Seeing Is Not Always About the Eyes

The research with Laura began with a simple but difficult question: what does it mean to meet another body without relying on the usual hierarchy of vision?
March - June, 2026Kaunas Chamber Theater, Kaunas, Lithaunia

Research - process - result

In dance, we often speak about seeing, watching, observing, following. The eye becomes the main instrument of orientation. It organizes space, controls distance, confirms the presence of another person. But working with Laura, a blind dancer, shifted this logic from the very beginning. The question was no longer how to “adapt” a dance practice for a person who does not see. The real question was much more radical: what kind of dance becomes possible when vision is no longer the central authority?
This research opened a space where seeing was not cancelled, but transformed. Touch, breath, weight, sound, hesitation, temperature, rhythm, silence — all these elements began to work as ways of perception. The body became not only an instrument of movement, but also an organ of attention.
The project grew from my long-term interest in the body as a place of memory, vulnerability and political presence. In my artistic practice I often work with subjects that cannot be fully explained through words: war, fear, childhood, displacement, trauma, tenderness, the loss of familiar ground. With Laura, this research moved into another dimension. It was no longer only about what the body remembers, but also about how the body trusts.
Trust became the first material of the work.
Before any choreography could appear, we needed time. Time to understand how to enter the same space. Time to learn how to touch without forcing. Time to discover how one body can offer direction to another body without domination. Time to accept slowness not as a limitation, but as a method.
At the beginning, many actions were extremely simple: walking together, standing close, changing weight, following the direction of the hand, listening to the floor, sensing the border between safety and risk. These small tasks revealed how much of dance is usually built on unspoken assumptions. A sighted performer often uses the eyes to control the situation almost unconsciously. Without this control, movement becomes more exposed. Every gesture asks for clarity. Every impulse has ethical weight.
The process demanded a different quality of presence from me. I could not simply propose movement and expect it to be copied. I had to describe it, share it, transmit it through touch, rhythm, image and physical relation. Sometimes the most important part of the rehearsal was not movement itself, but the negotiation before movement: where are you, where am I, what is safe, what is unknown, what can we try today?
This changed the structure of authorship. Choreography was no longer something created by one person and given to another. It became a field of mutual listening. Laura’s perception of space, her way of sensing distance, her attention to sound and contact, her courage to enter uncertainty — all of this shaped the artistic language of the project.
One of the central discoveries of the research was that blindness should not be treated only as absence. Of course, it changes the conditions of work. It demands responsibility, precision and care. But it also reveals the poverty of our usual dependence on visual control. The world does not disappear when it is not seen by the eyes. It becomes different. Sometimes more fragile. Sometimes more intimate. Sometimes more honest.
The work was also inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s short story Eyes of a Blue Dog. I was interested not in illustrating the text, but in the strange territory between dream and memory, between presence and disappearance, between the desire to find someone and the impossibility of remembering them fully. The story offered an atmosphere rather than a plot: a blue darkness, a room of uncertain recognition, a longing for contact that may vanish with the morning.
This atmosphere entered the process quietly. It appeared in the way we worked with darkness, voice, touch and distance. It appeared in the question that stayed with us throughout the rehearsals: can darkness become blue?
The final result of the project was a performative work that brought together movement, tactile score, voice, sound and spatial sensitivity. Instead of creating a performance “about blindness”, we created a performance about perception, trust and the fragile architecture of meeting another person. Laura’s blindness was an essential part of the work, but it was not used as an illustration, metaphor or spectacle. It was part of the reality from which the artistic language emerged.
The final presentation invited the audience into a space where watching was no longer enough. The spectators were asked to reconsider their own position: what do we see when we look at another body? What remains invisible even when the body is in front of us? Can we perceive presence without possessing it through the gaze?
For me, the most important result of this project is not only the performance itself, but the method that appeared through the process. A method based on trust, tactile attention, slowness, ethical proximity and shared responsibility. It is a method that questions the dominance of the visual in contemporary performance and opens another way of thinking about dance.
Dance is often described as an art of bodies in space. After this research, I would say it differently: dance is the art of bodies learning how to be present for each other.
And sometimes, to truly see, we have to stop believing only in the eyes.

Team of the project:

Authors - Anton Ovchinnikov, Laura StadalninkaiteMentor - Anton OvchinnikovEmilija Dedelaite - assistantKristina Ciziute-Svirskiene - costume designer Photo - Ignas Aleinikovas
The Project created in the framework of Serpantino Laboratorija of Kaunas City Chamber Theater and supported by Lithuanian Culture Council