As most of my human contact became restricted to the Zoom screen in spring 2020, I discovered a serious limit to my capacity for looking. I also began finding it difficult to read. A ten-month headache taught me to stop taking ibuprofen and learn to manage tensions around my eyes and head as well as to shift roughly half of my reading to screenreaders and audio books. The need to restructure my own practices of seeing refocused my interest in theatre's engagement of the senses at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic destroyed people's ability to smell, prompted them to hoard toilet paper, and created a U.S. boom in bidet purchases. These personal and cultural developments coincided with revived metaphors of blindness on the pandemic stage. This article begins with a brief discussion of The Blind, an “immersive audio/visual meditation journey” that Here Arts Center produced in 2021, and then centers on Blindness, the “socially distanced sound installation” produced by the Donmar Warehouse in 2020 followed by an international tour. I wonder at the reiteration of blindness as a tragic trope, seemingly unaffected by progress in disability rights, equity, and inclusion. I wonder at the appeal of wielding any contagious illness as metaphor during a global pandemic. My analysis turns particularly upon the relation between blindness and excrement in José Saramago's novel Blindness and the effect of cleansing the theatrical installation of any shit as well as the even more surprising choice to eliminate the voices of the blind characters. A detour through medieval French farces that link blindness and excrement reveals submerged tropes at play in these performative responses to fear of diminished capacity and diminished control—everything that individuals and societies cast out in order to maintain what we call health, whether literal or metaphorical.

中文翻译：

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剧院中的失明、排泄和弃绝：ASTR 主席致辞，2021 年 10 月 30 日

2020 年春季，由于我的大部分人际接触都仅限于 Zoom 屏幕，我发现自己的观看能力严重受限。我也开始觉得很难阅读。十个月的头痛让我停止服用布洛芬，学会控制眼睛和头部周围的紧张，并将大约一半的阅读时间转移到屏幕阅读器和有声读物上。在 COVID-19 大流行摧毁了人们的嗅觉能力，促使他们囤积卫生纸，并在美国掀起了坐浴盆购买热潮的同时，需要重新调整我自己的观看实践，使我的兴趣重新集中在剧院的感官参与上。这些个人和文化的发展与大流行阶段失明的复兴隐喻相吻合。本文首先简要讨论盲人，Here Arts Center于2021年制作的“沉浸式视听冥想之旅”，然后围绕失明，Donmar Warehouse 于 2020 年制作的“保持社交距离的声音装置”，随后进行了国际巡演。我对失明作为悲剧比喻的重申感到奇怪，似乎不受残疾权利、公平和包容方面进步的影响。我想知道在全球大流行期间使用任何传染病作为隐喻的吸引力。我的分析特别关注何塞萨拉马戈小说中失明与排泄物之间的关系失明以及清除任何狗屎的戏剧装置的效果，以及消除盲人角色声音的更令人惊讶的选择。绕过将失明和排泄物联系起来的中世纪法国闹剧，揭示了在这些对能力减弱和控制力减弱的恐惧的表演性反应中隐藏的比喻——个人和社会为了维持我们所谓的健康而抛弃的一切，无论是字面上的还是比喻上的。