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The Royal Ballet traditionally made available headphones with audio descriptions so that sightless patrons could follow the action on stage. Now, in a revolutionary production, the entire gathering will listen to such commentary within a production that investigates how lack of sight can redefine our reactions to sensation, sound and storytelling.

Blind Artist Partners with Famous Choreographers

Devon Healey, a visually impaired artist, is collaborating with Sir Wayne McGregor, together with other choreographers, and musician the celebrated composer in developing a recent Royal Ballet commission that will launch on 12 November, World Ballet Day, as declared on Thursday.

In her art, the artist is motivated by a desire to show how visual impairment and disability can provide an alternative mode of awareness for all people. Her rich spoken descriptions, blended with the score, establishes the heart of the production on stage.

"Making exceptional ballet and opera for all" is a guiding principle of the Royal Opera House. Under Kevin O’Hare, the Royal Ballet's director, the troupe is focusing on "total access – welcoming creators and patrons to encounter ballet in transformative innovative methods," he said.

Various Choreographers Work on New Work

The recent commission is being designed by Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson, and Rebecca Myles Stewart, alongside Wayne McGregor, every one working with Healey.

Robert Binet, the organizer of this production, stated: "World Ballet Day was created on the idea of inclusion. After a ten years, we're pushing that notion more to explore how challenged viewpoints can mold our performance style, and welcome viewers of diverse capacities and experiences to discover ballet in fresh approaches."

After collaborating with Healey in Canada and Australia, the curator recognized that sighted people who had experienced the artist's audio narration felt it helped them grasp dance, which can seem so complex.

Touching Collaboration Between Expert and Non-Professional Performers

In one dance piece, the company's dancer Leo Dixon will perform alongside Takashi Kikuchi, an non-professional performer who has been visually impaired from birth and who had long assumed that ballet was "mainly for those who can see". But Kikuchi has understood that it in fact "involves a lot of sensation and emotions" and activates senses, "sight-based and other sensory".

Kikuchi’s individual experience of previously losing his way on his way home and using the sunlight to orient his way back had motivated a performance in which Dixon becomes the "gentle warmth of the sun around his partner as they dance in unison," Malcomson explained.

"This occurred mid-afternoon and I had a intuition that the sun should be radiating from the western sky. So, if I turned toward the sunshine, even though I couldn't see the sunlight itself, I could sense the heat … So I persisted in walking to the western direction …. It directed me home. The sun was a great helper to me. The sunlight could be a meaningful metaphor. So the story emerged from there."

Visual Impairment Provides Special Connection with Movement

The blind artist, an scholar of disability studies at the University of Toronto, commented: "Visual impairment and being blind encourages a active relationship with movement in a way that is similar to a expert performer's bond with their body and movement."

In collaborating with the dancers, the artist was striving to express what "they’re experiencing in their physical being, something that’s just not perceivable through looking," she explained. "I speak with the dancers to get a feeling of how they’re feeling in their body, where their breathing is, what they consider, how their physical form are experiencing.

"Working together with the dance creators [and] costume, lighting, scenery and audio artists, the perceptions and artistry of visual impairment are constantly visible as we, blind and sighted individuals, develop a rapport through our love of dance and performance. It is this artistry and passion that I try to integrate into the spoken commentary. It is a collaboration of the faculties directed by blindness."

The artist added: "Even though the sight of the ballet, the beautiful visual feast, is there before the patrons, there is so much that they miss or valuing, and it is blindness that is encouraging seeing and visually impaired patrons alike into the hidden. What I desire is that, when viewers depart, they sense performance in a distinct way, and they’re also experiencing the being, and perceiving the perceptions of, blindness in fresh and dynamic ways."

Musician Max Richter on Sound Descriptions

Richter, whose recordings have amassed more than 3.5bn online plays, stated the spoken narration formed a rapport between blindness and vision "by means of a soundscape, providing expression to that which remains unseen". He continued: "This isn't simply a explanation of a show. This is performance."

World Dance Day Partners

The company's worldwide collaborators for International Ballet Day feature the National Ballet of Canada and the Australian dance troupe. The companies will also offer entry to exclusive material, preparations and freshly produced works – streamed as it happens via their official platform.