→ Design overlaid on screenshot from performance: Daniel Teo

How might we respond to the current compounded losses of touch, of autonomy, of bustling buildings and gatherings of people? In our current digital spheres of communication, how can we re-trace and re-discover pathways of intimacy and touch with both human and non-human bodies?

In this special edition of Touch You Later!, an intimate online participatory performance, we hope to gather together and mark what would have been Centre 42’s last day at 42 Waterloo Street, and celebrate the team’s work and efforts.

Till we meet again in person, come join us to play, to dance, and to hope.

//

Touch You Later! (2020-ongoing) is an intimate participatory performance that was created specifically for the Zoom platform amidst pandemic conditions. In a world where physical touch and intimacy with loved ones became suspect, much less touch with strangers, what new forms of touch and intimacies might be possible between bodies and objects?  

Touch You Later! draws from Tactility Studies (2018-ongoing), a long-term performance project jointly manifested by theatre and dance artists Chong Gua Khee and Bernice Lee. Tactility Studies is an invitation to audiences to open up their bodies as sites and spaces for performance – to be soft, to wobble, to stretch and uncoil.

In turn, Tactility Studies conjures experiences where touch is both transgressive and reparative, pleasurable and profound. In playing with these tensions, each iteration is deeply responsive to the times and worlds we inhabit, in hopes of generating and expanding new affective discourses around touch and consensual intimacies.