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This prestigious ballet company has long made available headphones with audio descriptions so that blind audience members could follow the performance on stage. Now, via a groundbreaking performance, the complete crowd will listen to such descriptions within a work that explores how visual impairment can reshape our responses to feeling, sound and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Partners with Renowned Dance Creators

Devon Healey, a blind creator, is partnering with Sir Wayne McGregor, among other choreographers, and composer the celebrated composer in developing a fresh Royal Ballet work that will debut on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as revealed this week.

Within her creative practice, Healey is guided by a wish to demonstrate how visual impairment and disability can offer an different type of perception for all people. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, blended with the score, forms the center of the performance on stage.

"Creating top-tier dance and opera for all" is a motto of the the organization. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the organization is concentrating on "radical accessibility – inviting artists and patrons to discover dance in revolutionary new ways," he explained.

Various Dance Creators Partner on Fresh Work

The new work is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, every one partnering with Healey.

The curator, the director of this work, said: "International Ballet Day was established on the concept of access. Following a decade, we're pushing that concept deeper to consider how disabled perspectives can shape our creative medium, and invite audiences of all abilities and backgrounds to experience dance in innovative methods."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canadian venues and Australia, he recognized that those with vision who had heard Healey’s descriptive audio found it aided them understand dance, which can look so complex.

Touching Partnership Of Professional and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular performance, the company's performer Leo Dixon will dance with Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from birth and who had previously believed that dance was "mostly for individuals with vision". But the dancer has understood that it actually "involves a lot of emotion and feelings" and engages faculties, "visual and other sensory".

The dancer's personal story of earlier losing his way on his way home and depending on the sunlight to orient his way back had influenced a dance piece in which Dixon embodies the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around Kikuchi as they dance in unison," Malcomson explained.

"It was during the day and I had a sense that the sunlight should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I wouldn’t see the sunlight itself, I could sense the heat … So I persisted in walking to the west …. It guided me home. The sunshine was a great assistant to me. The sun could be a good representation. So the narrative developed from there."

Blindness Offers Unique Relationship with Motion

The blind artist, an academic of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: "Visual impairment and being blind encourages a vibrant bond with movement in a way that is like a professional dancer’s relationship with their physical self and movement."

In working with the dancers, the artist was seeking to communicate what "they feel in their body, something that’s just not accessible through vision," she explained. "I talk with the performers to get a understanding of how they’re feeling in their physical self, where their breathing is, what they think, how their body are experiencing.

"Working together with the choreographers [and] clothing, illumination, set and sound designers, the viewpoints and artistry of blindness are ever present as we, visually impaired and sighted people, establish a rapport through our passion of motion and performance. It is this innovation and affection that I strive to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a cooperation of the senses directed by blindness."

The artist noted: "Even though the sight of the ballet, the gorgeous display, is available in front of the audience, there is a great deal that they miss or understanding, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and visually impaired patrons alike into the invisible. What I wish is that, when audience members depart, they feel performance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and perceiving the understandings of, blindness in innovative and active ways."

Composer Max Richter on Audio Narration

Richter, whose recordings have gathered more than 3.5bn online plays, stated the descriptive commentary formed a connection between blindness and vision "through a audio environment, providing expression to that which is not always visible". He continued: "This isn't merely a narration of a performance. This is performance."

World Dance Day Collaborators

The Royal Ballet’s international associates for World Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The organizations will also supply availability to behind-the-scenes video, practice sessions and recently created works – streamed as it happens via the event website.