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Well, Bee Arts' new exhibition The Dark offers you a pitch black experience at the St Nicholas Centre in Ipswich.Μύ

It's a touring exhibition which commemorates the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade by recreating what it would have been like to be a slave in a slave ship bound for the new world.

As a result it gives you plenty of food for thought.

It's very strange going into a tent indoors. Even more so, when the inside of that tent is totally black. Once the fabric door drapes shut behind you, you can see absolutely nothing. You can just sense the people around you. Then the sounds begin.

The Dark isn't a story in a conventional sense. There's no narrator. It's not a neatly told series of scenes. It's more like experiencing something first hand.

It's like this, but completely dark!

20 speakers create true surround sound and you hear your 'fellow passengers' on an 18th century slave ship moving, talking, crying, begging for mercy, dying and drowning.

With nothing to see, your mind focuses totally on the mish-mash of sounds. A conversation over here, creaking timbers over there.

Terry Braun, one of the two people behind The Dark, explains: "What we strive to do is present people with a story that was broken into fragments like a jigsaw puzzle. So we really rely on the audience to walk around and to physically explore in the dark. They can then make judgments on these fragments of sound and assemble the jigsaw puzzle in their own mind."

Gabi Braun is the other main collaborator on the project. She says people have a wide range of reactions to it: "Some people are really in tears, other people are strangely exhilarated, some feel the urge to dance, laughing - and everything in between."

It's certainly fairly intense, once you get over the initial weirdness of it. And as it builds towards a climax, I became acutely aware of the likely outcome for some of these slaves. It was haunting.

Some of my fellow 'experiencers' were also caught up in it. One girl told me: "Because it was so dark, it felt really real."

And a man said: "It transported you straight away, to do with the sensory deprivation I suppose. It was more like reading a book that watching a film, as you were transported into somewhere."

It's free and open to all. You can book in advance or just go along. There are shows every half an hour, and they last about 20 minutes. It's at the St Nicholas Centre in Ipswich town centre and is open 11am-6pm weekdays, 10am-4pm Saturdays until August 10th.

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