There was a disordered sort of white noise.
A leg, perhaps a hand, appeared in the blackest of blackness that moved from the back of your mind to nowhere, and just as it swam into view it was gone.
Something creaked closed and the audience was bathed in a red light, sitting in front of a rich velvet curtain that covered a dark stage that had disappeared.
We were trapped inside the mind of David Lynch.
We were in a dark dream, struggled in the knotted sheets of an anxious night.
We were the blind, shuffling through an endless sinister night.
We were at Dark Matter at the Allen Hall Theatre,
Arts Festival Dunedin sets out strange, alluring hooks across Dunedin.
In theatres and cathedrals, halls and historic homes across the city, arts lurk and loiter, leaving out their bait to drag you in.
There is comedy, music, dance and drama, but at Allen Hall yesterday - and sadly its run is over - Dark Matter provided something altogether different.
An uncanny mix of light and no light, dancing and indescribable sound, it challenged its audience to make sense of what they saw, what they didn't see and what they thought they might have.
It was all that art could and should be: a spectacle, a journey to nowhere and everywhere, and a trip far inside and beyond the mind.
God, it was good.
