touching-touched, dance emerges in the hyphen, carving out a temporary autonomous zone.
“haptomai” is an ancient Greek word for touch. Its “-omai” ending employs a middle voice, which illuminates the mutuality of touch, that one is simultaneously touching and being touched. Touching-touched, dance emerges in the hyphen, carving out a temporary autonomous zone that are not bounded by fixed identities, in which our emergent relations are possible, in which I am woven into and becoming with others.
This project primarily draws upon my curiosity and practice in Contact Improvisation (CI) – an improvised dance form that invites practitioners to attend to and moving-moved by the emergent shared sensory experience via touch. Yet the research question sprouts from a chance encounter with and continuing practice in CI-inspired online jam since 2021. An inquiry often arising in our online practice has been: (how) can we share sensory experiences, where actual physical touch is absent online? Yet the “CI-ness” truly felt in these online practices enables me to realize that: touch does not end at one’s skin sac; it permeates and transmits through our attention. The embodied attention that touches virtually allows us to tune in to the dance with each other inclusive of various states i/she/he/they/it is in (the zoom-lagging, frozen, disconnection, immobility, not ready, out of tune…).
In inviting touching beings and things alongside you, dancing with more-than-humans, this project also attempts to offer an embodied approach to delve into the post-human
ponderation on intra-active agency and entangled intentionality.
This haptic piece invites you to touch it, with your skin physically, or with your attention virtually, and ask: where is the co-presence of other beings and things that are the co-subject of my dance in this very moment? may I notice in a subtle yet wondrous scale inclusive of beings and things alongside me, participating in their shimmering, wiggling, and murmuring?
This project primarily draws upon my curiosity and practice in Contact Improvisation (CI) – an improvised dance form that invites practitioners to attend to and moving-moved by the emergent shared sensory experience via touch. Yet the research question sprouts from a chance encounter with and continuing practice in CI-inspired online jam since 2021. An inquiry often arising in our online practice has been: (how) can we share sensory experiences, where actual physical touch is absent online? Yet the “CI-ness” truly felt in these online practices enables me to realize that: touch does not end at one’s skin sac; it permeates and transmits through our attention. The embodied attention that touches virtually allows us to tune in to the dance with each other inclusive of various states i/she/he/they/it is in (the zoom-lagging, frozen, disconnection, immobility, not ready, out of tune…).
In inviting touching beings and things alongside you, dancing with more-than-humans, this project also attempts to offer an embodied approach to delve into the post-human
ponderation on intra-active agency and entangled intentionality.
This haptic piece invites you to touch it, with your skin physically, or with your attention virtually, and ask: where is the co-presence of other beings and things that are the co-subject of my dance in this very moment? may I notice in a subtle yet wondrous scale inclusive of beings and things alongside me, participating in their shimmering, wiggling, and murmuring?
Tags:#touch#relationalpresence