TUCH
Solo Live performance about EPIC TOUCH.
TUCH is both an intimate and informal conversation set around a choreographed catalogue of moments of EPIC touch with and from other bodies and also indulging in the absence of touch. The body is treated as a prod-able, bouncy and fleeting mass in a series of actions WITH and AT others.
The process of the work was based around semi-improvised monologues, google facts and movement sequences relating to memories of touch and learnt knowledge, which move through various anecdotes about the impact of different sensations and their traces. The work refers to conversations had about how to make this work more effective, how to really connect with people and began life as a solo project for live event ‘ Body As Archive’ at the ‘Slade School Of Fine Art’ (London.) Tilda and I then reimagined the solo using her experiences for The Royal Exchange: Co:Lab Festival 2018.
Video documentation by Scout Stuart
Special thanks to Rowland Hill (Body as Archive), Juliet Davis (Participant)+ Tilda O’Grady (performer + collaborator)
“ The audience are encouraged to find somewhere to stand in the bare studio space. It starts with the simplest of introductions, a sparse explanation of what will happen. Then O’Grady begins to carry out sequences of individual movements – intricate, often at speed, sometimes expansive often compressed – all leading to touch. The intensity of feeling and emotion is gripping –
She moves through the crowd, stopping now and then, reflecting and then moving on. There’s something of a ritual about it. Throughout she talks (sometimes in abstract terms) of remembered moments of touch, seeming to relive them before our eyes. Up close and personal. At one point O’Grady reads from a copy of Ali Smith’s Artful – a book whose narrator is haunted by a former lover. When she lets out a cry or repeatedly runs violently at a wall is something (or someone) being exorcised?
It’s a fascinating work, seeming to withhold as much as it claims to reveal. Starting to tell us something then remembering that there was a decision to cut that bit. Appearing to reach out and touch members of the audience but stopping just short of any genuine physical contact. Repeatedly asserting a need to be touched but then running away when someone eventually plucks up the courage to do so. Things speed up and then become momentarily still, sentences begin and then drift off. We are invited into her train of thought only to be rebuffed. It gives the illusion that we are active participants but what we are witnessing are memories of other bodies. Tuch’s flamboyant self-absorption is however difficult to resist as the fragments of sensuous intimacy coalesce into an enthralling spectacle.
Circle&Stalls
Reflection 2018”
