The Radical Potential of Blindness
Fayen d’Evie, ‘Orienting Through Blindness: Blundering, Be-Holding and Wayfinding as Artistic and Curatorial Methods’
Performance Paradigm, Issue 13, 2017.
ABSTRACT: This essay traces my conceptual stumbling amidst a succession of ephemeral frameworks of contact—from informal conversations to complex exhibitions—oriented through blindness. Via creative experiments, and myopic reading of William Forsythe’s choreographic objects theory, a trio of methods coalesced to texture and tension the temporalities, densities, dynamics, and choreopolitics of performative works: blundering, be-holding, and wayfinding. Blindness is not treated as darkness or nocturnalism here, but instead introduces a complexity and diversity of embodiments and relationships to perception, imagination, and consciousness, that offer an array of alternatives to the ocular standard of 20:20 vision. Blindness may destabilise performer-spectator conventions, activate attentiveness and movement improvisations, and innovate methods for sensing, archiving and conserving performative artworks. The essay traces a few of these fledgling propositions, as I nudge blindness away from segregated accessibility policy, towards generative artistic practice and curatorial thinking.