Photo Credit: Slater Mapp
DURHAM, NC – I’d like to describe here what ShaLeigh Dance Works‘ enVISION: The Next Chapter, a new commission by the American Dance Festival, looked like last Friday night during its world premiere at The Fruit.
I can’t, however. I was blindfolded at the time.
Critics have recently been taken to task on social media in our region, so I should probably add here that this unconventional choice – literally blinkering a critic on a show’s opening night – was not an act of self-defense or retribution on the creators’ part. I volunteered for it instead, since the choice was directed toward one of the main points of the production, and a significant part of its raison d’etre. (I also went back, two days later, to experience the work with my eyes as well as my ears – a privilege that a number of its creators and collaborators do not have. More on that in a moment.)
Hopefully it’s a bellwether that this, the first essay in my 31st year as an arts journalist, deals with one of the most challenging and ambitious works for stage that I’ve encountered in many months.
In criticism, a number of words lose a lot of their meaning through overuse. When we say too frequently that a work is “touching,” “moving,” or “gripping,” it’s easy to lose sight and sense of what it actually feels like, what it means to be physically touched, moved, or gripped – seized, in other words, by someone in a moment of supplication, passion, or intervention. By now, the shopworn turns of phrase that an artwork “brings us closer to others” or, worse, bids us “walk in someone else’s shoes,” have all the lingering literary force and descriptive flavor left in a day-old wad of chewing gum. The words have certainly lost all track of what changes within us when experiences compel us to recalibrate our notions of proxemics, community, and intimacy.
For, to be sure, something important shifts when we’re lost, like the central characters are at the outset of this work, and have to follow, through unknown and treacherous terrain, the steps in a path that once took someone back to safety. Our relationships with our own bodies, lives, and fellow humans also change when we’re forced to rely on direct and intimate contact with other people if we’re actually going to make it through a situation.
In enVISION: The Next Chapter, we encounter an uncanny artwork that gives us the option of doing both of these things quite literally. As with its predecessor, enVISION: Sensory Beyond Sight, which American Dance Festival also commissioned, award-winning choreographer ShaLeigh Comerford created this dance theater work with, by – and most importantly, for – communities of differently-abled people who have been traditionally shunned by the dance world.
Photo Credit: Slater Mapp
The first work in this series not only sought to let visually impaired artists, including co-creator Davian Robinson, a Charlotte-based blind choreographer and dancer, articulate the stories of their lived experiences. The ingenious constructions in its 2022 premiere worked to share those experiences, in a direct and granular way, with the visually-abled. Audience members for that work were given four choices. The sighted could view the work in a conventional manner, or choose to encounter it blindfolded in their seats. Blindfolded or visually impaired patrons on the front rows were close enough to experience production elements that engaged the sense of smell and the tactile skin senses involving air movement, proximity, temperature and texture that produce autonomic sensory meridian response (ASMR).
But in the earlier work’s most audacious option, audience members elected to be blindfolded (if sighted), and led by the hand on stage during the performance – to be literally touched, moved and sometimes even gripped, as they were physically immersed in the world of the performance and the lived experiences of its two principal characters as they unfolded. Using imaginative arrays of props, set pieces, theatrical tech and choreography, the dancers, technicians, and running crew in 2022 led viewers and participants through a series of scenarios sometimes all too familiar for the visually impaired. A churning crowd scene which posed a particular danger to those who could not see preceded a flight and vacation sequence, negotiating the maze of an airport before taking a seat on a plane. After arrival, the couple dressed in a hotel room before a night out, walking the romantic streets of a foreign city, before dinner and dancing.
The stuff of everyday experiences, like the smell of coffee, or walking the uneven pavement of a city, took on a different sharpness and acuity when I let myself relinquish the privilege of sight, and encounter them through all my other senses. As a sighted person in the immersive experience, I found I experienced a different sort of engagement with the things and people around me. I also vividly recall the sharpened sense of isolation in my human form in those moments where I was left alone. The experiences in approaching, through these simulations, a body whose abilities were different from my own were profound. For me, they not only widened the doorways of perception and empathy towards others; they also indicated a way by which I might, conceivably, come to know better the other within myself.
I’ve gone into such detail here concerning enVISION‘s first iteration because I will not disclose a lot about its second. The element of surprise, not knowing what comes next or how it unfolds, is fundamental to the experience of enVISION: The Next Chapter, no matter which senses the participant uses to encounter it.
