BLIND NESS: The Irresistible Light of Encounter

BLIND NESS: The Irresistible Light of Encounter is a multidisciplinary theater piece about Belgium’s brutal colonial exploitation of the Congo in the 19th Century and its reverberations into the present. Using text, movement, performance and puppetry, BLIND NESS intercuts the dramatic narrative of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, told through shadow puppetry, with the real-life figures of King Leopold II of Belgium, who acquired the Belgian Congo as a personal colony, and courageous activists, such as Roger Casement, Edmund Dene Morel, William Sheppard and others, who orchestrated one of the first global mass-media human rights campaigns to reveal and stop his abuses.