This prestigious ballet company traditionally made available audio devices with descriptive narration so that sightless viewers could follow the performance on stage. Now, via a groundbreaking production, the whole gathering will hear such narration within a production that explores how lack of sight can transform our perceptions to experience, audio and narrative.
Devon Healey, a blind artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in creating a new ballet company work that will premiere on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared this week.
In her art, Healey is guided by a desire to illustrate how visual impairment and disability can present an unique type of understanding for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the composition, establishes the center of the production on stage.
"Creating exceptional dance and opera for each person" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's leader, the organization is concentrating on "complete inclusion – encouraging creators and viewers to discover ballet in life-changing new ways," he explained.
The fresh production is being created by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, all working with Healey.
Robert Binet, the director of this commission, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the principle of access. After a decade, we're extending that idea further to explore how challenged perspectives can influence our performance style, and encourage patrons of diverse capacities and experiences to discover dance in innovative methods."
Having worked with the artist in Canada and Australian locations, he recognized that individuals who can see who had heard the artist's descriptive audio felt it helped them comprehend ballet, which can look so abstract.
In one dance piece, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been blind from childhood and who had previously believed that dance was "mostly for individuals with vision". But the dancer has discovered that it truly "includes a lot of feeling and sentiments" and activates faculties, "visual and non-sight".
The dancer's personal story of earlier getting lost on his way home and relying on the sun to direct his way back had motivated a duet in which the professional dancer embodies the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they perform as one," Malcomson explained.
"It was mid-afternoon and I had a intuition that the sunlight should be shining from the western sky. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I didn't perceive the sunlight itself, I could perceive the warmth … So I kept walking to the western direction …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great helper to me. The sunlight could be a good metaphor. So the story developed from there."
The blind artist, an assistant professor of disability studies at the Toronto university, commented: "Visual impairment and lacking sight invites a active connection with dance in a way that is like a professional dancer’s bond with their physical self and movement."
In partnering with the performers, the artist was seeking to convey what "they perceive in their physical being, something that’s just not available through looking," she noted. "I talk with the dancers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breath is, what they think, how their physical form are sensing.
"Working together with the dance creators [and] clothing, lighting, scenery and sound designers, the viewpoints and innovation of blindness are always there as we, blind and seeing individuals, build a connection through our affection of motion and performance. It is this creativity and passion that I try to blend into the detailed narration. It is a cooperation of the perceptions directed by visual impairment."
She added: "While the sight of the dance, the stunning display, is present before the patrons, there is a great deal that they overlook or understanding, and it is blindness that is inviting seeing and blind audience members alike into the unseen. What I wish is that, when patrons exit, they experience dance in a new way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and listening to the understandings of, visual impairment in fresh and dynamic ways."
The composer, whose compositions have accumulated more than 3.5bn digital listens, commented the audio descriptions created a relationship between blindness and sight "through a soundscape, offering narration to that which remains unseen". He noted: "It is not just a description of a production. This is performance."
The company's global associates for International Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian Ballet. The troupes will also provide access to behind-the-scenes material, practice sessions and recently created productions – transmitted in real-time via the event website.
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