Imagined Touch at Barbican. Photo: Jeff Busby
There’s a lot that can be said against immersive theatre, which is, at this stage, less of a trend and more of a theatre-marketing paradigm. Immersive features very often pander to their experience-seeking audience, and perform a function closer to thematic entertainment than narration or exploration. Immersive theatre is, so often, a matter of a lack of seating and some convincing costuming.
Imagined Touch, presented by the Barbican in partnership with Pacitti Company as part of SPILL Festival, is therefore initially remarkable for its genuine immersion of the senses. The experience, which runs to 30 minutes in total, including an introductory video, gives its audience a chance to mimic the experiences of a deafblind person, using goggles that cloud and restrict the vision, and headphones that play squeaks, thumps and fuzzy white noise, blocking out all external sound.
The short experience is certainly thought-provoking. A mere five minutes after being goggled and headphoned, we are rendered passive; shuffling in socked feet along a soft floor (audience members are required to take off shoes, coats and bags), waiting for someone to take our hands and lead us to the next part of the experience. Our bodies are a vulnerable objects we are forced to entrust to the care of the people around us, dictated by their next move and not our own.
In the introductory video, presented by two deafblind women, Heather Lawson and Michelle Stevens, we are invited into their world, which Michelle tells us does tend to involve a fair bit of waiting around. (You can see the beginning of the video here.) If you consider the social model of disability, you begin to understand that this waiting around is less to do with physical impairment so much as it is to do with our exclusion and our lack of adjustments to disabled people; we have not given deafblind people access and have prevented fuller integration. This point is best demonstrated when the world is flipped on its head, as Imagined Touch deftly shows, and it is this flip that is the most powerful message of the piece.
Take me as an example. I am seeing, hearing and able-bodied. I have never have to worry about space and surface in relation to my body, I have never learned to read Braille, I have never learned to sign. Unseen guides repeatedly tried to communicate with me through Braille signed on my hand and back, through hand signs which they would encourage me to touch and so translate, and through Braille information sheets. None of this meant anything to me. Even now I can’t tell you what was said to me, what it meant, if there was a narrative or if I was being told something important. Imagined Touch gives its non-signing, non-Braille-reading audience members a taste of what it feels like to be plunged into a world that expects you to fit round it and not the other way around.
It’s not all total disorientation. I had what would otherwise feel like an alarmingly intimate interaction with a stranger sat next to me, running my fingers through his fingers, touching his face and hair, but in the circumstances, it was the polite introduction we needed before we were gently guided into a dance. But my overall comprehension was low; my overall sense was of bafflement, interest and curiosity. Trust, vulnerability, connection, joy, intimacy, surprise, difficulty: Imagined Touch gives us a sort of user-friendly, encounter-driven taster of the daily lives of deafblind people, inasmuch as a whole realm of experience can be delivered as a taster.
Imagined Touch was on at Barbican as part of SPILL Festival. More info here.
