‘It felt like there was a subtitle in my heart.’ The School embraces radical accessibility for World Ballet Day 2025 

Our 1st Year students took to the Royal Opera House Linbury stage on 12 December 2025 to participate in the World Ballet Day livestream. Curated and conceived by choreographer Robert Binet, the global celebration featured international companies all responding to the same theme of access becomes art.  

The 90-minute stream also featured choreography by Sir Wayne McGregor, Tiler Peck, Bim Malcomson and School alumna Rebecca Myles Stewart. Each worked individually with Devon Healey, a blind artist and assistant professor of Disability Studies who specialises in Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA), to create a portion of a six-minute long original work. 

Several School alumni also performed representing the Company: Tristan-Ian Massa, Marianna Tsembenhoi, Madison Bailey, Marcelino Sambé and Emile Gooding.

Devon also ran a workshop with our 1st Year students the week before World Ballet Day to create an original choreography using IDA to generate ideas. They began by discussing their preconceived notions of blindness and disability. 

‘An extreme high point was working with all the students and introducing blindness, or a different expression of blindness, to the School,’ said Devon. ‘First, we talked about our imaginations of blindness – how we think and feel when someone says the word ‘blind.’ We began to pull that apart and think about how we got to this understanding and what this understanding is doing.’ 

1st Year student Lewis reflected on this workshop: ‘When we first worked with Devon, it immediately felt so different to music in the way that words can be interpreted in so many different ways.

Tiler Peck took a selfie with the students backstage.

When we were creating the piece, everyone was coming up with so many different ideas that all linked back to Devon’s words. It really inspired you to stretch your creativity and make something unique that’s both personal to you and to Devon.’

Robert, Devon, Lewis, Anzu and Gia on the Linbury Stage during the World Ballet Day live stream. 

Robert discussed how he and Devon conceptualised this workshop: ‘We took some early drafts of IDA that Devon wrote but didn’t use for this project, then we invited students to respond to it and create their own choreography. We found that sometimes, when we revisit recordings of IDA after enough time has passed, we have forgotten all the original steps, and it starts to ignite new dances in our imagination. The beautiful thing about that is that it means blindness is leading sight instead of blindness responding to sight.’  

For the World Ballet Day stream, Devon selected two passages of IDA and repeated each passage three times with different intonations. Small groups of students took turns interpreting her words, demonstrating the choreography they developed in the previous week’s workshop. Rob described Devon as both composer and conductor of the movement, as the students respond to her live reading.  

‘One of the delights about IDA is that it’s not merely a description of a performance – it is a performance,’ Devon said. ‘The delivery, the intention and the connection with the dancers on stage and the music is so important. It’s been a thrill.’ 

Student Gia added, ‘Throughout the process with Devon, her words really influenced our movement. Through each intonation of her voice, we respond and adapt to it, just as in ballet, we respond to the music played by the pianist through every breath and every step.’ 

When asked about what surprised or challenged her during the process, student Anzu said, ‘English is not my first language, but even though there was a language barrier, I felt a very deep connection between myself and Devon. It almost felt like when you watch a movie with subtitles when it’s not in your first language. When Devon was speaking, I was closing my eyes to try to feel what she was thinking even though I didn’t know some of the words. It felt like there was a subtitle in my heart, and that felt very surprising and special to me.’ 

1st Year students performed on the Linbury Stage as Devon read the IDA script live on the downstage left corner.

Devon concluded the conversation, expressing her enthusiasm for the project. ‘It was exciting to work with the students and get to know my blindness in a different way. I hopefully brought a new speck of blindness for all of them to carry with them into their practice. I hope they learned to understand disability as a really necessary creative and valuable perception and artistry of our world and work.’ 

Watch a recording of the World Ballet Day stream here. The Royal Ballet School appears at 1:04:04. 

Watch behind-the-scenes footage about the School’s workshop and hear from more students here.