INVISIBLE touch - There is nothing to see here!

Our works are often designed for hundreds, sometimes thousands of visitors per evening. Nevertheless, we strive to be as close as possible to the visitors... so close that you can touch them. Not only with emotions or stories - no - ultimately also quite physically. With our new event format, we are developing our Theatre of Encounter continues.
For years we have been pursuing the idea of designing a project in which visitors cannot see anything. Now we have dared to implement it. In the following, I'll tell you what particularly impresses me about INVISIBLE touch.

THE BEGINNING

Only 20 people can participate in one evening. Six people take care of their well-being for three hours and enable them to have impressive experiences.
What fascinated me from the beginning was the idea that the visitors would be picked up somewhere in Berlin and led blindfolded from there to the venue. At the end of the evening we escort them out again blindfolded. Only when they are on the street do they have their blindfolds taken off. This way, the visitors neither know where they were nor with whom they spent the evening.have provided.

A WORLD LIKE A DREAM

But where only inner images can arise, a world is formed that does not exist in reality. I have often wondered how, when reading a book, the faces of the protagonists come into my head, how the places can form so vividly in my imagination alone.
By deciding that the visitors never get to see the place and fellow visitors, their own image worlds are not overlaid by others later on. What is experienced remains a dream and the experiential space becomes, in the best case, a place of longing.

THE SILENCE OF THE JUDGES

I know from my own experience that when I spend an evening blind, the feeling of being unobserved quickly sets in, even though I know of course that there are sighted companions.
But when I feel unobserved, that doesn't mean that I let the much-cited "sow out". Rather, in blind formats I experience unbelievable presence, in which it is not IT that decides what I do and don't do, but ME.
At INVISIBLE touch, our consistent experience is that the visitors, through the feeling of being unobserved, do not "muTieren" into animals, but rather become people who, for moments, detached from the stream of stories, of commands and prohibitions, become very mindful, even loving.
"Loving" is a strange, almost esoteric word. But in all its sound it corresponds exactly to what I perceive from the outside when I, as a sighted person, experience the people at INVISIBLE touch.

THE DISAPPEARED DRAWERS

When the visitors dance together or touch each other's hands, they have an experience that for many people can only be had in blindness: Neither age, nor gender, nor appearance play a role in the encounter. The pigeonholes into which we can sort people so incredibly quickly seem to have disappeared - through the magic of the blindfold. That's why I don't have to get involved in every encounter by any means. But there is something surprisingly liberating about the inner judge taking a back seat and letting the immediate experience take precedence in deciding how far and where I want to travel with the other people that evening. In the process, I can sense what life might feel like that is not defined by demarcation and competition, but is above all borne by connectedness and mindfulness.

Stefan Behr

Photos: Dajana Lothert https://dajana-lothert.com

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