Dancing in the Dark: Tu vois ce que je veux dire?

Tu vois ce que je veux dire?, which was featured during the Festival TransAmériques in Montreal in May 2010, is a time-based de´rive (peregrination). It partners two complete strangers: one a volunteer signed on by the producers, and the other a ticket-buyer. Before they meet, the ticket-buying partner is blindfolded. Together they will negotiate an urban landscape and some of its interior spaces. The present writer was one of the blindfolded ticket-buyers, hence the point of view.

The first edition of this "urban odyssey" in 2005 was a co-production by Projet in situ in association with three diverse organizations: The´aˆtre Le Merlan, Lieux Publics (an urban theatre company), and the National Institute for the Blind in Marseille. Three years later it was a contribution to the Biennale de danse in Lyon. The artistic directors of the walk are dancer Martin Chaput (originally from Montreal) and choreographer and anthropologist Martial Chazallon, whose company regularly collaborates with dancers, photographers, and visual and installation artists in France and South Africa. For a decade Chazallon has also been rechoreographing urban environments so as to interrupt the habits of the social and historical body. Such walks engage local sites and local artists as part of a kinesthetic lab, the emphasis being on the physicality of movement rather than descriptive touring. The experience is an active immersion in a kind of acoustic and tactile scenography. The title is playfully ambiguous because what you are told is very minimal and what you "see" in the mind's eye is immensely more than what is told. The seeing partner is under instructions not to describe, identify or confirm the assumptions, suppositions or guesses of the blindfolded one, except to warn about approaching hazards such as curbs and steps.

Initially, the walk is a trust exercise in which the ticket-buying participant's own urban gait and habits of walking are adapted under seeing guidance. Chaput and Chazallon allow for both the heightened acoustic and other sensorial impressions engendered by the blindfold to take hold before the visits to various interior spatial and social environments begin. These will culminate in a final dance in a large gymnasium about two and half hours later. During the walk, generalized aural attention to street sounds is alternated with visits to defined spaces such as a cafe´, a yoga studio, a graphic exhibit, a church, and its internal ritual spaces including a confessional and a music lesson—a different selection for each ticket-holder.

In Montreal the walk started from the second storey Long Haul/Le Corrid'art, a not-for-profit artist's space that otherwise serves as a hub for visual artists. Departures for the walk were timed so that there were only two or three ticket-holders in the gallery at any one time, and the briefings were simultaneous with a blindfold fitting.

The three-hour walk had a real vibrancy about it for each member of the couple; for the guides, showing the city provided a new perspective.

A volunteer guides the blindfolded walker and each walker is encouraged to take refreshment en route.
Photo by Juan Saez

My guide, Louise, was introduced. Her left elbow was my point of contact. Up to this point Tu vois ce que je veux dire? was like any number of trust walks used in workshops; the first five minutes of the walk were taken up with a careful descent to the street, down a circular staircase and to the sidewalk. On the street the guide fell silent and my pace became the measure for the walk. Tu vois ce que je veux dire? insists on the participant being immersed in the city and becoming a spectacle while being deprived of sight herself. Initially the walk appears to have absorbed the city—the sidewalks, the textures of fencing or railing, the construction materials of the buildings, and the public fountains and benches—but soon modulates into a complex sense of one's presence...