The vocabulary of touch: encountering otherness through contact improvisation

This PhD investigates how touch is used and experienced in Contact Improvisation (CI), a dance form based upon communication through touch between one or more partners. In dialogue with phenomenology, affect theory and new materialist philosophy, touch is researched as an entangled sense that interacts with dancers’ physicality, emotions, cultural and social history, thought, memory and imagination. With the aim of developing ethical approaches to touch in dance, the project questions how touch enables encounters with Otherness. Here, Otherness is interrogated through practice as an entangled experience encountered within an individual subject, as conceptualised within new materialist philosophy.

Building upon current dialogues concerning consent, social justice and touch deprivation in Western society, the research identifies how touch is used and experienced amongst dancers, from which it develops a unique Vocabulary of Touch that proposes to expand an embodied ethics of touch and consent in CI. Guided by new materialist theory, the research is primarily informed by fieldwork in which I investigated interactions between CI dancers in studio settings and dancers’ interactions with environmental matter outdoors, including water, soil and trees. Unique inter-material insights are drawn that concern space, tension, density, and material agency. These discoveries are incorporated into the vocabulary of “listening”, “light”, and “deep” touch techniques, which contribute new ways of attending to dancers’ emotions, desires, and vulnerabilities. In the thesis, I discuss how these techniques have been developed through practice, teaching and performance-making, and how they can be used to enhance empathy, dancers’ communication skills, and to navigate both disturbing and enlivening encounters with Otherness. The project also generates performance outputs, which demonstrate how the found insights and touch techniques can be used to facilitate easeful states of regulation, dancers’ agency and expressive capacity, and experiences of intimacy and transformation.