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The Royal Ballet traditionally made available audio devices with descriptive narration so that visually impaired audience members could track the movement on stage. Now, through a groundbreaking new work, the complete gathering will listen to such narration within a production that examines how visual impairment can redefine our perceptions to feeling, music and storytelling.

Visually Impaired Artist Partners with Famous Choreographers

The blind artist, a visually impaired artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and composer Max Richter in creating a fresh ballet company commission that will debut on November 12th, World Ballet Day, as declared recently.

In her art, the artist is motivated by a wish to illustrate how blindness and disability can offer an unique mode of understanding for everyone. Her “immersive descriptive audio”, integrated with the music, creates the heart of the production on stage.

"Producing world-class ballet and opera for everyone" is a mission statement of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the company's director, the troupe is focusing on "total access – welcoming performers and audiences to encounter dance in transformative new ways," he said.

Multiple Dance Creators Partner on New Performance

The fresh production is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, in addition to McGregor, every one working with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the organizer of this commission, said: "International Ballet Day was created on the idea of accessibility. Following a decade, we're expanding that concept more to examine how impaired perspectives can shape our art form, and invite patrons of all abilities and experiences to experience ballet in fresh approaches."

Following partnerships with Healey in Canada and Australia, the curator understood that individuals who can see who had encountered Healey’s audio narration believed it helped them understand dance, which can appear so unclear.

Moving Collaboration Between Professional and Amateur Dancers

In one dance piece, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been blind since birth and who had long assumed that ballet was "mainly for sighted people". But Kikuchi has understood that it actually "entails a lot of emotion and feelings" and activates faculties, "sight-based and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s personal story of previously becoming disoriented on his way home and relying on the sun to direct his way back had influenced a duet in which the professional dancer embodies the "soothing presence of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," the choreographer explained.

"It was during the day and I had a feeling that the sunlight should be beaming from the west. So, if I faced the sunlight, even though I couldn't see the sunlight itself, I could perceive the heat … So I kept walking to the west …. It directed me home. The sunshine was a excellent helper to me. The sun could be a good symbol. So the tale emerged from there."

Blindness Presents Unique Relationship with Dance

Healey, an academic of disability studies at the Toronto university, commented: "Blindness and lacking sight invites a vibrant bond with movement in a way that is like a professional dancer’s relationship with their physical self and movement."

In partnering with the performers, the artist was striving to communicate what "they perceive in their body, something that’s just not available through sight," she said. "I converse with the performers to get a understanding of how they are in their body, where their breath is, what they’re thinking, how their physical form are experiencing.

"In collaboration with the choreographers [and] costume, lighting, scenery and music creators, the understandings and artistry of visual impairment are ever present as we, blind and sighted people, build a rapport through our affection of dance and dance. It is this innovation and love that I strive to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a partnership of the senses led by blindness."

The artist continued: "Although the sight of the dance, the beautiful display, is available before the audience, there is much that they’re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is welcoming seeing and blind audience members equally into the invisible. What I wish is that, when patrons exit, they feel performance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and perceiving the understandings of, visual impairment in fresh and dynamic ways."

Musician Max Richter on Audio Descriptions

The composer, whose works have amassed more than billions of online plays, said the spoken narration formed a rapport between blindness and sight "by means of a audio environment, giving voice to that which remains unseen". He added: "This isn't just a narration of a show. This is the performance itself."

World Ballet Event Partners

The company's worldwide collaborators for International Ballet Day include the Canadian ballet company and the Australian dance troupe. The organizations will additionally provide access to exclusive footage, rehearsals and newly commissioned productions – broadcast as it happens via their official platform.