→ Photo Credit: Objectifs - Centre for Photography and Film

When was the last time you touched someone other than people in your household, or your family?

2020 has been a peculiar year of minimised human touch, rapid digitalisation, and a pervasive air of uncertainty as the world recalibrates around an unseen virus. In these times, we protect one another by not-hugging, bumping elbows, and trying as far as possible not to breathe the same air. What then are options that do still remain for us to touch? In the durational work Tactility Studies: Pandemic Distances, we sensitise the soles of the feet, and play with gestures of self-care in public space -- in persistent hope of expanding the current choreographies of touch and connection.

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Tactility Studies: Pandemic Distances is an iteration of Tactility Studies (2018-ongoing), a long-term performance project jointly manifested by theatre and dance artists Chong Gua Khee and Bernice Lee. Emerging from their exploration of ‘the body as theatre’, each iteration of 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. 

Since 2018, Tactility Studies has been incubated at and supported by Dance Nucleus, Singapore. fb.com/TactilityStudies