🔗 Share this article

This prestigious ballet company for years offered headphones with audio descriptions so that visually impaired patrons could understand the performance on stage. Currently, via a revolutionary production, the entire crowd will listen to such descriptions within a production that explores how blindness can reshape our reactions to sensation, audio and dramatic expression.

Blind Creator Works with Famous Dance Creators

The blind artist, a blind creator, is collaborating with renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in creating a fresh Royal Ballet commission that will premiere on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as declared this week.

Through her work, the artist is guided by a wish to illustrate how blindness and disability can offer an alternative form of awareness for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, woven with the score, forms the heart of the production on stage.

"Creating top-tier dance and musical theater for each person" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the troupe is zeroing in on "complete inclusion – welcoming performers and viewers to encounter ballet in revolutionary fresh approaches," he said.

Multiple Choreographers Work on New Work

The recent commission is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, all working with the blind artist.

The curator, the director of this production, said: "World Ballet Day was created on the idea of access. After a decade, we're pushing that concept more to examine how disabled perspectives can shape our performance style, and welcome viewers of every capability and backgrounds to experience dance in innovative methods."

Having worked with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, he recognized that sighted people who had experienced the artist's audio narration believed it aided them grasp ballet, which can seem so complex.

Touching Collaboration Between Professional and Amateur Performers

In one dance piece, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired since birth and who had always thought that ballet was "primarily for sighted people". But the dancer has realized that it actually "includes a lot of feeling and feelings" and engages senses, "visual and non-sight".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of previously getting lost on his way home and using the sunlight to guide his way back had inspired a duet in which the professional dancer embodies the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they perform as one," Malcomson stated.

"It was mid-afternoon and I had a sense that the sunlight should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I didn't perceive the rays itself, I could feel the heat … So I continued moving to the west …. It led me home. The sunshine was a great guide to me. The sun could be a meaningful metaphor. So the tale emerged from there."

Blindness Presents Unique Relationship with Movement

Healey, an academic of disability studies at the Toronto university, said: "Visual impairment and lacking sight invites a dynamic connection with dance in a way that is like a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and dance."

In collaborating with the performers, the artist was striving to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not accessible through looking," she noted. "I talk with the dancers to get a sense of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their muscles are feeling.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] attire, illumination, set and audio artists, the perceptions and artistry of visual impairment are ever present as we, visually impaired and sighted individuals, build a relationship through our affection of motion and performance. It is this artistry and love that I attempt to weave into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the faculties led by visual impairment."

The artist continued: "Although the sight of the ballet, the gorgeous spectacle, is there before the viewers, there is a great deal that they miss or valuing, and it is blindness that is welcoming sighted and visually impaired audience members equally into the invisible. What I hope is that, when patrons depart, they feel performance in a different way, and they’re also feeling the presence, and listening to the perceptions of, blindness in innovative and active ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

Richter, whose recordings have amassed more than 3.5bn online plays, stated the spoken narration established a rapport between visual impairment and sight "through a audio environment, offering narration to that which is not always visible". He added: "This isn't just a description of a show. It is performance."

International Dance Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s global associates for World Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will furthermore provide access to backstage video, rehearsals and newly commissioned productions – transmitted live via the event website.