Staging an encounter
The departure point of this research was intimacy, I was attracted to the moments where I found myself the most vulnerable, raw, and shed possible. I began to wonder what would happen if I created for myself and other spaces where we could explore intimacy perhaps only suggested or completely explicit, what were the conditions I needed to ensure to create these spaces? The research became more about the ethics of participation and the implications of participatory art in the realm of contemporary dance.
Participation is now a day a buzz word, it is assumed that if a work is participatory it must be inclusive, socially engaged, and ‘actively engaging’. Within this realm of the research I was interested in creating spaces where the passive-active dichotomy was questioned: watching, sleeping, imagining, dancing with, or thinking about, are all active verbs that we (audience and performers) as co-participators of a staged event perform. I turned to installation and site-specific processes because they gave me the opportunity to think and create through setting conditions for an event. I wanted to create spaces where notions of care, tenderness, and attunement were suggested but not imposed, and to depart from there in order to see where could we could travel.
Thinking about the conditions at the staging part of the process allowed me to draw a conceptual connection between the ways of training, the ways of creating, and the ways of staging. I realized that my main strategy during the research had been to focus on the conditions present at any given event and work in designing or problematizing them. By focusing on becoming aware of the conditions present and researching how to relate with/to them without a desire to control the research gave way to ethical questions of engagement, participation, creation, and responsibility.
Touch Interviews, 2018