[Music] Hello and welcome to Technicast, a podcast showcasing research from across the arts and humanities. I'm Maura Akhtomis and today I'm hosting the latest installment of our series on the Census. In a moment you'll hear from Rosalind Holgate-Smith about her research on Deep Touch in the field of dance and contact improvisation. And then I'll be back later to join you for a Q&A session. I hope you enjoy. [Music] I'm lying somewhere in the middle of a room. I have just been dancing with a partner. And I'm now lying spread on my back. Both my arms are right and left of me. And suddenly I feel fingers touch my fingers. And I'm somehow shocked by the tenderness of this touch. And I feel like what I know about touch or my socialization around touch puts it into like being in love for the first time. When you're sitting in a cinema next to your date and you do this reaching and you finally touch. And it's just like fireworks. And then I'm like, "Oh wow!" And just like, "Am I allowed?" I'm having a bit of a cinema in my head and I don't know. I have a lot of thought processes because it feels very deep. And then I try detaching this memory from the touch. And I can connect more towards just the sensation without the memory attached. My body starts to relax. Actually first, my strategy to feel the sensation and to detach from the memory is to connect to the weight of my body, to gravity. That helps me to feel more connected to the sensations I'm experiencing and the feelings. But without the situation or the memory attached to it. I realize I'm feeling pleasurable now for feelings sensations all over. And I'm happy they can arrive without going on a date to the cinema. [Music] My name is Rosland and I'm a dancer, choreographer and a teacher, working with a dance practice called contact improvisation. Over the course of my PhD, I've been investigating how touch makes possible encounters with otherness. Otherness that might be experienced as a kind of disturbance within an excitement, social insecurities, maybe feelings of a rouse all. All that kind of creative enlivenment and possibilities that emerge when we come into relationship. In the dance form of contact improvisation that relies on moving in relationship to a point of contact, giving and receiving weight. I've been investigating the vocabulary of touch that's used, how dancers apply touch and how they experience it, and how this vocabulary of touch might be developed. [Music] In this podcast, I'd like to share some reflections on deep touch, a category of touch I've been investigating, that is both concerned with how dancers express touch actively and outwardly, and how we receptively open ourselves to be touched deeply. Investigating deep touch has led me to think a lot about how touch always embodies desire and how touch can feel intimate and express sensuality. Over the course of my research, I've developed a number of techniques for dancers and people also interested in working touch that might enable intimacy as an experience or situation of reciprocal trust and recognisable change or transformation between partners. In these touch techniques, I place focus on dancers reaching, giving weight, and actively extending themselves to develop strong bonds in their surroundings that enable them to receive, feel and communicate in more global, subtle and nuanced ways. [Music] In the politics of touch, a book by Erin Manning, she introduces the idea that the body exfoliates. Exfoliating refers to having a receptive or porous membrane, and also exposing desires, feeling tones and kind of rubbing off a sense of being in and upon the world around. In this concept of the body that exfoliates is especially vulnerable body, a body that is without a complete sense of identity, unfolding, sensuously, and ongoing through its orientation to touch. Because as Manning and Delims touch always interacts with other senses, with, for example, vision and imagination, there are humans incorporate the world and embody the actuality and virtuality of others is manifold and infinite in its possible variations. Exfoliation underscores the importance of conceiving the body as a moving, sensuous process that multiplies, expands, dissolves, and displaces itself through touch towards other bodies, surfaces and spaces, creating and occupying new spaces in its movements of desire. The exfoliating body signifies that bodies in their living existence and expression in the world desire, not only as desire expressed in gestures that reach out for the apple, for example, for objects and people around, but also in bodies that inhabit space, that orientate on going the end of space themselves towards others. In the extract at the beginning of this podcast, a dancer is able in some way to expand, to exfoliate, or could say, into a full essence of feeling her body in this detaching that she talks about from a story, a story of a cinema romance falling in love, she's able to drop more into a widening sense of unfolding the experience. At the level of touch, at the level of physically being in her body. This concept that desires in her and in simply being alive in the world is echo also in John Paul's archers being in nothingness, where he describes that desire is consciousness making itself body. He says, "I feel my skin and my muscles and my breath and I feel them not in order to transcend them towards something as an emotion or appetite but as a passion by which I'm engaged in the world and in danger in the world." Similar to Manning, Sartre highlights the way in which through touch bodies are vulnerable to the effects and impressions of the world around, while also impressing needs once and a desire for growth in and upon the world around.
