A Newly Relevant Dance About Torture

Choreographer Ping Chong’s latest work is guaranteed to provoke thoughts about the recent Abu Ghraib torture scandal, but it wasn’t designed that way. The actual subject of “Blind Ness: The Irresistable Light of Encounter,” which premiered this spring in Ohio and moves to New York this week, is the brutal but century-old maiming and killing of Africans in the Congo by an occupying force of Belgians. But Chong has a history of creating provocative works, and the apparent American policy of torture and intimidation in Iraq makes the performance resonate like a national gut punch.