What utter nonsense! – you might be thinking now. But maybe it is a promise of a better understanding.

Or do you always understand what the choreographer is trying to convey? Storylines are begun, then left unfinished. Time and space are chopped into pieces – it’s like watching a music clip backwards. Just when you got to recognise one dancer, another one appears wearing his costume. Just when you seem to understand one character’s role within the dense activity, suddenly the role is doubled up. Just when you’ve come to appreciate that dance never leads to an organic ending, suddenly one dancer performs a masterful choreography –not with the whole of his body, however, but only with his hands and face. Something usually left to actors. A world turned upside down.

If you don’t quite dare to follow my advice and close your eyes (the ticket, after all, was too dear for you to want to miss anything), then you could do the following:

Complete a movement that intrigued you in your own head. Would you be able to finish it unharmed? Is it not true for your everyday as well that the phone rings right at the very minute that you settled down with a cup of hot tea?

Get up from your seat in the 4th row in the middle of the stalls (but only in your imagination, of course) and look at the whole thing as if you were sitting on the moon, holding a pair of binoculars. Where just before you’ve been puzzled how theatre can put so many different stories on stage at the same time, you will now be witnessing your own city observed from high above. There are people passing each other on the street without taking notice of each other, even though they have the moment and the space in common. They are sharing things as much as they are ignoring each other.

Join the dancers on stage (still in your imagination, please). You will encounter real people of flesh and blood – not some cadaverous aliens. Like a taxi driver transporting 40 or 50 people across town on a successful day – carrying a new storyline with each one of them.

If you manage to visualise this comparison, you are one step along to becoming an experienced fan of dance theatre. You will profit further by combining the different stories (of the taxi driver = audience). Maybe the lady you picked up at Uhlandstraße this morning knows the well-dressed gentleman who got in at the train station. And what if both of these people asked for you, specifically, to drive them, so as not to have too many witnesses to their secret love-affair?

Now, if you still cannot get a feeling for dance theatre, maybe you want to try and examine everything you see for its possible taste or smell. If it doesn’t smell like a neutral deodorant, then at least you know you’re not watching a bad classical ballet. But don’t get confused with the smell of the freshly showered lady in the seat next to yours. If you can smell the tube at rush hour, then you’re close to adopting those dancers on the stage. Or maybe the protagonist suddenly seems to wear the same perfume as your first love? If you can taste vegetable stew, then it’s bad dance theatre. That, too, can happen.

If you manage to feel all this, then you could already be called an emancipated audience.

But there is still the final test: Close your eyes and pretend to be someone born blind, who has just gained eyesight through a successful surgery.

It is a moment of exaltation and constant surprise: the cube, which the blind person could easily play with, is now unrecognisable. A friend’s hands, which seemed so familiar, now look like the hands of a stranger. The tactile sensors in the brain store information on shapes, edges and textures differently from the optic regions. A cube has to be perceived as a square block, not as a toy, before it can be visually recognised. The visual world has to be re-created by intellectual definitions of shapes. Our eyes are no camera, our retina not a film.

Only when you’re ready to accept that you don’t want to recognise anything you see, can you prepare to open your eyes. Only if you’re possessed by curiosity, can you really embark on discoveries. Be ready to close your eyes and slap yourself, whenever you catch yourself in the act of comparing: Oh, I know that. Knowing makes you lazy. And superficial.

However, you should make yourself comfortable in your seat. Enjoy this opportunity of redefining the world. Just like the recognition of an object is accompanied by a firework of electronic impulses in your brain, dance theatre at its best will create a world you have not known before. Choreographers of dance theatre are collectors of rarities, not inventors or storytellers. If you adopt their freedom, you will also be able to discover their findings for yourself.

Congratulations! You’re almost there! At the end of the piece, your neighbour to the right looks at his wife, shrugging. He would rather have watched the football on TV. He has no idea that you have meanwhile become an accomplice to the choreographer.

Now you’re leaving the theatre, already impatient to see the next piece, in love with the work of the choreographer and the dancers. Do you still think it’s nonsense to call dance theatre a theatre of images for the blind? No, of course not. You, too, close your eyes when you kiss someone – or don’t you?