Un-staging Tactility

In this promenade performance incorporating dance, immersive choreography, sculpture and sound art, Vera Tussing and collaborators ask: What comes before touch? 

Our sense of touch is interwoven with desire, fear, disgust, comfort, pleasure, danger. Tactility is by definition a complex phenomenon, defining our relations with each other and the world but it is so often left unexamined. Because it is so loaded with meaning, touch requires careful negotiation. And because everyone comes with their own history of touch – which can include training, practice, memory, and trauma – the ‘before’ of touch needs to be always lived afresh, carefully considered and reconsidered with each new encounter. 

In a show consisting of four different parts, three dancers (Helen D’Haenens, Raphael Philipe Damasceno Ferreira de Moura, Christine Sollie) & Vera Tussing invite the audience to explore who we are in movement, in dance, at the point before touch? What memories of past touches do we carry within us? What possible touches precede any immediate touch? Does touch only happen when we notice it – when we actively reach for the other’s hand? What touches do we never even notice at all? 

• Vera Tussing’s (she/her) creative processes, performances and installations are driven by her interests in dance, movement, perception, the senses, embodied experience, multisensorial spectatorship, collectivity and consent. Her most recent series of work, the Tactile Cycle, is formed of stage creations, sculptures and movement-sound installations focussed around the creation of unique, inter-personal encounters between audience and performer. She has worked as a dancer, director and researcher throughout Belgium, the UK and across Europe. In October 2019, Tactile Quartet(s), a performance in which she expands her research into tactility to the discipline of music, went into premiere at Kaaitheater.