The Vocabulary of Touch: Encountering Otherness through Contact Improvisation

A form of engagement, a gesture that produces contact, touch foregrounds the relationality of bodies. The implications of the ways in which touch is practised and conceptualised are relevant to a broad range of contexts and disciplines including epistemology, cultural studies, medicine, politics, religion and pedagogy. In light of increasing marginalisation and prohibition of touch in education and creative learning (Bannon & Holt 2012), touch is at risk of being poorly understood, policed and further relegated to intimate spheres. The dance form of Contact Improvisation (CI), typically based on two dancers in touch, offers a vocabulary of touch which foregrounds a rich resource of detailed phenomenological knowledge on touch experience and use, yet to be unpacked. Through a peer-facilitated practice-as-research approach, this project will examine how different dancers experience touch, interrogating the potential of CI techniques to support a rethinking of the creative, epistemological, social and political effects of touch. Drawing on Karen Barad's (2003, 2011, 2012) new materialist philosophy - and in particular on her understanding of touch as an entangled process that enables an encounter with otherness (including with the other within oneself) - this research will explore how different touch techniques facilitate the intra-action of phenomena between and through bodies. Arguing, with Manning (2007: xv), that 'touch [...] enables the creation of worlds', this project has significant implications for 21st century society where the overwhelming increase of virtual forms of communication highlights the urgent need to re-think ways of interacting, communicating, learning and coming together. The project's outcomes include: dance-touch workshops and a practical resource mapping and analysing the touch techniques investigated, encompassing reflections and ethical guidance to inform and inspire further applications of touch in dance and other forms of partnering, as in the development of embodied learning in education and healthcare.