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This prestigious ballet company has long made available headphones with descriptive narration so that visually impaired audience members could follow the performance on stage. Presently, via a revolutionary production, the complete crowd will listen to such commentary within a work that examines how visual impairment can redefine our perceptions to experience, music and dramatic expression.

Visually Impaired Artist Works with Celebrated Choreographers

The blind artist, a blind professional, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, alongside other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in producing a recent Royal Ballet production that will debut on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as announced on Thursday.

Within her creative practice, the artist is driven by a ambition to illustrate how blindness and disability can present an alternative mode of understanding for each individual. Her detailed audio narration, integrated with the music, forms the heart of the performance on stage.

"Producing world-class ballet and musical theater for each person" is a motto of the the organization. Under the director, the Royal Ballet's leader, the organization is concentrating on "total access – inviting creators and viewers to experience dance in transformative innovative methods," he stated.

Various Dance Creators Collaborate on New Work

The new work is being designed by choreographer Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside McGregor, each working with the blind artist.

The curator, the organizer of this work, commented: "World Ballet Day was established on the idea of accessibility. After a ten years, we're expanding that notion further to examine how impaired outlooks can mold our performance style, and invite audiences of diverse capacities and histories to discover dance in fresh approaches."

Following partnerships with the artist in Canadian venues and Australia, the curator understood that sighted people who had encountered the artist's spoken descriptions felt it helped them understand ballet, which can seem so abstract.

Touching Partnership Between Professional and Amateur Dancers

In a particular performance, the company's performer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from birth and who had always thought that ballet was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it in fact "involves a lot of emotion and emotions" and engages perceptions, "visual and non-visual".

The dancer's personal story of earlier getting lost on his way home and using the sun to direct his way back had inspired a dance piece in which Dixon represents the "warm breath of the sunlight around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson stated.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the light itself, I could sense the warmth … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a good helper to me. The sun could be a meaningful metaphor. So the tale originated from there."

Visual Impairment Presents Special Relationship with Motion

The blind artist, an academic of disability research at the University of Toronto, commented: "Blindness and being blind fosters a vibrant relationship with motion in a way that is similar to a expert performer's relationship with their physical self and movement."

In working with the performers, the artist was striving to communicate what "they’re experiencing in their body, something that’s just not accessible through looking," she explained. "I speak with the performers to get a feeling of how they are in their body, where their respiration is, what they think, how their physical form are sensing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] costume, stage lights, scenery and sound designers, the understandings and artistry of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, visually impaired and sighted individuals, develop a rapport through our affection of motion and dance. It is this innovation and affection that I strive to blend into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a cooperation of the senses directed by visual impairment."

She continued: "While the view of the performance, the gorgeous display, is there in front of the audience, there is a great deal that they overlook or appreciating, and it is visual impairment that is encouraging seeing and blind audience members equally into the invisible. What I desire is that, when audience members leave, they experience dance in a new way, and they’re also feeling the existence, and hearing the understandings of, visual impairment in fresh and vibrant ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Narration

The composer, whose recordings have amassed more than 3.5 billion streams, said the spoken narration formed a connection between blindness and sight "by means of a soundscape, providing expression to that which is not always visible". He continued: "It is not just a explanation of a show. This is the art."

International Ballet Event Collaborators

The company's global partners for International Ballet Day feature the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will also provide entry to behind-the-scenes video, practice sessions and recently created works – transmitted live via the event website.