Radical Touch
A collaborative practice as research with Florence Logan
Radical Touch is a movement-research project, in collaboration with contemporary performance practitioner and mover Romi Sarfaty, which consists of a performance duet titled "It takes place in the Womb" and through a series of community workshops titled Touch Tales. Our performance duet has been supported through residencies with Co.Labs (Czech Republic) in 2023, CityMoves Dance Agency Aberdeen and Dance Base in 2024. ​We will be delivering our first series of Touch Tales ​workshops in collaboration with The Village Storytelling Centre and the Glasgow Women's Library in February and April 2025, supported by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's Make It Happen fund.
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This project explores the touch practices and rituals of girl/womanhood, mothering, and female friendship in order to change the way we communally care for each other*. Our aim is to create new care practices through dance and authentic movement with an emphasis on joy, togetherness, and inclusivity. We are inspired by the unblemished love of girlhood and profound yet practical care of mothering in order to mitigate this current crisis and address our need for more wide-spread and unashamed acts of platonic intimacy. Looking outside and seeing the violent disregard and carelessness of everyday touch, the loneliness experienced by older generations, the alienation and consequential aggression caused by insufficient and artificial forms of online connection, and the heightened fear of intimacy since the pandemic - it’s evident that we need to relearn how to care collectively. We believe we are communally failing to provide the touch and affection we need, failing to admit that we need it. This project responds to this need and we believe that by listening and paying attention to the way women have approached care and translated it into touch in their everyday to navigate relationships could drastically impact and improve how we live together.
*It is important to say that we are defining ‘female’ as a transcending phenomenon which is not defined by a person’s biology, but instead focuses on the sensorial and experiential aspects of femininity and its practices. We are considering that acts of mothering can be genderless and are not restricted by biological relation or a generational difference. By women, we meaning having experienced any form of womanhood.
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In our performance duet, we specifically explore:
(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, the courage of trying.
(2) The duet of a body inside a body- drawing inspiration from images and experiences of pregnancy and mothering, viewing the body as a host-body, as both archive and archivist, as both carrying and carried.
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We work with real and imagined memories of closeness and touch in order to explore total unashamed togetherness in various forms of movement and ways of being. Our duet is built on obsessive trust and authenticity which means working with exhaustion and caring vulnerability to expose the body and its needs. We work with notions of real-time/real-effort and promising never to pretend. Our aim is to research every possibility of being together our bodies proposes. In our duet, we embrace the tender clumsiness and desperateness of trying to be together.
In Radical Touch, we wish to deborder the body and to be unconditionally together in all its difficulties, against loneliness. Our work, sincerely melodramatic and desperately loving, is inspired by the following words of 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.” We wish to explore platonic touch as a passionate, dramatic and unapologetic act and as a necessary way of communicating and living together.
Although our research starting point was girlhood and mothering and working with people with experience of womanhood, we expand these thoughts around platonic care and connection into spaces for everyone, and believe it’s crucial to do so.
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.