Description
This special issue deals with touch as it appears, is deployed, applied and experienced in the production and reception of performance. However, rather than continue to perpetuate a dyadic account – of touching and being touched – in which it remains a fundamentally passive receipt of sensory information about other things, the issue’s authors give attention to the active, the multiple and the mysterious in the act of touching. To reduce touch to sensation alone would be to obscure the tension and release inherent to the acts of hefting, grasping, stroking, pressing and testing that are shaped and afforded in acts and events of performance. Even more than this, as the issue’s authors attest, to attend to these acts is to describe an aesthetics – a knowing in sensing – in the admixture of bodies, environments and events.
READ THE EDITORIAL AND ABSTRACTS ONLINE
1 Editorial: On Touch
ASHER WARREN AND MARTIN WELTON
7 Touch (Sk)Interrupted? Dante or Die’s Skin Hunger: A socially distanced performance installation
FREYA VERLANDER
16 Trust Fall: Rubbing rocks and the irreconcilability of objects
TED HIEBERT
25 Touching Moment [Artist pages]
ROSEMARY LEE
27 The Sound of a Door: Reflections on tactility of sound design for Feeling Thing, a dance film by Candoco dance company and Jo Bannon
JULIE ROSE BOWER
36 Wearing a Second Skin of Sound: Touching the other through sounding and listening [Artist pages]
JAN SCHACHER
38 Cassils with Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘[T]he touch is not less deep than the wound’ (Nancy 1991: 98)
WENDY HUBBARD
46 soft matter: Re-pair [Artist pages]
SIMON WHITEHEAD
48 Touching through Music, Touching through Words: The performance and performativity of pianistic touch in musical and literary settings
ALEXANDRA HUANG-KOKINA
56 Eye Contact and the Performative Touch of Blindness
DEVON HEALEY
64 Sonic Touch: Charting connections in contemporary sound-led performance practice
MILES O’NEIL WITH HOLLY AUSTIN, CAYN BORTHWICK, ALISDAIR MACINDOE, TAMARA SAULWICK AND GLEN WALTON
72 Enduring Touch
MISCHA TWITCHIN
81 To Kill or Die For: The imperceptible tactility of public feelings in Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists by Tiago Rodrigues
ANA PAIS
……………………………………………………………………………………
REVIEWS
91 Dancing and Reading across Difference, with Love
REBECCA CHALEFF
92 Embodied Rhetoric
HEATH PENNINGTON
……………………………………………………………………………………
94 Notes on Contributors