You're seated in a beanbag against the wall, you're told not to let your legs or belongings creep out onto the area rug, and you're handed night-vision glasses. When the lights go out, they go out completely. It's not just that the three dancers who begin performing can't see each other, they can't even see their own hands. The lighting design is infrared—so you, a sanctioned voyeur, watch the dancers dance, but they can't see you at all. Occasionally, one slowly creeps into your view—without warning, because you have no peripheral vision—crouched down and blindly trawling the perimeter like a human who doesn't seem quite human.

The dancers spin each other, fall, push each other away, scramble to find each other again out of nowhere. Sometimes these movements are tender, sometimes violent. There are duets and solos. The performance lasts 20 minutes. The dancers are green, grainy, tiny, and flat in the scopes. Other than that, there's only total blackness and the sounds of breathing, like the sounds an apartment neighbor makes in the night or early morning, erotic by mere suggestion whether erotic or not.

Seattle choreographer Crispin Spaeth first created a version of this show (for five dancers rather than three) and staged it at Western Bridge in 2006, with the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on her mind. (Everybody involved has limited information and could get hurt.) The current remount is sold out, but the dancers sat down after preview night to talk about what it feels like to dance in total darkness. Their names are Annie Hewlett, Elia Mrak, and Kathryn Padberg—and they all said it's unlike anything they've done before.

Some people have trouble breathing in that much darkness. They feel like the air is ink. The worst feeling is a missed connection, passing by the dancer you were supposed to meet. "You know it the second it's been missed," Padberg says. "It's horrible."

Touching someone is the only grounding thing. Otherwise, just roaming that void, "I feel like I'm drowning in my internal perspective," Hewlett said. "There is something about being in the dark that brings out insecurities."

Out in the other galleries of Western Bridge this spring, all the artworks are made of light, but there are no ambient lights on. For Dark Room Trio, the dancers learned the choreography in the light, but quickly moved to the dark. Spaeth's early background was as a visual artist—working in the darkroom on photo-based prints. Her first experiments in dark-room choreography were inspired by a studio in the University District where the lighting was terrible. She turned it off, and everything changed.