Tactility Studies: Soft Bodies
(2019)
Work-in-progress showing:
7 Dec 2019. Dance Nucleus.
Production Info
Incubated at and supported by Dance Nucleus since 2018
Work-in-progress showing supported by National Youth Council, Singapore
Production Credits
Co-Directors — Chong Gua Khee and Bernice Lee
Dramaturg — Corrie Tan
Creative Presence — Joseph Nair
Set/Prop Designer — Sheryll Goh
Phase 1 workshopping performers — Chan Sze-Wei, Benjamin Chow, Eng Kai Er, Julius Foo, Bib Mockram
Phase 2 workshopping performers — Julius Foo, Adele Goh, Hasyimah Harith, Myra Loke, Wayne Ong, Toh Kwee Kee
Phase 3 & Work-in-progress performers — Julius Foo, Adele Goh, Myra Loke
→ Photo Credit: Joseph Nair
If we think of ‘The Body-as-Theatre’, the body as a shapeshifting archive of memory and sensation, what languages do our muscles and limbs speak? What kind of fluency exists in decoding the gestures and caresses of others?
Tactility Studies: Soft Bodies proposes that tactility is a language we can all build sensitivity and fluency in, through experience and practice. In this cozy piece that builds relationships between 3 performers and audience members through touch, sound, voice and text, our skin isn’t what contains our bodies – it’s what opens out our bodies to other bodies and other encounters.
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Tactility Studies: Soft Bodies is the first 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