Rainbow on Mars was co-produced by Outside the March theatre company and the National Ballet of Canada.BRUCE ZINGER – Photographer/Supplied
Title: Rainbow on Mars
Creator: Devon Healey
Directors: Mitchell Cushman and Nate Bitton
Choreographer: Robert Binet
Produced by: Outside the March, The National Ballet of Canada and Peripheral Theatre
Venue: Ada Slaight Hall
City: Toronto
Year: To Aug. 20, 2025
Ballet and blindness make for an unexpected pairing. Can an expressly visual medium be experienced satisfactorily by an audience who can’t actually see what’s happening on stage? On the other hand, can sighted audiences stand to gain anything by receiving the same accommodations as the visually impaired?
These questions are central to Rainbow on Mars, the beautiful, category-defying work now playing at Toronto’s Ada Slaight Hall, co-produced by Outside the March theatre company and the National Ballet of Canada. But questions may be the wrong place to begin an analysis of this strange and singular production, which is focused on the sensory above the intellectual.
Immersive dance show takes audience on an adventure into blindness
Better to start with phenomena and perception. Entering the theatre through a dark hallway, you reach up to grasp strips of jewel-encrusted velvet and bits of plastic dangling from the ceiling. When the stage reveals a woman bristling and flinching amid flashing lights and dissonant sounds, you resist the urge to draw conclusions. Plato told us that shadows can’t be trusted (particularly when they appear on the walls of caves). He knew our senses were neither foolproof nor exhaustive; what we see and what exists are not one and the same thing.
It follows that Rainbow on Mars can be perceived as various projects: a story of going blind, an exploration of perception, a woman’s journey into a new form of sightedness, her other senses sharpening and sensitizing as she transcends her reliance on seeing. Written by and starring blind artist and academic Devon Healey, the interdisciplinary work is largely experiential – speaking in narrative terms feels somewhat beside the point. But you might describe the plot as Iris’s (Healey) through-the-looking-glass descent into an underworld of stone-hearted ophthalmologists, crusading techies and melancholy shadows, each of whom push her to the brink of existential crisis in their own merciless way.
The interdisciplinary Rainbow on Mars is largely experiential, as our protagonist Iris is pushed to the brink of existential crisis.Bruce Zinger/Supplied
But Iris’s ultimate conflict–and the real substance of the drama–is with herself, her soul, the enduring sense of me-ness that exists despite the fact that she can no longer see. Healey’s performance is vulnerable, tender and funny; we feel her frustration, her anger, her fear. And it’s in the construction of Iris’s character and emotional world that the production introduces a fascinating stagecraft practice, something which Healey calls immersive descriptive audio (IDA), which reimagines the convention of descriptive audio for the visually impaired as an actual character within the story.
For a sighted audience member (like me), the Voice (Vanessa Smythe) is easy to accept as Iris’s internal monologue, a stream of consciousness that gives us unfiltered access to her thoughts and feelings. But a blind audience member must experience the Voice quite differently. When clusters of ballet dancers begin to move across the stage – figures that both interact with and vivify Iris’s emotional world – the Voice’s role becomes much more layered. On one level, her words are describing the dancing, both its emotional register and the visual effect of the movement. But at the same time, they continue to express Iris’s inner world. We’re left with a chicken/egg conundrum – what came first, the movement or the words – that points to bigger questions about phenomenology, perception, and the nature of thought itself.
What’s specifically interesting to me as a dance critic is how much this exercise mirrors what I attempt through criticism: to describe what I see, but also more than what I see. There are no technical terms in the Voice’s text. While I couldn’t help but note the pointe shoes, brisés and pirouettes–the robust technique of the National Ballet’s incoming cohort of apprentices, the company’s most junior rank–the Voice spoke poetically of light and joy, shadow and fear. No insider jargon or terminology; she found words that gave us additional vision, no matter our baseline.
Devon Healey, right, plays Iris, who descends into an underworld of stone-hearted ophthalmologists, crusading techies and melancholy shadows.Bruce Zinger/Supplied
Which is a good segue to the actual choreography, created by former National Ballet associate choreographer Robert Binet. Immersive, site-specific ballets that use sculptural lines and a classical lexicon have been Binet’s strongest suit the past decade; he’s figured out that changing the audience’s proximity to the action, bringing us up-close and personal to this sort of physical virtuosity, reinforces the form’s magic. No exception here. In the gorgeously ethereal white slips (designed by Anahita Dehbonehie), the dancers feel like manifestations of pure bliss.
At times, Healey’s writing can feel stylistically inconsistent, with a haphazard use of verse and casual banter. This didn’t help the overall muddiness of the supporting characters or my insight into their respective motivations. It also exacerbated the sense that we were meant to understand more than we did, that puzzle pieces should have been fitting together that weren’t, that we were climbing towards an epiphanic moment that never came.
Then again, the production’s charm is its opacity. Squint too hard and you’ll miss the beauty of the blur.
