Rods & Canes

It's confirmed: the solo piece called CONES will debut in June, and we'll show a piece of that piece April 6+7 at the Rotunda in West Philly. More about that soon.

Much of this blog has been dramaturgy for this performance, and as we segue into more writing and rehearsing for CONES, these blog posts will be less frequent.

I'm really psyched to have some professional eyeball people on board. One of them is a fellow theatre artist who works with people who are losing their vision. The other day we met and talked about how there isn't much of "a blind community"—unlike deaf folks who have their own language and culture, blind and low vision folks don't necessarily hang out together. Why would we? The blind leading the blind might not be the best way to cross the street, and until self-driving cars hit the market, we're not apt to drive each other to Home Depot to stock up on power tools.

She also talked about how the bulk of the people that she trains to use white canes are not "fully blind" but have some vision. Popular perception of a person using a cane is that they are completely blind, but more common are folks just using the cane to tell others, "I can't see so well." The misconception of cane-wielders being completely in the dark vs. non-cane users being fully sighted, essentially invisibilizes the legally blind majority: folks who use canes and can see, as well as folks who don't use canes even though they sometimes can't see.

CONES and this blog are the beginnings of that conversation about this majority, a unconnected populace of real-life Mr. Magoos, searching for each other, not in the dark, but in the fog. That's what I'm talking about.