Darkness visible

The concept of ‘The Effing and Blinding Cabaret’ grew from the work of our company, Extant. Our team of blind performers presented short pieces at ‘Dans Le Noir’ – a restaurant where diners eat in absolute darkness. In this environment we had the luxury of exploring what the dark offered us as a creative playground. Working with words, sound and space, we could use the darkness itself as a medium to heighten suspense, surprise and comedy. However, we ran into difficulty when we decided that we were ready to take the show out of its ‘birthing pool’ and tour it in the big light-filled world. To our consternation, we found that acquiring total black-out in conventional theatre spaces could be as problematic as attempting to make them watertight. Having now presented the show at places including the Edinburgh fringe, The Zagreb Festival, the Wolverhampton Arena and Helsinki’s contemporary art museum, we feel we have met most, if not all, of the challenges in trying to deliver a show in the dark.

The main problem has been venues simply not understanding what total darkness means – turning down the house and stage lights but leaving exit lights on, having light seeping from under dressing room doors and light from the sound box blazing out from the back of the auditorium. When we have managed to argue get this light struck from the space, our trusty stage manager has stood back and confessed that LED lights from pieces of electronic equipment can still be seen glinting wickedly away, and even glimmers of outside street lights sometimes sneak around curtained windows. Black gaffer tape and sheets of foil have been our saviour in these cases. We have therefore become very pedantic with venue staff about what we mean by ‘dark’, and found that they generally rise to the challenge of trying to achieve it to our satisfaction. This does not come without health and safety concerns. Generally, we need to mollify venue programmers about the likelihood of audiences panicking in the dark and performers tripping over themselves or others, and so on. When we assert that our performers are perfectly equipped to work in the dark, that we will lay down floor guides to help them navigate, and also explain our pre-show routine to enable the audience to judge whether they can withstand the total dark for up to an hour, fears are usually quelled.
The beauty of the dark is that the content of the show can spill over the defined areas of performance that are usually fixed in light spaces. Our action lies in how and where the sound travels, not how and what the light reveals. In this way we can use 3D surround-sound spacialisation from localised and remote sources to create the show’s auditory experience. We use elements of tactile surprise to add dramatic flavour. The nature of these resources has embedded the absurd in the show’s style, which is a state not uncommonly known to blind people, who often find themselves in absurd situations trying to negotiate the sighted world. The cabaret is a place where the audience, both visually impaired and sighted, are levelled by the dark, and our performers, liberated by it, can visit their personal brand of scurrilousness and anarchy on all those brave enough to enter their world!