Throughout Deep Trance, Foreman’s actors nod at various forms of extreme experience: the actors put Smarties candies on their tongues, imbibing them as though they were tabs of acid; one actor intones “me and my shadow” calling forth the “shades” of ancient and Medieval theosophies; on the left and right walls of the stage are “spirit photographs” (19th century photographic portraits of actual people double exposed with “otherworldy” presences) and gold-painted masks (masks of transmigratory movements? the Bardo journey of Eastern mystical practices?). I am drawn to all of these details of Deep Trance as they interpolate Foreman’s audience as “undead,” where one experiences undeath both through mystical experiences and psychedelic ones, as well as the nonsensuousness of thought as an experience of interiority deprived of outside data, given to neural activity in and of itself.

While I believe Foreman’s theater to provide principally the experience of “no body,” a bodily awareness “cancelled-out” by thought, dream, and chemical simulation alike (and hence the appearance of “X” and “NO” in the videos of Foreman’s past two productions), it also points to ways that nonsensuous experience is involved in a political-ethical imagination. During the moment when I most felt relieved of my “regular,” waking-consciousness during Foreman’s Deep Trance, one of his actors walked on stage with a costume mostly hummingbird, and part tank. On the hummingbird-tank’s beak was blood; on its breasts, flags of the United States and UK. Among all the visions of Foreman’s Deep Trance, I think of the hummingbird-tank as an irruption of the real, peeking out at its entranced viewer. And it is to such visions of this world that Foreman’s drama would wake us, if only to draw us back into other worlds of dream experience, hallucination, and a distracted consciousness.