Rainbow on Mars begins by disorienting its audience, drawing us into a space where sight alone simply cannot anchor us. From this moment of uncertainty, the production unfolds into a gripping exploration of perception. Co-produced by Outside the March, The National Ballet of Canada, and Peripheral Theatre, Rainbow on Mars is conceived by playwright, performer, and scholar Devon Healey. Moving between dialogue, narration, and dance, the unfolding story is both intimate and expansive: a love story, a meditation on sight and identity, and an invitation to reimagine what it means to truly “see.”
Healey, who is a leading scholar in creative disability studies, is herself blind. And she grounds Rainbow on Mars in her own lived perspective. The story follows Iris (Healey), a young woman confined to a Plato’s Cave-like environment, where human interaction takes place almost exclusively through screens and digital devices. When an accident destroys her device and leaves her blind, Iris is thrust into a disorienting new reality. A fruitless search for solutions leads to her nightmarish consultation with a chorus of doctors (played terrifically by Amy Keating, Sofía Rodríguez, and Danté Prince) and technology specialists, who make empty promises in playful rhyme. Eventually, she meets Lynk (Nate Bitton) and Arlo (Elliot Gibson), who challenge her to reconsider blindness: is it a limitation to be overcome, or a different means of perceiving and connecting?
The play’s origins are both personal and conceptual. Healey has written that she began sketching Rainbow on Mars after a night at a party. She was surrounded by people, yet as a blind guest, found herself isolated by their transfixion with the images and messages pinging onto their phones. Conversations with her partner Bitton and disability scholar Rod Michalko sparked the question of how blindness could be dramatized — not as an isolating limitation, but as a generative perspective. Through several years of collaboration with choreographer Robert Binet and director Mitchell Cushman, Healey has transformed these ideas into the multi-sensory theatrical language that now defines the show.
As audience members enter the auditorium, they move through a corridor with visual, auditory, and tactile cues that begin shifting our senses before the play even begins. At the centre of the stage hovers a suspended form—part eye, part chandelier, part cage. Iridescent strands ripple outward from it, catching and refracting light so that it seems to breathe with the room. More than some aesthetic centrepiece, it feels like both a surreal, animate anchor for the production’s design, and a signal of the expansive, otherworldly journey about to unfold. Anahita Dehbonehie’s costuming elaborates the timeless, mythic atmosphere with garments that invoke Greco-Roman drapery with a futuristic, Mad Max–like edge.
Rather than mounting a spectacle, Rainbow on Mars distinguishes itself by weaving theatre and dance into singular, seamless storytelling. Binet, drawing on years of collaboration with Healey, uses movement as an embedded parallel narrative element. The play thus unfolds through both dialogue and dance, embodying a story where blindness and perception are realities rendered through shifting physical vocabularies. The choreography communicates what words cannot, and in the process underscores the production’s central proposition that to perceive is more than just to see.
A major innovation and “wow factor” is the incorporation of Inclusive Digital Audio (IDA), devised by Healey. IDA differs from simple audio description, in that it is rooted in the perspective of blindness, rather than added to it as a supplement. So unlike conventional audio description, IDA sound from 360° weaves sound, description and narration (in a bravura turn by Vanessa Smythe as the Voice) directly into the dramaturgy – and in the process, shapes the experience for both blind and sighted audiences. Heidi Chan’s layered and expansive sound design further ensures that every movement resonates beyond the visual plane.
What emerges most strongly from Rainbow in Mars is a seamless union of accessibility and artistry. Resisting didacticism, the production balances its meditation on perception with humour and moments of tenderness, which keep the work grounded and human. And the use of IDA, dance and abstraction create a visceral experience that show us that perception itself is layered and multifaceted – and seems certain to resonate with both blind and sighted audiences. At times, I wondered if the immersive elements could be pressed still further – but my fleeting question only underscores the singularity of the creative vision on display.
Ultimately, Rainbow on Mars succeeds by offering an exceptional performance by Healey, in service of a transformational experience that holds perception at its core. Rainbow on Mars not only represents blindness, but reorients us to perceive it differently, and to understand that seeing is only one way of knowing. This multi-sensory theatrical experience is as absorbing as it is important—and I am eager to contemplate possible future works from the imaginative and versatile Healey.
Rainbow on Mars runs until August 20, 2025, at Ada Slaight Hall within Daniel’s Spectrum. Tickets are available at outsidethemarch.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
