© Stanislav Dobák
Un-Staging Tactility
What comes before touch? Our sense of touch is interwoven with desire, fear, disgust, comfort, pleasure, danger. While tactility defines our relations with each other and the world, it often goes unexamined. Everyone comes with their own history of touch, which can include training, practice, memory and trauma. Because it’s so loaded with meaning, the ‘before’ of touch needs to be always lived afresh, carefully considered and reconsidered with each new encounter.
In this performance Vera Tussing and three dancers 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? What touches do we never even notice at all?
