MEANS WITHOUT AN END
“...the topography created in a crumple and torn handkerchief in the depth of a pocket, where metric linear, time and space are collapsed into an unexpected topography of proximities and distances, where entirely different connections are made and events pulled into surprising intimacies and astonishing distances…” Michel Serres
Do we keep a safe distance between ourselves and our reality, ourselves and our experiences? Do we seek to put a frame around feelings so that they are contained and cannot leak beyond the boundaries we allow them? ‘Means Without an End’ is an interactive one to one performance where a single member of the audience and the performer meet in a space and with a card game and the unique physicality of body contact, aims at discovering an infra sensual language that our reciprocal touch creates. The act of touching someone, like in a Tango presupposes a certain demand, a decision, an instance of response-ability.
Means Without an End was performed in various venues and festival in the UK and Europe
2014 Tempting Failures, The Island, Bristol
2013 Dimanche Rouge, La Villette Enchante’ Performance Art Festival, Paris
2013 Darnley gallery, Synesthesia, London
2010 Performance/workshop during ‘Collision’ at Central School of Speech and Drama, London
2009 Performance at Coachwerks Performance Art Festival, Brighton
2009 BIOS, National Performance Art Festival, Athens
2008 Terra Extremitas by Foolishpeople – Nsdm Werf, Amsterdam
2007 Wimbledon College of Art, London
Type of performance: interactive (one to one) live performance
Equipment: A deck of 20 cards (each card is a photograph of different parts of the body: elbow, chin, mouth, knee, ear, hands, foot, elbow, chest, lips, neck and nose (genitals excluded)
Setting: The lighting is soft and understated.
Sound: Linear notes of a cello intersected by a clarinet - tempo increases slowly.
Time: The “ event ” for each encounter can last from 5 min to 1 hour.
Documentation: Photos, memories, anonymous guests written response and music/sound
Process: Two players, the performer (myself) and a member of the audience play the ‘card game’. The performer starts the process first: picking up pick a card from the deck and turning it over; the performer invites the member of the audience to do the same. Once that the two cards are revealed the performer will start to negotiate the contact-touch of the body parts revealed by the cards (genitals excluded) and hold in position for a short length of time.
The tension of the piece will be created by the fate of the card game; a combination of ear versus knee or forehead and foot.
The contact that the game implies is a skin-to-skin encounter. Some members of the audience will be willing to play the game in its entirety removing their clothes to allow any kind of skin contact, others will only participate with positions that they are comfortable i.e. hand to chin, elbow to ear etc (where there is no need to remove their clothes) whilst others will simply refuse to engage in any skin to skin contact.
The work seeks to question rather than provide easy answers. By asking the audience to take a risk, a sense of intimacy is established, creating a direct and immediate dialogue.
Conceptual Intention: In modern society we sometimes feel that there is a constant striving to pull back and create an armor for ourselves in order to build up a system of defense. The notion of pulling together becomes a key imperative for secure identity in the world. Do we keep a safe distance between ourselves and our reality, ourselves and our experiences? Do we seek to put a frame around feelings so that they are contained and cannot leak beyond the boundaries we allow them? Michele Serres speaks of the topography created in a crumple and torn handkerchief in the depth of a pocket, where metric linear, time and space are collapsed into an unexpected topography of proximities and distances, where entirely different connections are made and events pulled into surprising intimacies and astonishing distances.
‘Means Without an End’ is a one to one “performance/event” where a single member of the audience and the performer meet in a space and with a card game, the use of text, sound and the unique physicality of body contact aims at discovering an infra sensual language that our reciprocal touch creates.
The piece is an attempt to understand the structure and possibilities of “Touch” by exploring personal/social distances and proximities, in an event/performance, which involves interactive physical exchange in order to experience, investigate and question conventions of the body boundaries and the politics of contact improvisation. Through touch the body is improvised at the level of its perceptions and the significance of these perceptions. The performance examines in a contemporary playful form, these personal / social remoteness and closeness in order to permeate the barrier between two individuals and explore whether or not this exchange/ encounter has a meaning.
The emphasis on touch is a play on ambiguity, aimed to soften the perceptions of our boundaries and make us more aware of our own fragility and strength. The act of touching someone, like in a Tango, presupposes a certain demand, a decision, an instance of response-ability, in the performance the idea is to flavor and rock the boundaries between states of allowing and mindful intention.
The aim is to experience vulnerability for both the performer and the audience, as a way of exploring how the social relationship might adjust (or not) to accommodate this sense of energies and cascading power exchanges.
This makes the participants aware more than ever before of their individual perceptions, the pain of disconnection and the desire for communication. It is a reflection of what we are exposed to in our daily experience.
I am interested in the reaction positive or negative that subjects when bypassing language might have towards each other. The skin as a medium becomes the star of the show as well as the opening to its own identity.
On touching: The surface of the body is a thinking, feeling surface. It is a shell that protects us but also opens us toward and makes us vulnerable to an other.
Our bodies are resistant to ourselves, to each other, to knowledge, to language, to sensing, as well as to ignorance, to be touched to be meaningful, to being there. Touching our bodies is a gesture toward each other and ourselves, 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.
Touch is a moment of response-ability, an instance of reaching out, a touching of what I do not yet know, a touching of an other in a reciprocal engagement with the unknown. It is the discovery of an infra sensual language that our reciprocal touch creates.
I cannot predict the effect on my skin, since it cannot know the other reaction to my touch and vice versa. This is what makes touch so difficult to embody comprehensively, what makes touch ungraspable and indefinable-in and of itself.
Touch is not simply the laying of hands. Touch is the act of reaching towards something/someone, of creating space/time through new worlds that occur when bodies move. Touch when seen in this way, is not simply something added to an already stable body. Touch presupposes a certain demand, a decision, and creates in the other an instance of response-ability. This multidimensional movement of desire is violent .A violent event that induces at once what can be imagined beyond the scope of our experience.
Relation to 'Tango' : Tango, like touch, is the act of reaching towards something/someone, of creating Space/time through new worlds that occur when bodies move. The Tango is used here as a reference. In fact, it is the improvised nature of Tango that fascinates me and makes it possible for me to use Tango as an example of the politics of touch. Since the movements of Tango are always to come, it is impossible to speak of a Tango, as an ideal gesture or a contained negotiation: Tango in this instance works as an attempt to explore relations in the context of potential corporeal negotiations. Tango as an encounter it is a peripheral engagement with the world that introduces us to a different way of living with an other. It is a movement that offers the possibility of improvising our encounters. It is a dance that turns us toward an other to whom we might not speak. It is about movement between here and there, about an exchange between two bodies.