you through your cardiac paces: the anticipation of the waiting
room before the show begins; the acceleration of running; the
startle response when a dancer slams into the wall beside you;
the heat of skin against yours; a pulsing chest beneath your
palm.
All I knew about the show going in was that I wasn’t allowed
to bring a notebook—or anything at all. In the “Waiting Room/
Antechamber,” I felt unarmed. I knew that there would be a
maximum of 12 audience participants, who would interact with
the dancers somehow. I was the first person there. No phone,
no clock, no other people. Would there be a cardiovascular
test? Would I pass? Would I remember the important things
about this room without my notebook? What were the important things?
Finally, Oberfelder and six other audience members filled the
antechamber, and the lights went down. The choreographer
stood, illuminated by a white cube-shaped lamp on the floor,
and welcomed us to “4Chambers,” an exploration of the heart
guided by “dancer docents.” She beckoned to me, put her hands
on my shoulders. We breathed in and out. I tried to have good
posture. Oberfelder sent me down a hallway, through a black
curtain into a dark room. A dancer docent put his hands on my
shoulders and placed a red pillow on the floor for me to sit on.
The other audience members entered one by one. The ceiling
lit up with video projections repeated in several blocks. Each
block seemed to have its mirror image so that an up-and-down
movement in one frame became a contraction of the whole display. White, tank-topped chests drew in on themselves. Were
we going to dance? Where were the other performers?
Interactive performances crank up the sense of anticipation.
I want to describe it by saying, “I didn’t know what was going
to happen,” but then, audience members don’t know what’s
going to happen when they see a new show on the stage, either.
The difference is that in an interactive piece, what happens
affects the audience physically, and the audience is expected to
react in the moment.
In the following, coral-colored chamber, the dancer docents,
six of them, I believe, were waiting. A woman in blue jeans with
pixie-cut blonde hair put her hands on my shoulder. We ran
over to a wall. I imitated her, making a bridge with my body
against the wall. She went under me, made a bridge; I went under her. Then she left me to watch. Everyone was dancing. One
woman rolled over the back of her docent in what looked like
contact improv. The docents brought us out into the center of
the room and danced around us, jumping and stomping as if
to startle us. We ran around the room in a circle. We breathed
harder. A second door led out of the room.
The following two rooms, called not chambers but “arteries,”
were calmer. In the “Aural Artery,” the guides placed our fingers
on tiny green lights, which produced a cacophony of digital
beeping noises. These were monitors that measure heart rate
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