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Imagine a life where words and touch are the only way to experience dance. Don’t close your eyes, but recall how words affect your intake of dance, or how you might use words to describe your dance. Don’t close your eyes to listen harder. Let’s open our ears. The blind and partially sighted community has historically not attended dance presentations. We are a new audience. We experience bodies on multiple layers, and if there is silence, there is no body. If there is a music track accompanying the dance, there is just a music track. So we want dance that is visceral, and verbal. An awesome choreographic work would be one that is developed with sound and text in mind. Text to describe the world and set and expression, sound to convey the emotion, weight, direction, duration, for example. Touch could also be used in interesting ways, with audience consent (asking before doing, for someone who is blind). Our deeper experience of the world cannot be found through a blindfold, but through an acknowledgement that there exists a whole non–sighted world, where sight is not prioritised.
Last year I brought together a small group of blind, partially sighted and non–blind performers, thanks to AusDance NSW. We sat on the floor of the dance studio and discussed at length the opposite ways of thinking that bridge the cultural gap between the sighted and non–sighted world when teaching dance. It was clear that we, in the non–sighted world, know much more about the sighted world, than people from the sighted world know about the culture of the non–sighted world. In my investigations of blindness and dance, which have thus far spanned across New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, England and America, the common message in learning dance is, please don’t grab our limbs, please let us touch the instructor. We are much more attuned to reading through touch than anyone who lives predominantly
THE NO BODY?