Ballet for the blind? Dance piece takes surprising steps
By Nick Dent
The seemingly disparate worlds of ballet and blindness are coming together in a groundbreaking work by Queensland Ballet.
Newborn Giants is a new 25-minute ballet for 13 dancers masterminded by two Canadians: sighted choreographer Robert Binet and blind academic and theatre-maker Devon Healey.
Binet said the work, which is for both sighted and blind audiences, was much more than ballet with spoken narration.
Newborn Giants is a dance piece by Robert Binet as part of Bespoke for Queensland Ballet, 2025.Credit: Jakob Perrett
“In its simplest form, you’ll see a dance with a poetic text recorded and performed by Devon,” he said.
“[But] the whole stage is miked, so you can hear the dancers breathing, you can hear the contact of one person’s hand on a partner’s leg as they jump into a lift.
“Sometimes the text is describing what you’re seeing, but other times it might be describing what a dancer is feeling inside their body.”
Binet, who was in Brisbane in April and May directing the piece, said he was invited by Queensland Ballet to “take a big swing” with something experimental.
He said his choreography was inspired by Healey’s writing, rather than the other way around.
“It’s blindness leading sight, rather than blindness following.”
Healey, who has a limited amount of peripheral vision and is an Assistant Professor of disability studies at the University of Toronto, said that experiencing blindness and sighted dancing together was “thrilling”.
Choreographer Robert Binet and theatre maker Devon Healey. Both are Canadians based in Toronto.
“Blindness changed how I perceive the world and creates an intimacy with the body in a way that dance does,” she said.
Newborn Giants is one of three dance pieces in Queensland Ballet’s annual Bespoke series, which opens at the Thomas Dixon Centre on July 31.
The work joins Curious Beings by former QB principal dancer Amelia Waller, which uses puppets designed by Dead Puppet Society, and Nhamgan Ngali Nyin, We All See You by Bidjara woman Yolande Brown.
Binet said he loved collaboration with people who could stretch his idea of what ballet could be.
“I’m always game to try something new,” he said.
Collaborating with Healey made sense because navigating the world as a blind person had a lot in common with memorising dance steps, he said.
“Devon said, ‘this is how I get to work, it’s 16 steps down onto the subway, two steps to the left’, and that’s so much of what dance is.”
Bespoke runs at the Thomas Dixon Centre, West End, July 31-Aug 9.