Walk toward the sound of my voice. This was Dana Salisbury’s instruction to us, a group of about 20 people who were standing, blindfolded, in a hallway outside a dance studio on a recent Saturday night. We were there for a performance of Salisbury’s Unseen Dance, and part of the deal was that we weren’t allowed to see the space in which the dance would take place. Our only cues about our surroundings would come from sound, touch and smell.
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.
