“Collaboration of the Senses”: The Royal Ballet collaborates with a blind artist in a new performance | Royal Ballet

The Royal Ballet has long provided headphones with audio descriptions so that visually impaired audiences can follow the action on stage. Now the entire audience will hear such descriptions, in groundbreaking work that explores how blindness can redefine our responses to sensation, sound, and storytelling.

Devon Healy, a blind artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne MacGregor, among other choreographers, and composer Max Richter on a new Royal Ballet commission that will premiere on November 12, World Ballet Day, and will be announced on Thursday.

Healy is guided in her art by the desire to show how blindness and disability can offer an alternative form of cognition for everyone. Her “immersive, descriptive voice,” woven with the music, is at the center of the performance on stage.

“Making world-class ballet and opera for everyone” is the Royal Opera House’s motto. Kevin O’Hare, director of the Royal Ballet, said the company was focusing on “radical accessibility – by inviting artists and audiences to experience ballet in transformative new ways”.

The new work is being designed by Tyler Peck, Pim Malcomson and Rebecca Miles-Stewart, as well as McGregor, all of whom are collaborating with Healey.

“World Ballet Day was founded on the principle of access,” said Robert Binet, Curator of the Committee. “After a decade, we are pushing this concept further to consider how the perspectives of people with disabilities can shape our art form, inviting audiences of all abilities and experiences to experience dance in new ways.”

Having worked with Healy in Canada and Australia, he realized that sighted people who experienced Healy’s descriptive voice felt that he helped them understand dance, which could seem very abstract.

In one of the duets, the Royal Ballet’s Leo Dixon will feature Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired since birth and who has long assumed that ballet is “primarily for sighted people.” But Kikuchi realized that it actually “involves a lot of feelings and emotions” and makes use of the “seen and unseen” senses.

Malcomson said Kikuchi’s personal story of once getting lost on his way home and relying on the sun to guide his way back inspired the duet in which Dixon becomes “the warm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they move together.”

Kikuchi recalls: “It was afternoon, and I had a feeling that the sun must rise from the west. So, if I encountered the sunlight, even though I didn’t see the sunlight itself, I would feel hot… So I kept walking to the west… It led me home. The sunlight was a good helper for me. The sun can be a good symbol. That’s where the story came from.”

“Blindness and blindness invite a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is similar to a professional dancer’s relationship with their body and movement,” said Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto.

By collaborating with dancers, she sought to convey what “they experience in their bodies, something that cannot be accessed through sight,” she says. “I talk to dancers to get a feel for what they feel in their body, where they’re breathing, what they’re thinking, and how their muscles feel.

“In collaboration with choreographers [and] Costume, lighting, set and sound designers, the perceptions and creativity of blindness are ever-present as we, blind and sighted, develop a relationship through our love of movement and dance. This is the creativity and love I try to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a cooperation of the senses led by blindness.

She added: “Although the spectacle of the dance, the beautiful visual feast, is there in front of the audience, there is much that they cannot access or appreciate, a blindness that invites sighted and blind audiences alike into the unseen. What I hope is that when the audience leaves, they feel the dance in a different way, and they also feel the presence of blindness and hear its perceptions in new and dynamic ways.”

Richter’s recordings have amassed more than 3.5 billion streams. Audio descriptions create a connection between blindness and sight “through a soundscape, giving voice to what is not always apparent,” Healey said. “It’s not just a description of the performance. It’s a performance,” she added.

The Royal Ballet’s international partners for World Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also provide access to behind-the-scenes footage, rehearsals and newly commissioned acts – streamed live via Worldballetday.com.