One book that deeply influenced our rehearsals as well as my own thinking process throughout was “Politics of Touch” by E.Manning (2007). He describes his understanding of the role of the senses and touch in particular. It is an attempt to explore of what might happen “if we are willing to direct our thinking toward movement, toward a relational stance that makes it impossible to pin down knowledge but asks us instead to invent.” (p.11) The most striking realization for us in rehearsals was that touch between two people can only happen in the singular-plural. As Manning (2007, p.8) describes: “I touch you twice, once in my gesture towards you and once in the experience of feeling your body, my skin against yours.” Moreover, does he believe that touch connects bodies intermittently: “touch is an utterance geared toward an-other to whom I have decided to expose myself to, skin to skin.”(p.9) When touching another body, a person receives a response, not necessarily felt or acknowledged through words, but through the return of the touch, initiated by the other person. Manning adds: “ with touch I enter (in communication with) you, with you I create the interval between me and you, I am moved by you and I move (with) you, but I do not become you.”(p.11) Through touch one becomes accountable to another and this gesture therefore renders the “subjectivities plural”.
During our so called “Placing and removing” exercise the dancers are asked to put one hand onto a body-part of their partner. The partner responses by taking the received touch to another body-part of their choice and after puts their hand onto the body of the other performer. This placing and removing of different body-parts can go on for a long time and can also shift from hands to other body-parts. While engaging in this task Flavien once noticed: “I am not just touching Hannah, but she is touching me at the same time!” This reminded me of Manning’s believe that one can only touch another body by allowing to be touched in return. “I am responsible for doing the touching and yet I can’t touch without being responsive to it.” (p.8) Sometimes, my dancers got quite entangled while doing this task and they told me afterwards that they weren’t sure anymore if they were the one’s initiating the touch or their partner. It became a complex task that challenged my performer’s understanding of who is receiving or initiating the touch.
Furthermore, I often chose to read parts of the book to my dancers, while they engaged in improvisational tasks with one another. The words influenced their way of connecting to another and it also helped them to stay connected both to their surroundings and to other people in the space, as they mentioned afterwards.
During the sharing of my work, I decided to also include some of Manning’s quotes as recordings in the Soundscore, in order for the audience to hear them, just like my dancers used to in rehearsals. All my performers spoke different parts of the text, which enabled them to listen to their voices later on while performing. They were a constant reminder for them about our process, our influences and experiences in the studio. Some of the chosen quotes from the text can be found below:
“Touching our bodies, gesture toward each other and themselves each time challenging and perhaps deforming the body-politic, questioning the boundaries of what it means to touch and be touched to live together to live apart to belong to communicate to exclude.
There is no touch in the singular. To touch is always to touch something, someone’s. I touch not by accident, but with a determination to fee you, to reach you, to be affected by you. Touch implies a transitive verb, it implies that I can that I will reach toward you and allow the texture of your body to make an imprint on mine. Touch produces an event.
Touching you, I propose to you to receive, to touch. To touch Is not to manipulate. I cannot force you to touch. I can coerce you, I can take your body against your will, but I cannot evoke purposefully, in you, the response to my reaching towards you. To touch is to tender, to be tender , to reach out tenderly.
Perhaps, this tendering is always, in some sense, a violence: it does violence to my subjectivity to the idea that I am One. I cannot affect you violently: I affect us.
To touch is to gently encounter a surface.
To touch is to feel the limits of my contours
To touch is to expand these contours
To touch is to share”