Comerford and her collaborators have worked to extend the experiential bridges begun in their initial work by attempting to integrate and raise into visibility certain lived experiences among members of the deaf community. As in enVISION‘s first showings, sighted and hearing audience members can elect to experience the work through a combination of senses, or to occupy sections of the audience equipped with blindfolds and earplugs, where sensoric elements have been enhanced for those with limited hearing or sight.
And audience members again can choose an immersive encounter which leads them through the lived experiences of its principal characters: a young man who is visually impaired, and a young woman who is deaf. These begin with a tentative reunion at the ocean’s edge, and proceed through various forms of travel, before a nighttime visit to a carnival. As before, each of these holds potential hazards for the deaf and blind that sighted and hearing people may not immediately recognize. A melancholy haunts this work in the reveries of the couple, who’ve clearly been apart for a while and may still be somewhat estranged. They spend a significant part of The Next Chapter feeling their way forward, emotionally and metaphorically as well as physically, as they attempt to reconnect with one another, at a shoreline where a sea made of memories borders all that may be possible in the present.
The cast of enVISION: The Next Chapter. Photo credit: Slater Mapp
To some degree, that melancholy may well stem from the limits of experiential portability and translation that are possible across the absence of the various senses. It’s obvious that the creators came up against these limits while creating this work, when the last words of a pre-show announcement tell us, “You won’t see everything. You won’t hear everything. Welcome to our world.”
Moreover, Comerford and company may have discovered that the bridges a work of dance theater can construct to transfer internal insights about visual impairment to the outside may constitute a roadblock of sorts for channels involving deafness, and possibly vice versa. Blind collaborators told Comerford and crew that audio descriptions for the blind are all too often aesthetically sterile and artistically meaningless. This production endows them with poetry, context, warmth, and liberates them from closed headsets, sharing them with the room – including the deaf, who can read them in projected captions. But the longer those enlarged words linger and fill up the screen, the more they dominate the visual space, pulling focus among sighted hearing and non-hearing people from all the other visual elements. Ironically, these include the work’s own choreography itself, and, to a lesser extent, Jonathan Faw and Alex Maness‘s evocative, three-sided projections, and Nicholas Jackson‘s imaginative, nimble set and environmental design.
Violinist Omar Ruiz-Lopez with the cast of enVISION: The Next Chapter. Photo Credit: Slater Mapp
Eric Hirsh‘s moody, evocative music features Omar Ruiz-Lopez‘s sometimes pensive, sometimes piercing live violin. Erik Ramquist‘s robust, nuanced sound design conveys an organic – and sometimes threatening – natural and human world. But even with American Sign Language synthesized into the choreography, it seemed the comparative primacy of sound, in the audio descriptions and other striking auditory elements, threatened at points to eclipse the work’s representations of the world of the hard of hearing. It was also unclear how much of the auditory experiences were meaningfully crossing over to the deaf. For my part, as a hearing individual, the kludgy foam earplugs provided didn’t block out much of the sound when I tried to use them. When I could never fully tune out the beguiling audio, I sensed intrinsically that I was missing something larger.
Comerford acknowledged the potential conflicts among these goals in a pre-show interview. The new work, she noted, “is trying to operate on an enormous number of levels; to create an artistic experience that feels meaningful for folks who are low vision and blind and deaf and hard of hearing, but that also can create an empathetic and educational bridge for sighted hearing folks.”
“Every step along the way, when things have gotten really hard, folks have said, I don’t know if what you’re doing is even possible,” Comerford continued. “And you know, they might be right. But that’s not why you do this. You don’t do it to get it right. You do it because something in you just knows there’s something to discover; something that could push our field forward.”
A similar project, devoted solely to the possibilities in conveying the life experiences of deaf and hard of hearing people, might feel less conflicted and cross-wired than this latest installment seemed at times. Still, there is something palpably Proustian in the way enVISION: The Next Chapter inquires into what we are beyond the sum of our memories. A real tension exists here between the physical labor of holding on (a crucial, central part of the immersive experience here), the metaphorical holding on to sense memories that a character says are fading – along, potentially, with relationships as well – and the need to let go of things that have passed.
Since the body anchors these and other issues that are raised in physical experiences, I’d say the best way to encounter enVISION: The Next Chapter would be first in its immersive mode. Afterward, a second trip to learn how the company achieves the textures in the moments it creates would be the most revealing. “If folks come in as sighted and hearing, to see it with their eyes and hear it with their ears, they will probably get the least amount of the story by the way that we’ve designed it,” Comerford wryly noted in our interview.
She wasn’t wrong. In a sensory tour which deconstructs the senses, it’s the ones you give up that enable you to get the most.
There are two final performances of enVISION: The Next Chapter on Sunday, July 28.
