the director of this work, said: "International Ballet Day was founded on the principle of accessibility. After a ten years, we're expanding that idea further to consider how disabled perspectives can mold our art form, and encourage audiences of all abilities and histories to experience ballet in fresh approaches."

Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australia, he understood that individuals who can see who had encountered Healey’s audio narration felt it helped them understand dance, which can look so unclear.

Touching Collaboration Between Expert and Amateur Dancers

In one dance piece, the company's performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired from birth and who had always thought that dance was "mainly for those who can see". But Kikuchi has understood that it actually "involves a lot of sensation and feelings" and taps into perceptions, "visual and other sensory".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and depending on the sun to orient his way back had influenced a duet in which Dixon becomes the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they perform as one," the choreographer explained.

"This occurred in the afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be shining from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the light itself, I could perceive the temperature … So I kept walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a great guide to me. The sun could be a powerful symbol. So the story developed from there."

Blindness Presents Special Connection with Movement

The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, stated: "Visual impairment and lacking sight encourages a vibrant bond with dance in a way that is like a expert performer's relationship with their physical self and motion."

In working with the performers, the artist was attempting to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not available through sight," she said. "I talk with the dancers to get a feeling of how they feel in their body, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] attire, illumination, set and music artists, the viewpoints and creativity of visual impairment are always there as we, blind and seeing individuals, build a rapport through our passion of motion and dance. It is this innovation and love that I strive to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the senses directed by visual impairment."

The artist added: "While the sight of the dance, the stunning spectacle, is available facing the viewers, there is so much that they overlook or understanding, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and blind audience members alike into the hidden. What I wish is that, when audience members depart, they sense dance in a new way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and listening to the viewpoints of, blindness in new and dynamic ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Narration

Richter, whose compositions have gathered more than 3.5 billion streams, commented the descriptive commentary created a relationship between blindness and vision "through a soundscape, offering narration to that which is not always visible". He noted: "This isn't simply a description of a performance. This is performance."

World Dance Event Partners

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for World Ballet Day comprise the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will also provide access to behind-the-scenes video, practice sessions and freshly produced works – streamed as it happens via the event website.