But first we had to grope our way down the hall, tentatively shuffling forward, until a hand reached out to guide us into the space. Those first few minutes in the dark felt like tumbling down the rabbit hole. I could have sworn that the hallway was getting narrower as I moved, and it was a great relief when someone took my arm and ushered me into the studio.

When I interviewed Salisbury last summer, she told me that wearing the blindfold created a heightened state of sensory awareness — I think she called it a calm alertness. It was an accurate description. My initial anxiety quickly melted away, and my entire body was suddenly awake.

My skin tingled as a dancer rushed past, leaving a cool breeze in (his? her?) wake; my heartbeat quickened as more dancers joined in, running back and forth and breathing hard. They sounded terrified, as though someone or something were chasing them. A low growl erupted several feet away, and soon it was right next to my ear. There was a bee-like buzzing that sounded echoey, like when you speak through a paper towel tube. Something soft and feathery brushed across the tops of my feet. What would happen next?

We sat in metal folding chairs for part of the performance, and at other times we were instructed to stand. At one point, Salisbury told us to walk forward and take some food. I hardly had time to think about how I was going to accomplish that before I was swept up in a crush of bodies and felt a firm grip on my arm. My hand was plunged into a box filled with sandwich baggies; I came up with a fistful and found crackers inside.

During the performance I found myself thinking about a Halloween many years ago, when a particularly crafty neighborhood mom transformed her basement into a haunted house. Disembodied voices and creepy noises greeted us as we descended into the pitch-dark, and we were instructed to touch a series of squishy items identified as brains, guts and other internal organs. It was scary but also sort of magical, this idea that an ordinary basement could be so altered simply by flipping the light switch and forcing us to use our other senses.

I don’t mean to equate Unseen Dance with a homemade haunted house, though it did have its share of disturbing moments. There were also moments of beauty, some surprisingly emotional, as when a dancer took my hand and placed it on her diaphragm so that I could feel its staccato rise and fall as she laughed. A woman sang in a clear, sweet voice, and at one point my nose was filled with the scent of oranges. Unlike my haunted house experience, when I was relieved to have the lights turned back on, I was reluctant to take off my blindfold at the end of Salisbury’s performance.

As a critic, I have spent a great deal of time sharpening my visual observation skills. After Unseen Dance, it became clear that I need some practice tuning in to my other senses — as it turned out, I missed quite a few things. When I spoke to Salisbury after the performance, she asked if I’d noticed a moment when the pressure seemed to drop. I hadn’t. But apparently, someone had placed a bucket over my head at some point in the performance and I was completely oblivious to it. Also, I’d somehow failed to detect the aroma of cooked steak.

In relying on sight we tend to forget about our bodies, and in the process we shut out lots of important information. When I described the performance to a friend, he remarked that it didn’t sound like dance to him. But dance is nothing without the body, and while most dances focus attention only on the performers’ bodies, Salisbury forces audience members to pay attention to their own as well. With Unseen Dance, she’s cracked open a whole new world of possibilities for experiencing dance. And I’m looking forward to following her, blindly, wherever she goes next.

If you haven’t seen Streb’s company in action, get yourself over to Williamsburg and check them out — you can find their rehearsal schedule here. If you’re not in New York, catch them on tour.

In the meantime, please click here to read my interview with Streb in the current issue of Dance Teacher magazine.

Still/Here by Bill T. Jones

This month marks 15 years since former New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce scandalized the arts world by writing a scathing review of Bill T. Jones’ “Still/Here” without actually having seen it. Croce dismissed the piece, which featured terminally ill people talking about their illnesses, as victim art and refused to see it on the grounds that Jones had crossed a line between performance and reality, thereby making it “undiscussable” as a work of art. In short, she said, she could not review people she was forced to feel sorry for.

Coincidentally, on the occasion of this ignominious anniversary I, too, have found myself with an opportunity to review a dance work without seeing it. Unlike Croce, I have no ideological objections to this piece. Also unlike Croce, I plan to attend the performance. The reason I won’t see it is that I will, like the rest of the audience, be wearing a blindfold while the dance takes place.

Dana Salisbury

The piece is Dana Salisbury’s Unseen Dance, and it’s happening Saturday night at Green Space in Long Island City. I interviewed Salisbury a few months ago for an article that appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, and we spent a rainy afternoon talking about how she came up with the idea to create dances for audiences who can’t see them. As it turns out, the idea evolved from a project she created called Dark Dining, in which participants experience a four-course meal and entertainment–musicians, singers, tap dancers, beat boxers–while blindfolded.

