As a judge in any competition, you are expected to be “objective.” But I think there is no such thing as pure objectivity, since we all come to an event with our own set of past experiences. I am aware of my personal biases and try to move beyond them, but part of the value of my—or anyone’s—feedback is in the passionate personal response. And let’s face it, if we know a person from our past, we see more in their performance than if we never laid eyes on them.

This is why the American College Dance Association requires that its adjudicators be kept away from the participants— “sequestered.” All the planners take pains to keep each choreographer’s name and school hidden from the judges so they/we can form opinions on a level playing field.

Scotty Hardwig and Breanne Saxton in Eric Handman’s Disappearing Days, photo by Chelsea Rowe

In the West region hosted by Arizona State University, for which I served as adjudicator last week, ACDFA board member Brent Schneider and regional rep Catherine Davalos, as well as  ASU organizer Cari Koch,  cheerfully accomplished this goal. There were more than 25 schools from California, Arizona, and Utah. I don’t know the West Coast too well, but I do have a number of colleagues at some of these universities. And I admit, if I had known which schools the contestants were from, I might have unconsciously favored them. So I was glad to go into it blind and uphold the frustration of not knowing. (“Endure uncertainty,” wrote Dostoevsky.)

But it does make for a strange situation. First of all, when you’re all staying in the same hotel, you can say hello to the dancers but you are told not to have any more conversation than that. And if they are wearing a sweatshirt with a school name emblazoned on it, you have to avert your eyes. In the feedback sessions, the groups sit together and sometimes it’s obvious what piece they’ve performed.

They are not allowed to ask or answer questions. There’s no discussion, no back-and-forth with the people who showed the work. You can discuss among the two other adjudicators, but you’re all in the dark about identities.

Me, Rachael Leonard, & David Shimotakahara, photo by Lorelie Bayne

The upside of this is that you bond with your fellow adjudicators immediately. You end up hanging out as a threesome and finding connections to each other’s past dance lives. I enjoyed getting to know David Shimotakahara, director of GroundWorks in Cleveland, and Rachael Leonard of Surfscape Contemporary Dance Theatre in Florida. In the feedback sessions, we bounced off each others’ energies. No fireworks in terms of sharp disagreements, but we came to the table with decidedly different slants.

Inevitably, when you finally learn who made which pieces and what school they were from, you realize that some of your hunches were wrong. I thought I recognized a Crystal Pite influence in Disappearing Days and guessed it was made by her former dancer Peter Chu. Lo and behold it was made by Eric Handman, who had danced with me early in his career! Now teaching at the University of Utah, he’s developed an approach called “feral torque” that yields terrifically complex choreography. How did I feel? Surprised and proud.

Another stunner, RUSH, I had figured was the work of a Forsythe disciple, like maybe Helen Pickett, who loves to ricochet between deconstructed épaulement and the ballet vocabulary itself. Wrong again. It was made by Robert Sher-Macherndl for the Dominican University LINES Ballet BFA program. How did I feel? Like I discovered a new program and a new choreographer.

Watching the zany Neanderthal versus Cyborg, I laughed through it while having a lingering feeling that the charismatic female dancer was someone I should know. When she turned out to be Laurel Tentindo, whom I recently danced with in Vicky Shick’s Everything You See, how did I feel? Like I had forgotten what my own home looked like—but also exhilarated to see another side of this magnificent dancer.

And when I learned that the poignant solo-with-talking My Mother and I by Cambodian student Chankethya Chey had been coached by UCLA’s David Rousseve, who has made an art of autobiographical talking solos, how did I feel? Like I should have known all along.

So it’s a guessing game. Frustrating at first but delightful in the end. The payoff wouldn’t have been so filled with surprises if we had known their identities beforehand.

Warming up for the big vote. Photo by David Shimotakahara

Rebekah Morin as Red Queen. Photo by Adam Jason

At the beginning of Then She Fell, an immersive performance in a Brooklyn church, a man playing “the doctor” reminds us of all the meanings of the word falling: Falling down the stairs, falling ill, falling in love. The audience of 15 is sitting in a tiny room in a Brooklyn church. This little speech, delivered by a young man so cluelessly serious he put me in mind of Professor Peabody of Rocky and Bullwinkle, helps us feel like we are entering pleasantly endangered territory. The mysterious wines and liqueurs we are offered also help.

The dancers playing Alice, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Hatter—even the Red Queen—are not as intense as the characters in Sleep No More, the more blockbuster example of the new immersive theater. There is no violent thrashing against ceilings or murder in a bathtub. But the smaller, quieter, Bessie Award-winning Then She Fell, has its own rewards. First of all, audience members get to be themselves, not masked. You are guided here and there like a patient in an elite hospital, and it gradually dawns on you that you are part of the performance. You are not one of the white masked masses that surge through Sleep No More, but you might be just a windowpane away from the Red Queen grabbing her bottle of pills. Or you might be invited to play poker with—was it the doctor?—after he tells of a dream where the streets keep changing.

Then She Fell, with Marissa Nielsen-Pincus and Tara O’Con as the two Alices. Photo by Rick Ochoa

Secondly, there is a literary component that comes at you in fragments, and it’s left to you to connect the bits and pieces. With more than 20 rooms and audience members being led in different directions, you don’t encounter the same scenes as your fellow spectator. One scene that hooked me was where the two Alices almost merge in a two-way mirror, reminding me of the haunting, identity-confusion scene in Bergman’s film Persona. Another was the Mad Hatter giving dictation in a room littered with thousands of such failed attempts. He tries to dictate a letter, scampering nervously all over the room, never getting beyond the first few words. The letter seems to be about a break between Carroll and Alice. (We learn earlier that her mother put an end to his visits.) As the woman taking dictation tries to get it right, I am reading some of the myriad scrapped letters that have accumulated in piles—traces of many shows past.

The intriguing thing was hearing and seeing bits of writing by Lewis Carroll. You get a sense of the weirdness of Carroll’s obsession with Alice but also the vastness of his literary output.

Tom Pearson as White Rabbit and Rebekah Morin as Red Queen. Photo by Rick Ochoa

While the story of Lewis Carroll and his young friend Alice is one cornerstone of Then She Fell, the site itself is another. The piece was first produced in a hospital (thus the doctor) but it moved to this site, The Kingsland Ward at St. Johns, last year. The building housed Occupy Wall Street a century after it was built. Tom Pearson, one of the three originators (the other two are Zach Morris and Jennine Willett) said to me after the show, “I love the architecture, the culture of what’s underfoot, the smells and touch. We call it all topography and it grows roots in all directions.”

I don’t understand the math, but with audiences of only 15, and a cast of about 8 doing two shows a night, somehow this production is holding its own financially. Happily, it is here to stay for months to come.