Un-Staging Tactility

Our sense of touch is interwoven with desire, fear, disgust, comfort, pleasure, danger. Tactility is by definition a complex phenomenon, defining our relations with each other and the world – but so often going unexamined. Because it’s so loaded with meaning, touch requires careful negotiation. And because everyone comes with their own history of touch – which can include training, practice, memory, and trauma – the ‘before’ of touch needs to be always lived afresh, carefully considered and reconsidered with each new encounter.

Three dancers (Helen D’Haenens, Raphael Philipe Damasceno Ferreira de Moura, Christine Sollie) & Vera Tussing invite the audience to explore who we are in movement, in dance, in this moment before touch? What memories of past touches do we carry within us? What possible touches precede any immediate touch? Does touch only happen when we notice it – when we actively reach for the other’s hand? What touches do we never even notice at all?