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Imagine meeting someone for the first time in total darkness. You don’t know what skin color they are. You cannot determine their age, gender or country of origin. whether they have a significant disability. If they are very rich or live on the street.
From the very first fraction of a second we meet a new person, our brains start tracking any immediate visual cues, and you don’t get any immediate visual cues. That pounding heart that goes with instant sexual attraction—or that instinctual sense of danger or fear.
What if you only have voice? How does that change whether you end up accepting that person into your life – or rejecting them?
Brian Roccelloa traveling musician from Boulder whose name is Rosh (rhymes with Josh), learned that darkness is great back in 2006 when he was wandering around Iceland in a public figure experiment social balancer.
Rosh was wandering around a cafe in Reykjavik that was holding a disability awareness event, as he toured the tight-knit country of 300,000 people performing his songs. He got a business card written in Braille and led him down a dimly lit highway into a dark room filled with laughter and chatter.
“It was a powerful moment,” Roche said. “It’s like the shock of jumping into a cold pool — and the shock of being hit by a wall of sound.”
‘Love & Rainy Days’ lives in the dark at The Blind Cafe, which returns to Boulder’s Dairy Centre October 14-16.
Rosh hands his business card to a blind waiter, who leads him to a table with a bunch of cool kids, probably in their teens or early 20s. They drank coffee, ate pastries, and chatted for hours, burrowing in and out of English for Roche’s sake. No one asked Roche: “Where are you from?” But someone asked him directly: “Are you from Colorado?” Icelandic strangers only know.
They talked about all the things that separate us: language, race, age, gender, disability — and the vagaries of light and dark.
Rosh, who had never seen his new friend’s face in the light, later wondered what it was like to experience a concert like this — “freed from all vision,” as he put it. It’s a weird conceit – one way to bond is to let go of one’s dominant feeling. But think about the awkwardness of your typical Zoom call. We tend to look not at the speaker but at ourselves, preoccupied with how we must see others. Think about the anxiety and stress that comes with a blind date, or even a casual office introduction. The clumsiness of the dinner party. Our brains instantly process all the first impression data and make judgments from it. It’s all fueled by an overactive vision of ours.
Roche, who was in Naroba University In Boulder, it has come to believe that vision can actually distract us. So what if he took all the visual clutter out of the way and all that was left was listening to words or music?
“When I’m in the dark, I experience a level of freedom from all the inherent neurosis that comes with eye contact and visual conditioning in social gatherings,” Roche said. “When everyone is on an equal and neutral visual playing field, it forces you to be in the present with each other – but without the pressure of visual processing. It’s like assessing the size of everyone in a room and trying to decide Are you a good fit for these people. Darkness provides a way for people to really open up, share and be heard. It’s like you’re in space — anything is possible.”
Since 2010, Roche and his Blind Cafe Orchestra Traveled across the country to provide a family concert dining experience in 100% darkness for over 50,000 people. The original idea of returning to Iceland was to illuminate the experience of the visually impaired. And, yes, “of course, I’m an advocate for the blind,” Roche said. But more importantly, he said, “I advocate for all people to feel connected to each other in any authentic way possible.”
The ‘Blind Cafe Experience’ returns to Boulder’s Dairy Center this weekend, resembling a three-course sensory meal — one of which is an actual meal — along with a discussion of positive social impact, followed by an intimate music session meeting. Everything is in the dark.
Rosh has hosted private events for as few as 15 people, and as many as 1,000 people have participated in the Google Leadership Program. (And then Katy Perry’s birthday party.)
Columbine High School teacher Jeff Garkow takes his seniors to the Blind Cafe every year.
Jeff Garkow, a longtime social studies teacher at Columbine High School, attended a blind cafe experience in Boulder six years ago and has since brought members of the senior class to Rosh as his parting Gift. That means, in essence, seniors at the school with the worst school shootings in America at the time are now spending their final two hours of high school with Roche in literal and metaphorical darkness.
“Magic happens when you take a group of young people who are about to enter the next phase of their lives and put them in total darkness,” Garkow said. “They opened up like never before. They had the opportunity to reflect on their time in high school and embrace the authenticity that doesn’t always happen when we’re guided by visual cues.”
Garkow said his students quickly learned how to lean on each other and embrace the feeling of the unknown. “By the end of the evening, we had a large group of seniors singing together loudly and sharing in a way they wouldn’t normally,” Garkow said. “It was an incredible experience.”
After the lights go out, attendees use the buddy system to enter the blind cafe experience.
The three upcoming shows in Boulder will be held in a small studio at the Dairy Arts Center with about 50 people each. They’ll offer vegetarian and meat options for what Rosh calls a potent, conscious menu, under the direction of blind ambassadors. Rosh is working with nearby founder Marcus McCauley Macaulay Family Farm On a picnic-style meal, he says, “it’s as good as your grandma’s Sunday dinner.”
They’ll hear music from The Richie Flores Project and Rosh himself Blind Cafe Orchestrawhich includes pianist, upright bass, cello and Rosh Sing arouse Sam Liang or New love. Roche said there would be a clear connection between the songs and the living conversations happening around him, he said.
Flores is Rosh’s chief blind ambassador and greatest champion. “Rosh is clearly a unique life force on this planet,” said Flores, who played with the Blind Cafe Orchestra in Austin’s early days when he was president of the local chapter. National Federation of the Blind. Rosh was seeking support from the blind community. Flores is interested in doing anything different to provide awareness to the greater Austin community.
Flores has since broken with the federation, in part because it passed a resolution condemning all “dinner-in-the-dark” experiences that have become a cottage industry, he said.
“Some in the blind community think that whenever you take your eyes off an (undamaged) person, you scare them (beep),” Flores said. “They believed it wouldn’t have a positive outcome — even temporarily, and in a safe way. But I said to that community, ‘Why don’t you come and experience our community? “
“What we do is not ‘dinner in the dark’. It’s much deeper than that. What we do is ‘learn in the dark’. It’s about connecting with others and connecting with ourselves.
“We have very little opportunity to use the other four senses, which are somewhat hidden, because we don’t use them like our eyesight. We use darkness as a tool, and you happen to have some food right in front of you. But I don’t have a (beep) beep). That’s not the point.”
Food was prepared for the blind cafe participants, who were then led into a darkened room.
Everyone who comes to a blind cafe has a different experience, Rosh admits,
“Some people do start to lose their (beeps) in the dark.” But chaos is just synonymous with excitement, he said. Roche fully accepts Trungpa Rinpoche’s mantra: “Chaos is good news.”
By embracing darkness, Rosh is fighting centuries of social training in which humans have been taught that darkness is evil and something to fear. This idea is at the root of racism and colorism, with all its baggage of light and darkness. This may be one of the reasons why the city of Boulder gave Rosh a grant in 2018 to hold discussions on “de-racism” in the dark.
“Darkness has a bad reputation,” Roche said, recalling his first experience in Iceland. Steeped in darkness, but surrounded by food and laughter, Roche feels nothing is isolated or lonely.
“I think everyone in the world right now just wants to go back to the present in some way,” Roche said, “and I think people feel most alive and most when we have some context in which we can connect. wide awake.”
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