Ballet<\/a> commission that will be premiered on 12 November, World Ballet Day, it will be announced on Thursday.<\/p>\nIn her art, Healey is guided by a desire to show how blindness and disability can offer an alternative form of perception for everyone. Her \u201cimmersive descriptive audio\u201d, woven with the music, is at the centre of the performance on stage.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaking world-class ballet and opera for everyone\u201d is a motto of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O\u2019Hare, the Royal Ballet\u2019s director, the company is focusing on \u201cradical accessibility \u2013 inviting artists and audiences to experience ballet in transformative new ways\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n
The new work is being choreographed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson and Rebecca Myles Stewart, as well as McGregor, each collaborating with Healey.<\/p>\n
Robert Binet, the curator of this commission, said: \u201cWorld Ballet Day was founded on the principle of access. After a decade, we\u2019re pushing that concept further to consider how disabled perspectives can shape our art form, and invite audiences of all abilities and experiences to experience dance in new ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having worked with Healey in Canada and Australia, he realised that sighted people who had experienced Healey\u2019s descriptive audio felt it helped them understand dance, which can seem so abstract.<\/p>\n
In one duet, the Royal Ballet dancer Leo Dixon will partner Takashi Kikuchi, an amateur dancer who has been visually impaired since birth and who had long assumed that ballet was \u201cmainly for sighted people\u201d. But Kikuchi has realised that it actually \u201cinvolves a lot of feeling and emotions\u201d and taps into senses, \u201cvisual and non-visual\u201d.<\/p>\n
Kikuchi\u2019s personal story of once getting lost on his way home and relying on the sun to orient his way back had inspired a duet in which Dixon becomes the \u201cwarm breath of the sun around Kikuchi as they move together\u201d, Malcomson said.<\/p>\n
Kikuchi recalled: \u201cIt was mid-afternoon and I had a feeling that the sun should be shining from the west. So, if I faced the sunshine, even though I wouldn\u2019t see the sunlight itself, I could feel the heat \u2026 So I kept walking to the west \u2026. It led me home. The sunshine was a good helper to me. The sun could be a good symbol. So the story emerged from there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Healey, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said: \u201cBlindness and being blind invites a dynamic relationship with movement in a way that is similar to a professional dancer\u2019s relationship with their body and movement.\u201d<\/p>\n
In collaborating with the dancers, she was seeking to convey what \u201cthey\u2019re experiencing in their body, something that\u2019s just not accessible through sight\u201d, she said. \u201cI speak with the dancers to get a sense of how they\u2019re feeling in their body, where their breath is, what they\u2019re thinking about, how their muscles are feeling.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn collaboration with the choreographers [and] costume, lighting, set and sound designers, the perceptions and creativity of blindness are ever present as we, blind and sighted people, develop a rapport through our love of movement and dance. It is this creativity and love that I try to weave into the immersive descriptive audio. It is a collaboration of the senses guided by blindness.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cEven though the sight of the dance, the beautiful visual feast, is there before the audience, there is so much that they\u2019re not accessing or appreciating, and it is blindness that is inviting sighted and blind audience members alike into the unseen. What I hope is that, when audience members leave, they feel dance in a different way, and they\u2019re also feeling the presence, and listening to the perceptions of, blindness in new and dynamic ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
Richter\u2019s recordings have amassed more than 3.5bn streams. Healey said the audio descriptions create a rapport between blindness and sight \u201cthrough a soundscape, giving voice to that which does not always appear\u201d. She added: \u201cIt is not merely a description of a performance. It is performance.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Royal Ballet\u2019s international partners for World Ballet Day include the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian Ballet. The companies will also offer access to behind-the-scenes footage, rehearsals and newly commissioned works \u2013 streamed live via worldballetday.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.theguardian.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Royal Ballet has long offered headphones with audio descriptions so that visually impaired members of the audience can follow the action on stage. Now the entire audience will hear such descriptions, within a groundbreaking work that explores how blindness can redefine our responses to sensation, sound and storytelling. Devon Healey, a blind artist, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2096192,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2096191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\u2018A-collaboration-of-the-senses-Royal-Ballet-teams-up-with.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2096191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2096191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2096191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2096193,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2096191\/revisions\/2096193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2096192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2096191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2096191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2096191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}