I’m excited about finally getting to experience Salisbury’s strange sensory world for myself on Saturday night. I also have to admit that the prospect of literally putting myself in the hands of a bunch of strangers who I’ll never actually lay eyes on (Salisbury calls her dancers the No-See-Ums) is kind of scary. Tune in for my report next week.

Happily, there are exceptions–and Sunday afternoon’s salon series performance of Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance at NYU’s Tisch Dance Studio was one of them. There, a very young audience member’s comments renewed my faith in the value of Q&A sessions and left me with a deeper appreciation for the work of Lavagnino, a choreographer who blends classical ballet and contemporary dance.

On the program were four pieces, including a work-in-progress called Menage, which Lavagnino and her company created during a residency at The Silo this past summer. According to Lavagnino, the inspiration for the piece came from Degas’ ballerina sculptures, and indeed watching the dance was like seeing those sculptures come to life. Dancers coupled and un-coupled in a series of intricate partner work that is one of the hallmarks of Lavagnino’s style. The movements were deliberate and meditative, as though the dancers were figuring out in that moment how they might fit together and how their movements–the sweep of a leg or the nudge of an elbow–would cause the other to respond.

Little hints of narrative flickered throughout. In one, a woman clung passionately to a man who appeared not to notice her. In another, two men joyfully waltzed each other across the floor, coming to rest side by side with linked arms.

The program moved along swiftly, and by the time the last piece was over it took me a moment to bring Menage back to mind. But a young boy, who couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, was ready with an astute observation. He noticed that there were lots of different stories in the dance, he said, but not one whole story. He was right on, and Lavagnino told him so. The piece lacked an overall cohesiveness because it was still stuck on the fence between abstract and narrative.

Thanks to the boy’s thoughtful observation, we learned from Lavagnino that narrative work is new territory for her. She added that she plans to bring in Kay Cummings, who teaches acting for dance at NYU, where Lavagnino is dance department chair, to help flesh out the story and the dancers’ characters. And though the dance was sparked by Degas, both Lavagnino and composer Scott Killian admitted that it seems to be taking on a kind of deep-South, Tennessee Williams flavor as they continue to work on both the dance and the music (composed by Killian in collaboration with Jacob Lawson and Jane Chung).

And so, as the boy so precociously suggested, the whole story has yet to emerge.

It will be interesting to see how it all turns out. We’ll have our chance in the spring, when Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance has a season at Symphony Space May 6-8.

In the meantime, the kid in the audience has given me a lot to think about–not just in terms of Lavagnino’s piece but in how I approach my work as a dance critic. Like the know-it-all who hijacks a post-performance Q&A session to expound on obscure bits of dance ephemera, dance critics can fall into the same trap in our writing. In our valiant attempts to grasp at a piece’s meaning and relevance we can often lose sight of what’s happening right in front of us. The boy reminded me that the first thing you have to do is take a deep breath and tell what you saw, and say it simply. The rest will unfold from there.

Dwight Rhoden

When you started out in 1994, did you envision sticking around for 15 years?

Dwight Rhoden: Desmond and I didn’t necessarily set out to start a dance company. We were both leaving Ailey at that point, and Desmond was going to dance in Frankfurt with Billy Forsythe and I was going to concentrate on choreographing and directing. Then I decided to choreograph a show, and we brought together a bunch of people we respected and found inspiring. We brought them from all different places, from the major companies in New York to dancers who might not even have formal training—modern, ballet, street, you name it. Once we saw all of that great energy and curiosity all in one room, we decided that we had something really special here and that’s when the company was born. It was really out of a love for dance and an appreciation for all those differences and contrasts.

Why did you decide to call this year’s program Love, Sweat and Tears?

DR: Because it’s the truth. It’s a lot of hard work to start a company from the ground up and maintain it. I think it defines everything we’ve been through to bring the company to where it is, but in a very positive way. It also sort of mirrors the programming for this season.

Tell me about the two new pieces you choreographed this year.

DR: Mercy deals with the human condition, with compassion. It’s inspired by many things that are happening around the world. It deals with being at a place where you’re looking for answers, trying to find a way to handle all that’s sent your way. Dirty Wire looks at relationships and connections. It’s about how people meet and communicate these days, with everything from e-mail to Facebook.

