Why touch : I am a single

“The most subtly necessary guardian of my life is the other’s flesh. Approaching and speaking to me with his hands. Bringing me back to life more intimately than any regenerative nourishment, other’s hands, these palms with which he approaches without going through me, give me back the borders of my body.” (Irigaray, L.  An Ethics of Sexual Differences. pp. 187)

Considering the lack of touch in my life I still have the vivid memory of the actions though there is no resonance of feeling. I am researching touch because I think it is now affecting my health.  I found my ability to handle stress or remain calm in desperate situations to be far less than before.  I notice couples more than I see single people.  Couples surround me in different stages in their relationships.  I find myself as an individual and find it hard to think I will share my intimate life again.  This is why I find it important to research touch as my new work.  My work has always been centered on human connectivity and as I find myself losing the sight of populace I don’t think I will understand what I am making work for. 

Movement has been a mechanism for me to connect and share. I am person who feels more comfortable with sharing my interest and thoughts physically with my body than with speech.  My skin is a narrator for my thoughts, interest and opinions.  In the work, I use contact improvisation as my form for exploring touch.  There is not an interest in choreographing the figures because if the movement becomes comfortable than attention and sensitivity is lost and human connectivity is as well.  This would make it a play and not an exploration or true meeting.  The work is entitled Meetings, which happened quite interestingly.  I chose the name for the press kits 3 months ago but as I started to develop the tasks for the improvisations and organizing the work more it truly was variations on the word.  You find the quick interactions that dissipate as quickly as they were formed.  The text is formed in conversations, which resemble arguments and therapy confessions but not inappropriate narcissistic emoting. A timekeeper moderates all these elements, which is the videos projected on the video screens at the back of the stage. Each text or improvisation is cut off by a video interruption.  There is a meeting of the figures on stage with the one on the videos.  The work makes me think about how quick touch comes in our lives and how we can be sensitive to it or brush it off.  

Seeing my body so I can feel

“It is hyperbolic, of course, to say that the perceiving body cannot be perceived" (Carman, T. 1999. pp.207)

We find ways to view ourselves in amidst of understanding our own bodies.  I started to explore touch in my daily life for a new work. What I came to realize was that I needed to have bodily self-identification for me to understand the resonance of touch and the localization of that feeling. This is why I perform showing my skin; it is a demonstration to be seen by viewers and for myself to understand my borders.  As I cannot truly “see myself seeing” I can view the body through devises and mechanisms that allow me to re-examine my image of self.  But the form I see is my perception and possibly is not the real or the perception of others.  I try in understanding what histories allow us to make a response to the body and how we view it.  I consider my histories or exchanges that make up my view of myself.  I find that I am more shocked by my image in pictures than in mirrors.  But I made a mental note of the image of myself and that doesn’t include my current state that is that I have a mustache.  The image is of myself with a trimmed beard as this is my usual fashion and has been for 6 years. 

I chose video to display my solo work because I can choreograph the image and present it to the spectator as the  possibility of how I view my body.  I think about the idea presented by Merleau-Ponty “as for my body, I do not observe it itself: to be able to do so, I would need the use of a second body, which would not itself be observable” (PP, 91).  I am not sure I agree that this is the way to discovery self-identification but I do like the concept.  I have chosen to film 5 short improvisations based on the same concept (“The body and feel itself feeling”) from different angles. In performance I will watch these improvisations all at once.  I am interested in what will I see?  I have found myself surprised by my image but the response of a fully dressed figure watching his naked image exploring touch.

        

Once I am on to certainty of self-identification I can explore feeling and resonance.  Touch is emotion, physical contact prempted by feeling.  The receptor of the contact is skin but the resonance of that feeling is stored within the brain.  Memory and proprioception work together I feel in a way that I must indentify the place of contact and the emotion exchange from the event.