→ Screengrabs from the performances

Singapore’s COVID-19 lockdown, rebranded as a ‘Circuit Breaker’, began on 7 April 2020 and lasted till 1 June 2020. For three months, residents hunkered down, confined in their homes and accommodations, to stop community spread. Now, as the situation seems safer, a mask and tracing applications serve as our main protective barriers when venturing out in public.

In this new, wobbly reality of sharing physical space again while still juggling virtual backgrounds paired with pajama bottoms, what does it mean to open up to touching objects and meeting strangers, and how might we find new intimacies and new forms of touch in digital spheres?

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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.