For some dancers, conceiving the body is a moving process, accessing desire and the ability to build bonds that allow for essentially rich engagement with touches inhibited by structures of dominance. With contact improvisation, being a dance form, developed at its outset by a white dancers, dancers of colour, including Mayfield Brooks and Kenna Alexander, for example, describe feeling unsafe and restricted to extend to move to their full kinesthetic range within predominantly white spaces. The claims of these dancers reveal how structural inequalities and the social milieu infilled trait onto the dance floor, with the effect of excluding marginalising certain groups. Because desire is responsive, tools are really needed for people to inhabit space, to inhabit their feelings, to inhabit their vulnerabilities and to assert their needs and passion to relate and to grow in relationship. So that's been my focus of developing the deep touch techniques and of developing and questioning these sites of potential intimacy where transformation can happen. We're learning that effects and shapes one of the whole body experience can take place. In researching the deep touch techniques, I've been finding some tools to anchor into the world around and to develop structural ties where there is a fine attention to small shifts that's opened up through a kind of widening receptivity to space, to widening ones' inhabitants of space, where it becomes possible to observe moderations in tissue tone, intention and density, to softness, to widening, spaciousness. I work with practices of gradual weight loading that start to reveal how one can change the tension and tone in particular specific parts of the body, to lift, to extend out, to connect in more direct ways with a receptivity, a porosity, to create some space in the connection, to feel perhaps the texture, the emotion, the quality that might be in the between, whether the relationship of touch is one with a rock or with soil or the skin of another and the back service, pushing, compressing, reaching down, ascending again up. Every touch has a texture, a quality, a depth, and in deep touch I'm interested in building these bonds, these structural bonds of reaching at the same time opening receptively to maintain some space in the bonds that might facilitate the space of recognising, recognising the other, the otherness that's there, those parts that we don't know that are not integrated, that maybe parts are feeling tones, that the other is bringing, that my partner is bringing, and with curiosity that might define that kind of active, outlooking touch, I come with the readiness to play with, to be with, to accompany that not knowing, that pleasure, that arouse all, all that disturbing, discomfort, that all might be considered, happiness. And so working with touch, I think one of my biggest findings, my project has been discovery around space, and relation to how we have it space and different material densities, so I've been working a lot with broadening the awareness, widening on spatial awareness to sense to feel more in every relationship, even when there is strong density and tone, how can we expand the mind, the body mind, to feel more specifically where the directions are taking place, and to perhaps have compassion with those strong assertions and compassion to be in difference, to perhaps often more, to be a bit more with this widened sense of space. While we often think about desire as a clear and direct force, desire is a complicated emotion and experience, complicated by hierarchies of difference, dominance of power, and often showing up in the shadow of shame, or expressions of frustration and anger, of grief and longing. So to feel desire is not always easy, and with these touch techniques I'm not proposing just to feel desire, but to feel all that is, to feel all that might be possible to experience in touch. After this, I had the pleasure of joining Rosalind for a chat about her research, and we'll share that with you now. Hi Rosalind, how are you doing? I'm good, thank you. Yeah, very good, how are you? Yeah, really well, thanks. Thank you so much for meeting with me today. So I really, really enjoyed your paper, I loved listening to it so much, I just thought I'd ask you a few questions. So just to start with, I'd like to come back to this idea of the body exfoliating or leaving traces of itself in the bodies of those we touch. It seemed to me that this is a really interesting way of countering the idea that everyone is kind of a discreet, bounded individual. It gives us a way of reimagining the self as porous and constantly in communication. Would you agree with that? Could you talk to us a bit more about exfoliation and sensuality? Yeah, I really love this terminology that many, very many uses. And yeah, it kind of both makes me think about porosity and how working with dance specifically, we in this dance, we're in contact with the position of very much kind of opening the skin and activating the skin to take in sensations, to read the world around. And also the sense of kind of more outward going touch, active touch. Manning talks about how we embody desire, how we in touch, join displacement as we move into the world. We're kind of expressing something and that might not be pleasure, it might not be discomfort. So even as we kind of move away from things towards things, we're adjusting according to what feels good, what we like, what we don't like. I like in this kind of sense of exfoliating that we're also kind of exuding like feelings, what we feel discussed or dislike or joy, whatever it might be comes out of this exfoliating how we are in the world. And I kind of make reference to it as well, but exfoliating has for me this maybe more privileged experience of sensuality. me.
