Radical Touch
A collaborative practice as research with Florence Logan
Radical Touch is a new method of moving created by Romi and Florence. This method not only applies to performance making, but to living and moving through the world. Radical Touch focuses on creating new care practices and principles of dance which put an emphasis on experimentation, togetherness and inclusivity in order to mitigate the current crisis of loneliness. Radical Touch is inspired by writings of the Care Collective on promiscuous care, Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, the work of Carolien Hermans on touch and Emily Underwood-Lee and Lena Simic's research on maternal performance.
Looking outside and seeing the violent disregard and carelessness of everyday touch: the alienation and consequential aggression caused by insufficient and artificial forms of online connection, the loneliness experienced by older generations - it’s evident that we need to relearn how to care collectively, how to touch radically. We believe we are communally failing to provide the touch and affection we need, failing to admit that we need it. We believe we have a lot to learn from the touch-semiotics and practices of girl/womanhood, mothering, and female friendship to stop this societal failing.
Last summer, Romi and Florence were invited to a residency at Co.Labs in the Czech Republic where they explored duets of radical closeness between female bodies, specifically:
(1) The duet of a body next to a body and/or with the memory of a body- exploring the fear of never feeling close enough.
(2) The duet of a body inside a body- drawing inspiration from images of pregnancy and mothering, viewing the female body as a host-body.
During the long days in a 30°c studio, our exhaustion and short temper betrayed our attempts to communicate with words and our intentions became cloudy with ego. Touch was all we had. Embracing the sweaty and sticky tension of collaboration and considering touch as an independent mode of communication, we removed the trivial and tiresome pedantry of words which allowed us to understand each other more. It was then that we first started to explore Radical Touch, a touch that we also recognised in our female relationships: consensual and platonic, important and passionate. It is not calculated or motivated by cryptic factors- it is freely given and generously received.
At the end of the residency, they shared their research as a scratch performance titled Baby, a collection of love that falls in-between. The full-length performance is currently in research and development.
The aim of Radical Touch is to wash away behavioral patterns we had to learn in order to move through the world. We acknowledge the necessity of social conventions and codified ways of communicating which are there to protect and organise the spaces/people we live in/with, but in this practice, we intend to create a space that feels safe enough to not rely on those patterns and encourages the exploration of new ones.
Our practice as duet is built on our fanatic commitment to ideas, even the tiniest ones, an obsessive trust in each other and a gratefulness for our surroundings. Our collaboration is built on the following principles, written by futurist founder F.T Marinetti:
“Intensify the communication and the fusion of human beings. Destroy the distances and the barriers that separate them in love and friendship. Give fullness and total beauty to these two essential manifestations of life: Love and Friendship.”
Through writing and dance, we hold each other and won't let go. Our work is sincerely melodramatic and desperately loving.The worlds we create whirl and wonder/wander between nostalgic trances, manic child-like pretending, irrelevant confessions, and sweaty paranoia. We generate material through various practices of movement and dance, such as somatic movement, Butoh and body-weather techniques, bouffon, jazz dance and partner/lift work - playing with strength, duration, exhaustion and closeness, always. We also engage in collaborative writing in a stream-of-consciousness format which prompts their movement explorations.
In our duet, we are eager to embody and explore the pulsive and trembling relationships of two.