LISTENING TOUCH is a one-to-one interaction with a touch guide, and a performance installation made for gallery spaces. For a duration of 30 minutes participants are offered an opportunity to receive touch that is not wanting or expecting anything from them. They may rest, move and respond. Heightening receptivity to more subtle sensations, this hands-on experience serves to support cellular expansion, nervous system regulation, and attention to what the body innately knows and needs.
In this participatory performance, the facilitating touch guides are trained somatic bodyworkers and Contact Improvisation dancers. Participation is voluntary and gallery spectators can also view the sessions.
Listening Touch was first presented at Medleys, Chistinnenstraße 19a, Berlin as part of the exhibition 'Attunement in Practice', on the 9th Dec 2022 (images and video below) and subsequently in Festivalen13, in Gothenburg, Sweden, 6-8th Jan 2023 (images above).
Listening Touch is a performance emerging from my PhD investigation of how touch enables encounters with Otherness and the haptic vocabulary used in Contact Improvisation. Drawing on Karen Barad's new materialist philosophy, I have considered and investigated Otherness as a co-creative form of agency, emerging from already entangled relationships. In Listening Touch, we explore beyond the boundary of our skin to attend to accumulating forms of agency. It is a meditative practice that involves accompanying and supporting subtle movements, emotions, forces and atmospheric qualities, while maintaining the ability to feel and respond in relationship. The Listening touch practice also asks that the touch guides stretch their attention and give space to be with nothingness, the unknowable possibilities of experience, and where and how the movement could unfold. With increasing technology and touch regulations in Western society that reduce in-person contact, Listening Touch stands to evolve trust, empathy and awareness in how we touch, communicate and come together.
Listening Touch, presented in the exhibition 'Attunement in Practice', at Medleys Studio, Chistinnenstraße 19a, Berlin 9th Dec, 2022