Blindness

≪I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see≫

J. Saramago

An immense tragedy is looming over the planet, disrupting its entire way of being. An unknown virus takes away people’s sight. Communities and individuals apocalyptically lose what they thought was theirs, to own and to see. Everything is suddenly immersed in a bright milky whiteness that seems to devour not only colors, but things and beings themselves, making them doubly invisible.

That milky sea into which the world’s inhabitants have fallen leaves them bewildered and frightened and vulnerable to odors and fumes, forces them to appreciate crying and tears, fingerprints and the touch of a hand. In this state of exception, a small group bands together to find an escape route and a new world. Among them is a woman who has not lost her sight, but who must alter every detail of her behavior to coexist with sight, to ask herself what seeing is for.

In this poem of death and suffering, the body advances with all its biology and emotions emerge from new, re-found, relearned gestures. The performers, witnesses to this event, find themselves touching space, and being touched by places, listening to signs from the ground and sound waves drifting in the air. The dramaturgical experiment proceeds, launching a reconstruction of the body that moves from blindness towards a new condition that forces it to experience things differently and to develop strategies for survival, or, more simply, ways to reeducate the gaze.

The explored space is re-composed through the discovery of tactile, perceived details, with touch creating a new perception of the self, of the other and of life. Desperate, outmoded, dramatic, evil, aimless, savage behaviors responding to animal instincts dig deep, bringing to light more human things, like friendship and solidarity. The biped human often becomes quadruped, a crouching puppy, a brutal beast shaking itself, or a slithering snake. Touching things and others, it elaborates new postures and emotions. In the blinding whiteness, everything is revealed once again: what before was present but hidden now emerges.

Dance arises from a return to a displacement, an inner migration. The body and its parts become the locus of re-departure: slowly pacing and crawling, hands reach to touch things, limbs stretch out for defense, to get food and to wash, to kill and to tend the dead, but also to embrace a dog and feel a profound, collaborative symbiosis among beings.

The biological needs etched into sapiens’ behavior burst through in this process of becoming accomplices and communities: feeding, caring for the weakest, defending ourselves at all costs. A condition that brings out a schematic, evil nature that surprises us and upsets our perception of others and things. The dancers, as bearers of this new essence, act by creating a new perceptive map of the space and the city, discovering ancient – perhaps once-lost – potentials that now call us to care for the land and the territory, in keeping with a vision that is, as James Hillman writes, “soul”, “atmosphere”, nature”, “genius loci”: under a tree, near a waterhole, near a spring, crouching in a corner, a trusting shoulder against a smooth wall.

Opening their eyes every time to see again.

Blindness explores the state of absence that reawakens the life in things, shoving them out of their everyday places, seeking an essence that reminds us that we are, first and foremost, nature – a nature that reacts within us and is capable of destroying us.

We are made up of agents and presences that call to us, whimpering, and the dance embodied within us responds, offering itself in an untranslatable ritual. The focus is on what is already here, on musical movement as a tension that engages every human faculty in simply being alive, creating and recreating the experience of initiation to movement. We don’t always know what moves us – the art of dance does not reveal, but traverses, uniting us with nature, questioning the infinite that surrounds us, taking us by the hand.

Source: https://www.virgiliosieni.it/

VIRGILIO SIENI
BLINDNESS

Conception, choreography, space design Virgilio Sieni
Perfomed by Compagnia Virgilio Sieni
Music Fabrizio Cammarata 
Lighting Virgilio Sieni 
Costumes Silvia Salvaggio

New production 2023
Centro Nazionale di produzione della danza Virgilio Sieni
Fondazione Teatro Piemonte Europa
Fondazione Teatro Metastasio di Prato 

Loosely based on the novel Blindness by José Saramago