The Blind Leading the Blind

Everytime I hear the words "trust exercise" I think of that scene from Mean Girls when Gretchen, a nasty gossip monger, inadvertently ridicules everyone else by speaking the truth and ends up falling flat onto her friend who is the only one there to catch her. However, with only five students in our class now, I believe that exercise might have been a little bit too much to handle. Instead, our teacher decided to send us out into the campus in small groups to lead a blind-folded classmate. Each of us took turns being the blind or the guide. Being able to experience both roles, I felt as though they completely changed our perception of everything. Obviously when you are stripped of your vision you tend to behave a bit meeker, possibly even introverted.

At that time, all your attention is focused towards listening to the voices of your guides and paying heed to any changes in the environment that you could possibly get a sense of. Smell actually became of a great use to myself because my guides thought it would be quite hilarious to send me blindly into the boy's bathroom. Prior to entering the bathroom I had bumped into something quite cold and hard (which was actually the door to the bathroom) and realized that something must have been going on. It wasn't until I had smelled the stench oozing from the boy's bathroom that I realized where I must have been. At a later time, my guides once again tricked me into walking into a classroom. Low and behold this time my sense of hearing came to the rescue and saved me before I actually made it all the way into the classroom. What tipped me off was the noise that the ramp leading to the classroom was making as I made my way up. Throughout the entire experience this sense of foreboding plagued me when I was apparently walking in completely wide open spaces. This shadow of paranoia made me feel as though there was always something within a few feet that would knock me down any minute. It was the most bizarre feeling I've ever felt before!

Now functioning as a guide was a feeling completely the antithesis of everything I've been talking about. It felt oddly empowering to know that another person was depending on you to tell them everything from the grade of the ground to the changes in terrain. With a close group of friends during this exercise, we all felt it was inevitable to play a joke or two on each other. For one of our classmate's we decided to take her up to the soccer field where we almost had her walk through mud. Unfortunately I misjudged the distance and instead I was the one who stepped in it. In the end, however, all the power gradually became somewhat of a burden. Minor things we would never notice regularly suddenly became integrally important for the blind to simply walk a few feet or up a flight of stairs.

This awareness of our surroundings becomes somewhat second nature in theater as actors become accustomed to the certain height of steps or the layout of the stage. However if something as minor as an uneven step were to be changed, the entire flow of the show would be disturbed. This experience, I believe, contributes to the whole process of the director-actor relationship in which blocking is established. It isn't that the director is leading the actor blindly, per se, so much as the director is guiding the actor through the correct motions. Let's hope that in this case, it isn't the blind leading the blind...