In anticipation of Crash, performed by the Belgium group CREW, I am sitting in the foyer of the Rotterdamse Schouwburg. I am being welcomed, along with three other visitors – each Crash performance is for a maximum of four visitors – and my personal Crash buddy leads me to an individual ‘cell’. She starts to dress me up, putting a helmet-like construction with video goggles and headphones on my head and hanging a bag in front of my belly. Then she buckles me onto an upright table, all the while giving me instructions. Attached to countless cables, I am completely wired.

CREW makes use of new technologies, like virtual reality. In Crash the visitor is immersed in another world through a VR-helmet. The performance is not something happening in front of him/her, instead, s/he is invited to imagine a world created through projections onto the goggles, and through texts, sounds, and tactile experiences. The images s/he perceives are a combination of prerecorded and live images. The visitor is immersed in VR, and sees his/ her own body as well. The live, real-time images are recorded by five tiny cameras attached to the visitor's helmet, and are then mixed with the prerecorded material, and transmitted to the goggles. Fiction and reality merge into an imaginary theatrical universe, and it is no longer possible to distinguish between VR and the actual world. The visitor is temporarily deprived not only of his/her usual sight, but of his/her sense of hearing as well. Through headphones, music and sounds penetrate the visitor's ears, acoustically disconnecting him/her from the here and now. As a consequence, the visitor feels completely isolated from the real world, and reality is replaced by the world evoked by CREW.

In this imaginary world I see projections of myself being driven around, and simultaneously the buddy moves the table I lean against. I feel that I am actually moving, while in fact I stay immobile. Because different senses are being addressed simultaneously, I get a remarkably realistic, almost uncanny, experience. The effect is amazing and disturbing at the same time – I find myself in constant sensory confusion, and I lose every sense of where I actually am. At a certain point in the performance, my buddy lowers the table, bringing my body into a horizontal position.