Jul 8, 2025

Inside the World of Rainbow on Mars: A Conversation with Devon Healey

This summer, theatre takes a bold new shape with Rainbow on Mars—a genre-defying immersive performance that blends fantasy, movement, and accessibility in unforgettable ways. Created by artist and academic Devon Healey and inspired by her own experience with blindness, the production features a diverse cast of Blind, partially sighted, and sighted performers, and introduces a groundbreaking new approach to accessible stagecraft called Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA).

We spoke with Devon about the story behind Rainbow on Mars, the meaning of access in art, and what it feels like to invite audiences into a world built from sound, sensation, and imagination.

Rainbow on Mars is inspired by your own experience with vision loss. What inspired you to tell this story on stage, and in this particular way?

Theatre has always been a part of my life. I’ve always loved performing. But when I began to lose my vision, it felt like my relationship with theatre was ending. I was scared and convinced I had to hide my blindness to continue being an actor. So, I performed sightedness for as long as I could.

Eventually, that performance ended. I thought my acting career was over—people didn’t understand how a blind person could be part of a show. I stepped away from theatre and found myself at the University of Toronto, studying education. That’s where I met Rod Michalko, a blind disability studies scholar and storyteller who became my teacher and friend.

Rod helped me explore blindness and sight as cultures and performances. One day, over cocktails, he suggested I return to theatre. It clicked. There’s nothing more dynamic than blindness—the stories it writes, the drama it holds. That’s when I began to explore my own journey into blindness through theatre. The result is a play that I hope challenges both blind and sighted audiences to rethink what it means to see and to be blind.

The show features Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA), a technique you developed. How is it different from traditional audio description?

I really appreciate traditional audio description—it’s creative and important. But I always left performances wanting something more. Traditional audio description often focuses on what catches the eye of sighted people and what they think blind people should know.

Immersive Descriptive Audio flips that. It centers the perceptions and creativity of blindness. Instead of describing what’s “there to be seen,” it invites the audience into the performer’s body, imagination, breath, and the intentions behind the choreography, lighting, and sound.

It’s a narrative that engages all the senses—not just sight or sound. Sight isn’t the lead narrator anymore; it’s a companion. IDA is a character in the show, not an external narrator. It’s for everyone in the audience, not just blind viewers. And it invites sighted people to question the authority of the eye, while offering blind audience members a show imagined specifically for them.

Dance plays a powerful role in Rainbow on Mars. How do you see the connection between blindness and movement?

Before I noticed my blindness in my eyes, I felt it in my body. As a sighted person, the world comes to you—you don’t have to move much. But blindness pushed me to move through the world differently. I had to explore it physically.

Simple tasks became intricate dances. Picking up a glass, walking down the street—everything became a new kind of movement. Meeting Robert Binet, the choreographer for Rainbow on Mars, helped me realize that dance and blindness are perfect partners. They both explore the world through movement and emotion.

Together, they offer a new way to understand what it means to be blind and to connect with others.

The cast includes blind and sighted performers. What has it meant to you to create such an inclusive production?

This show couldn’t exist without both blindness and sight. That relationship had to be reflected in the cast. We needed artists who identify as blind or low vision, and those who are sighted, to truly explore what can be created together.

Blindness can’t be told without sight, and sight can’t be told without blindness. But for too long, sight has been telling most of the stories. There’s now a beautiful community of blind artists and scholars—like Rod Michalko, the late Lynn Manning, Alex Bulmer and Thomas Reid—who inspire me. I hope this show contributes to that work and encourages more collaboration between blind and sighted creators.

What do you hope Blind or low vision audience members take away from this experience?

I hope they leave knowing this show was written for them. It’s an act of love for our collective stories and the complex journeys we’re on. Even when it feels like we’re alone, we’re not.

I want them to feel a genuine thank you—for all that they are and all that they do.

Rainbow on Mars isn’t just a play—it’s an invitation to reimagine how we experience art, story, and each other. With sound as its anchor and access at its heart, Devon Healey’s visionary work opens a space where blindness becomes a source of creative possibility.

To learn more about the performance or accessible ticketing, visit Outside the March’s website.