What would it be like to go through life blind? You may be able to imagine it, but that is very different from actually experiencing it. That was possible in Café Hofsteenge in Grolloo. There a theater play was performed completely in the dark. Even the chairs had to be found by touch.
“Alie, Tinus, are you still there?”, a woman calls over her shoulder. She has her hand on the shoulder of her predecessor, a visually impaired person with a cane. She is then led to her seat in pitch darkness. And yes, Alie and Tinus also find their place this way.
The café’s banquet room has been completely darkened for the occasion. Every window and every crack is taped up. In the middle there is a row of tables, along which the supervisors can find their way by feeling.
One of those supervisors is Henk Buurma. He himself became blind later in life and understands that it is exciting for sighted people to be guided in this way: “Of course it is a bit scary. A lot of people walk a bit crooked, a bit tense. For me that is not a problem.” problem, because I don’t see anything.”
The performance is organized by the Friends of the Hendrik Kok care center foundation. Hendrik Kok is the name of an Interzorg location in Rolde, where people with visual impairments can go.
The care center has been around for fifty years, so the foundation wanted to do something nice to celebrate that. “It’s a party, but also something to think about,” says Henk Santes, chairman of the Friends of Hendrik Kok Foundation. “The blind are not always taken into account enough.”
There are two performances on Tuesday and Wednesday with between fifty and seventy visitors. According to Santes, it is a special experience to enter the dark world of blind people. “The people giving the performance are right in front of you. But you cannot see them, you can only hear them. You have no idea what is happening around you. People often experience that as helpless.”
“When one experiences this, one has some idea of what it is like to be blind,” Buurma adds.
Watch here how fifty people find their seats in the dark: