If you are sighted, imagine being told that you will lose your vision in the next few years.
Now imagine it starting to happen.
Now – if you can — imagine having completely lost the final traces of your vision.
Sit in that absence for a moment.
Physically, you’ve lost the sensory input that you have most relied on: the lens through which you have first experienced most aspects of the world.
Now try to stretch your imagination even further.
How does this loss of vision impact your sense of the world around you?
What about your sense of self?
Your sense of humour?
And how does the evolving experience of blindness curtail – or does it actually broaden — the ambit of your ambition?
Blind artist Alex Bulmer’s biographical answers to these questions – which for her were real and urgent, not hypothetical — are the first layer of the charming and engrossing two-person show Perceptual Archaeology. This co-production between Crow’s Theatre and Fire and Rescue Team explores Alex’s ambition – not blunted, but expanded by her blindness – to become a blind travel writer. In fact, she wanted to be the greatest blind travel writer. And in this quest, she was alternately inspired and frustrated by the unexpected example of nineteenth-century British blind travel writer James Holman.
Perceptual Archaeology adapts Alex’s 5 BBC radio essays on the subject of her blind travel in Europe and America. But this is so much more than a 5-part “talk”, which she self-deprecatingly thanks the audience for coming to hear.
The effervescent Alex’s recollected experience – the events, the sensory inputs, the emotions – is the compellingly vulnerable base layer. But atop this chassis she, director Leah Cherniak and the Fire and Rescue Team have built a playful and profound theatrical experience that takes audiences on a parallel awakening.
After losing her sight, a disoriented Alex recollects how she felt her way around a kidney bean-shaped pool in California, and in the process restored her sense of self. Building on her insight that “Where place exists, I exist”, she focuses her energy on “turning space into place” through travel and exploration that de-center her lost sight. She takes inspiration from frenemy / idol James Homan, by seeking “information and momentum”, not the “safety and protection” which Holman felt people were more likely to give a Blind person.
So Alex — by turns self-deprecating, brash, overwhelmed and wide-eyed – moves back and forth across the stage, narrating her travels while interacting with metaphorical props. A trunk stands in for her bed. A set of seats stands in for an airplane. The lobby door will become a cathedral door. And so on. Through these recounted proxy experiences, she describes how she gathered diverse sensory and verbal information from the world around her, and built new momentum out of curiosity, receptivity and burgeoning insight. Likewise, through re-enactments of bravery and risk-taking during her travels through Europe and America, we experience how growth – not to mention great travel writing – benefit from the refusal of “safety and protection”.
Her acquisition of information and momentum is both idiosyncratically individual and compellingly collaborative – which fact leads directly to the show’s other performer, Enzo Massara. The first to speak in the show, Enzo is Alex’s “Line feeder”. In this capacity, he sits at the back of the stage, whispering into a microphone linked to her earpiece. But in between lines, he is called by Bulmer to become the show’s second performer. A gentle, genial co-pilot-cum-work-husband, he jumps up to aid her with whatever she asks: guidance, comfort, or even a short break during which he will read her lines or those of her remembered travelling companion. The genial Enzo displays unfailing empathy, curiosity and playfulness.
The relationship is lighthearted, yet deep. Filled with good-natured jokes, palpable warmth, and mutual support and cheering, it energizes the emerging theatrical co-creation.
For no one is an island. Not the blind traveller — and not, for that matter, the blind traveler’s audience. As the program notes, the company “have imagined both Blind and sighted audiences throughout” the creation process, and they “continue to question what it means to decentre visuality in the process of telling stories and making theatre”.
So as an inclusive audience, our journey in Perceptual Archaeology is also a quest for information and momentum.
We must seek new sensory and extrasensory information from this metaphorical stage space and the performers’ representational wanderings of it. From Enzo’s word pictures and Alex’s deeper, emotive imaginings. From the small rocks that we are given as tactile memory tokens, and from the ambience and sound effects of designers Deanna H. Choi and Thomas Ryder Payne.
And we must build momentum by feeling communally, responding vocally, and playing games collaboratively.
And when the lights come up, and Alex and Enzo have left the theatre, the sighted among us face not imagined blindness but a real and present question.
Is there an option for us other than retreating back to safety and protection?
Perceptual Archeology (Or How to Travel Blind) is on stage at Crow’s Theatre until June 25. Reserve tickets on crowstheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesayarts Magazine, 2023
