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This prestigious ballet company traditionally offered audio devices with spoken commentary so that visually impaired audience members could follow the action on stage. Now, via a groundbreaking production, the entire gathering will experience such descriptions within a work that investigates how visual impairment can transform our responses to sensation, music and narrative.

Visually Impaired Creator Collaborates with Renowned Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired creator, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and musician Max Richter in developing a fresh ballet company production that will premiere on 12 November, International Ballet Day, as revealed on Thursday.

In her art, Healey is driven by a wish to show how blindness and disability can provide an different form of perception for all people. Her rich spoken descriptions, woven with the composition, forms the heart of the performance on stage.

"Making world-class dance and opera for everyone" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under the director, the company's leader, the troupe is concentrating on "complete inclusion – encouraging artists and viewers to experience dance in revolutionary fresh approaches," he said.

Multiple Dance Creators Work on Fresh Performance

The recent commission is being created by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside Wayne McGregor, all working with the blind artist.

Robert Binet, the curator of this commission, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the idea of inclusion. Following a decade, we're pushing that notion further to examine how impaired perspectives can influence our creative medium, and invite viewers of every capability and histories to experience ballet in new ways."

After collaborating with the artist in Canadian venues and Australian locations, the curator recognized that those with vision who had heard the artist's spoken descriptions believed it helped them grasp ballet, which can look so abstract.

Moving Collaboration Between Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In a particular dance piece, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been sightless from birth and who had previously believed that dance was "primarily for sighted people". But the dancer has realized that it truly "includes a lot of feeling and sentiments" and activates faculties, "visual and non-visual".

Kikuchi’s unique narrative of previously 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 represents the "gentle warmth of the sunlight around his partner as they perform as one," Malcomson explained.

"It was in the afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be radiating from the west. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the rays itself, I could sense the warmth … So I continued moving to the west …. It led me home. The sun was a excellent helper to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the tale emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Offers Special Connection with Dance

The blind artist, an scholar of disability research at the University of Toronto, stated: "Visual impairment and lacking sight invites a active bond with dance in a way that is similar to a expert performer's relationship with their body and dance."

In partnering with the performers, the artist was attempting to convey what "they perceive in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she explained. "I speak with the performers to get a sense of how they are in their body, where their breath is, what they think, how their physical form are experiencing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] costume, illumination, stage design and audio designers, the understandings and innovation of visual impairment are ever present as we, visually impaired and seeing persons, build a connection through our passion of motion and performance. It is this creativity and love that I attempt to blend into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the perceptions guided by blindness."

She noted: "Although the view of the dance, the gorgeous display, is available before the patrons, there is much that they overlook or appreciating, and it is blindness that is encouraging seeing and blind audience members both into the hidden. What I hope is that, when patrons leave, they sense ballet in a different way, and they’re also experiencing the existence, and listening to the perceptions of, blindness in fresh and active ways."

Composer Max Richter on Sound Narration

The composer, whose works have accumulated more than 3.5bn streams, stated the audio descriptions established a rapport between visual impairment and vision "by means of a musical landscape, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He added: "It is not simply a explanation of a show. It is performance."

World Dance Event Partners

The company's global partners for International Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will additionally offer availability to behind-the-scenes material, practice sessions and recently created pieces – streamed as it happens via their official platform.