Kyra Wilson, The Body as a Choreographer
The Felt Room was a lesson in sensation and deprivation. What happens when you cannot see, what happens when you cannot hear… what happens when you have no sense.
I noticed the sensory deprivation. I noticed the moments when there was sound but not light and light but not sound. It was interesting to me that it was far more difficult to eliminate sound than light. I thought that it would have been the opposite–people are so reliant on their vision that I thought it would’ve been near impossible to create an environment where no one would be able to use the sense with which they are perhaps the most comfortable. I don’t know if the intention was to eliminate particular senses, but that is what I felt like, and so it interesting how there was still sound present in quiet moments. Breath, swishing of clothes, feet on the floor, sighs… it is much harder to be quiet than invisible.
I did not expect the performers to interact with the audience in the way they did. There was a moment when a dancer came up to me and played with my arm and I didn’t find that surprising. In a performance about sensation and feeling it should not be unexpected that the performers would try to feel the audience or force the audience to feel something. What did surprise me was when the performers would “interact” with the audience but impersonally. At one point, the performers kind of just moved around and on top of one of the audience members. They put their feet in his face, crawled across his lap, etc. It was unexpected because there was such blatant disregard for the typical rules of interaction. They moved around him like he wasn’t a person but just like an uneven part of the floor or some other obstacle to explore/move around.
During most of it I was incredibly uncomfortable. I did not like not being able to see what was happening or consciously trying to be quiet and not disturb the atmosphere. The more I slowed down and experienced The Felt Room, the more uncomfortable I was. There was a short portion where I was relaxed–there was dim lighting and gentle sounds, but that did not last long. Attending this performance showed me how much I am not used to/do not like when it is dark, and quiet, and I am not alone.
I think one of the reasons I was uncomfortable was because of my unfamiliarity with the situation. After all, how many times do you get to be in room with 20 other people, in the dark, in silence, and just pay attention to your sensations? Probably not very often. The Felt Room allowed me to experience conditions that I have never experience and likely will never experience again.
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- Feeling the Felt Room - February 19, 2017