Performance Review | Giant Magnet's intimate encounter

Performance Review |

This year's Giant Magnet (the new name of the Seattle International Children's Festival) offers a unique, interactive performance that is infused with whimsy and innocence — but definitely for adults and mature teens.

It goes like this: members of the Belgian troupe Ontroerend Goed sit you in a wheelchair, blindfold you, bind your hands and wheel you into a darkened theater.

No, it's not for an interrogation session, but for an enveloping and magical, one-by-one excursion that blends imaginative theatricality with an encounter reminiscent of intimate "sensory awareness" exercises of the 1970s.

As you are steered along, laughing and chattering voices float around you from unexpected directions. Saucy questions are softly whispered into your ears. You are given objects to touch and taste, with your permission. And somewhere along the way, your photograph is taken, and joins a galaxy of portraits the company has gathered in its many tours of this aptly titled piece, "The Smile Off Your Face."

A revelatory treat for those who appreciate the intimacy and generosity, and don't mind submitting to the gentle, guiding touch of strangers, "The Smile Off Your Face" can be a transporting, even transcendental experience — or an overly intrusive one. But whether or not these young Belgian theater artists frame it as such, their work has many antecedents in the 1960s to '80s theatrical/psychological experiments of Allan Kaprow, the Living Theatre, Yoko Ono, Chris Hardman and others, in the sensory awareness and psychodrama movements, and in happenings from decades earlier by surrealists like Marcel Duchamp.

The act of transforming the spectator into an acolyte who is led through a shrinelike labyrinth of shared and private phenomena, can also be traced to the ancient rites and rituals from which theater sprung.

It's fitting that Ontroerend Goed (which translates from the Flemish as "Feel Estate") should evoke this tradition now, in its own extraordinary fashion. We're in an historical moment when urban life can seem utterly, tragically estranged from those ancient roots of ritualized myth and communion.

One shouldn't give away the mini-surprises, unsettling and poignant, that this 25-minute "happening" offers. And for the very jaded, suspicious or shy, the experience may prove more unnerving than worthwhile.

But for this veteran theatergoer, surrendering to the care and artistry of this bold young company proved to be both fascinating and heart-stirring. If you want to take the plunge yourself, act fast. Few tickets remain for the show's short run in Seattle and Tacoma.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com