dualities to do with an ability to expand, to kind of have this safety in the body or feeling of trust in the body to kind of explore or to unfold how we feel. And in my research that's not just been with bodies in touch, I was thinking this morning a bit and reflecting on some of my experiences in water. So I've danced quite a lot in water and there I had a feeling of weightlessness or especially in warm water and kind of dispersing, releasing tension in my body and kind of feeling the both of kind of comfort and trust. So not anybody is going to have in water. I mean, we're all, I mean, maybe different bodies of water, we feel different in if we're in the sea or in a kind of warm swimming pool environment. But the sensuality for me kind of comes together at that like environment where I feel like I can kind of fold a sense of curiosity out with the two of the world, but as a sense of being what that's like belonging and continuous with the environment. And for me, I've encountered that quite a lot of water. I love, I love water, love being water, love moving water. And maybe, maybe we all kind of could come back to that in our ancestral biology or ancestral history or in our mother's womb where they say that our first sense of touch develops. Maybe that gives you a little bit of the sense of how I'm thinking about like, relating. Yeah, that's fascinating. That's absolutely fascinating because I was when I kind of thought about asking you that question, I was thinking about your kind of contact improvisation practice and your practice dancing with another person. But it's really interesting to hear you kind of expand that idea about exfoliation and kind of mutual interaction, not just with other dancers, but with the natural world. And I'm really interested in that idea of kind of interaction and kind of beyond human communication. I'm really glad to have heard you talk about that. The other thing I really wanted to ask you about was you spoken your paper about Sartre Manning and their conceptions of the body as porous as well. And kind of being receptive to external stimuli and influence through senses such as touch. And you say in your paper that this can make the body vulnerable. I wondered if I could get you to expand a bit on the idea of vulnerability because we often think of vulnerability as a bad thing, but is it always? Yeah, and maybe just like from that reference to water, I could go off and say in my experience as a moving in water, I kind of encountered like a feeling I can dissolve here. I can enjoy like sweating out. And rather than thinking about vulnerability as in a kind of negative thing, I've been thinking about through my practice based research, how can sense both imaginatively and physically through states of relaxation or with space. So kind of expanding spatially within environments of touch and movement. And rather than thinking about kind of vulnerability and all its negative connotations, more kind of just a sense of like making myself available. How do we make ourselves available to the effects of touch at the environment? The influences of others, that might be also kind of well, the influences of others, we only experience it through our own tangible bodies and minds. But I think I've watched myself over the last few years and my mind, my mind kind of moved through states of overwhelm. So overwhelmed in an emotional sense or in a mental sense. And how do I kind of you know negotiate that experience? I think we can our in dance in this dance form of contact with our association. We need to in many in many moments assert boundaries. And yeah, in this sharing, I wouldn't call it a paper, but it's for me some reflections on deep touch. And what I call deep touches is very much about how we kind of establish certain boundaries or maintain a sense of agency in order to in order to be with change, in order to be with kind of what might be a kind of more vulnerable, vulnerable meetings or to be able to stay more open, to be able to stay receptive, to be able to be with kind of other values, ideas, other people, other kind of I mean all of this stuff of the world, it comes together and it's the lot of difference that comes together. In in this deep touch idea and kind of body of practice that I've developed that includes techniques, these are kind of techniques that I've developed to sort of establish bonds and a grounded sense of connection into the environment or with partners to kind of harness a sense of fully fully feeling one's body. And I think this is where vulnerability happens when vulnerability and it's negative connotations is is also to do we kind of un not knowing and the kind of undefined state that's not really integrated or fully known. And that's also really exciting and just think about you know kind of you know you have these needs sometimes I have these needs with my boyfriend last night on the phone like I kind of miss a