What’s your personal take on how technology has influenced the way we connect with one another?

DR: There’s an upside to it, because there’s an immediacy to it and it gives you the ability to connect quickly. I think there’s also a disadvantage in that there’s sometimes a bit of a disconnect or lack of people skills. You can become removed and not really know how to communicate one-on-one as easily as before we had all of this stuff, back when you had to know how to be able to carry on a conversation in person.

You and Desmond have been doing quite a bit of work with So You Think You Can Dance over the past couple of years. What do you like about being a part of the show?

DR: First of all, to be able to reach so many people is great. A lot of times concert dance doesn’t get to be seen but So You Think You Can Dance has done a lot for dance in general. I’m not one of those choreographers who is prejudiced against doing something a little bit more on the commercial side because it’s all great, it’s all dancing. And we’re bringing it into people’s homes where you are instantly seen and heard, and that is invaluable.

Rhoden and Richardson choregraphed a contemporary routine for Jakob Karr and Kathryn McCormick for the Season 6 finale. Check it out here:

The critics can be harsh on you guys. Do you read reviews, and do they have any impact on your work?

DR: I think some critics are more responsible than others, but responsible criticism seems to be waning.  I don’t really listen to critics in terms of it directing what I do next. I think that would be a big mistake—you have to really follow your vision and it can’t be affected by what one person writes. I think criticism is a good thing to have, but it has to be responsible and respectful and not try to tear down the artist at hand. The main thing I care about is connecting with my audience, and one thing I am really proud of is that Complexions has always connected with audiences. We’ve had a major reception whether in Topeka Kansas or New York or Australia. As long as I’m connecting with my audience, then I feel that I’m doing my job.

And why do you think Complexions is so good at connecting with audiences?

DR: The work itself is very eclectic. You may have a performance that begins with Chopin and ends with U2. The movement itself is a mélange of all different types of stuff—there are influences of street dance, but you’ll also see the classicism. The dancers dance on pointe and they dance barefoot. There’s that diversity in almost every aspect of the organization. Then to top that off you have a very multicultural cast with people from all different parts of the world and all types of bodies and looks. The typical, skinny ballerina look isn’t what we go for. I think the company is accessible in so many ways. And that’s what Desmond and I try to make sure remains as the company continues to grow.

You talk a lot about dance as a means of expression, of using the body to communicate in as many different ways as possible. How do you coax this out of your dancers?

DR: We’re always pushing the dancers to do more, to really connect with what the work is about. We have a company full of amazing dancers who can do just about anything with their bodies. Physicality is really not the issue. Really, the most important part is being able to connect with it so that people in the audience aren’t just looking at a physical display, but they actually feel something. Hopefully we are able to grab you and bring you into the middle of whatever it is we’re dancing about so that in some ways it should be that you almost forget that they’re dancing.

What are your plans for the next 15 years?

DR: We hope to have our own space. We would love to have a training ground, because we have a very specific way we like dancers to work. There’s a huge educational side to Complexions, and we have crazy enrollment in our intensives, so we see the need to have a training ground for future generations of dancers. Certainly we want Complexions to be out there more and more, and for everyone to know who we are and what we are. It’s really about unity, and we think the message is so universal, so now—it’s very Obama. We think we’re the perfect company at the perfect time, and we’re hoping we can play a part in continuing to do some good in the world.

PETA protesters outside Philly's Academy of Music

PETA TARGETS YOUNG BALLET-GOERS: You might want to think twice about wearing that mink stole to The Nutcracker this year. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have been demonstrating outside Nutcracker performances in cities across the country, including Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia. Bearing signs declaring that “Fur is Tutu Cruel,” protestors hand out anti-fur stickers to children waiting on line for the ballet and urge them to “stick it” to their parents if they wear fur or animal skin.

NUTCRACKER FOR BLIND AUDIENCES: In happier Nutcracker news, Pennsylvania Ballet presented its first-ever “audio described” performance of the ballet on December 20. A woman seated backstage described the visual elements of the performance as it happened, and her commentary was transmitted to audience members wearing single-ear headphones. A sensory tour took place prior to the performance, giving attendees a chance to explore the set, costumes and props through touch. This is the first I’ve ever heard of audio-described performances, and I’d like to find out if other dance companies are using it. In the meantime, this article reminded me of Dana Salisbury’s Unseen Dances, which I wrote about in The Brooklyn Rail a couple of months ago. Check it out here.