miss talking to him and then and you know maybe we don't want to express these things because they're they're you know we're at a kind of flux of merging with another or exposing things that we maybe are not sure okay and are going to be met. Yeah how do we kind of hold these spaces that keep us sort of grounded in the world or here to be able to be with like these states of undefined state that's like sort of not knowing or being with possible change and with others. Does that make any sense what I was saying is kind of like complex and I recognize that. No no I think that does make a lot of sense I think particularly what struck me is your thoughts about what was it you said I love the way you said the stuff of the world I think you said the and kind of opening yourself up to the stuff of the world and being receptive to all the kind of senses and emotions that that make up the stuff of the world is is a huge kind of part of what you're saying here am I right in that. Yeah to like you know we kind of aroused by the stuff like stimulus from around us whether it's the stress of a PhD or it's all your messages on what's up or I know it's like the stuff that moves us and it's kind of like sort of trying to negotiate within us but things can't move you if you're to close down right and so that there needs to be an element of vulnerability in order for you to be moved and then to move. Yeah to be able to respond to those things. Yeah yeah and so all of this kind of thinking about deep touch has that influenced your kind of practice outside of academia particularly I'd be really interested to hear if it's influenced your performance and teaching practice. Yeah I mean I think it's it's starting to influence quite a lot not just my performance and teaching practice where it has a huge impact I mean through the course of my PhD I developed this sort of vocabulary of touch of listening touch techniques of light touch techniques and what I'm calling deep touch techniques. I'm I'm sharing through my teaching and I'm currently sharing in a kind of more comprehensive course that I'm running in Berlin but I'm also yeah it's also filtering into my performance work I've been made I made a piece called the pleasure patchwork recently which is a very slow growing project but it's a kind of blanket installation that has both a sort of phallic forms that you can turn inside out that make reference to the skin. It's the crochet blanket and all of these patchwork pieces you can you can kind of push them through one way and turn them out the other way so they're kind of like a bit like the skin cells like an imported surface area that is capable of taking a lot information and but they're also for me referred to this outward exuding or expressivity to reach and extending out into the world to move towards what we want and to touch that have to go out towards expressing ourselves so yeah I mean I'm busy developing kind of performance work and that's very life but also I feel like this.
topic of deep touch what it means to really be, be touched. Yeah, it's something that's both moving me more personally, perhaps making me think about, you know, maybe some of these techniques that I'm using that kind of are about opening a space and holding a space for intimacy, but that to be compassionate change between people or how we relate socially, how we kind of relate and deal with the challenges of being a difference or of being with complexity. Yeah, it could be more, could be used in relationship therapy or in personal therapy or in maybe there's many other contexts it could be used. So I'm quite excited at this point in my research to begin to kind of share the outcomes that are very physical outcomes, very physical tools and practices, but embedded within them, I hope that we might kind of open up a kind of intimate ground of relating. That's amazing to have so many kind of tangible, interesting outcomes from your research, how amazing. So if people want to find your work, where can they find you? Well, I can share you my website and there's the information about my touch trainings on there and some of my projects like the Teja Pact work and the other performance projects, like what a piece called Listening Touch and hopefully in the end towards the end of this year, I will be showing some work in the UK also in London, maybe at Kingston and at Independent Dance which is an organisation in Central London and I can imagine. Perfect, well I hope to be able to see some of your work soon. Thank you so much, Rosalind. Thank you more, I thank you for inviting me. A huge thank you once again to Rosalind for sharing her research with us and to you for listening along. If you're interested in making a podcast about your research, feel free to get in contact at
[email protected]. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you soon. Take care.
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