Touch me, feel me.
Intimate Encounters
(2008)
New Venture Theatre
New Venture Theatre. 20-25 May. Various Start Times. (45min)
This was an incredibly brave and experimental theatrical installation from New Venture Theatre. Individually you are lead, blindfolded, through a landscape of touch and a sea of bodies; snippets of dialogue spark memories within you.
Through losing your sight and the trust you must therefore place in these unseen strangers you begin to undo and re-approach your relationship to intimacy and see poignantly the boundaries and walls that you have put up over time.
This was such a visceral piece that I am finding it hard to ‘review’ it – one must experience what they experience – it will be individual to each and every person, just as each person’s ‘performance’ is slightly altered and tailored to the individual.
What struck me most was the multiple perceptions and reactions I had to their touch, and the different kinds of intimacy I was reminded of. Their hands their bodies their whispers became everyone I’d ever know/n – everyone who had ever loved me, protected me and used me. Mostly the feeling I sensed from the performers was a gentle, caring one and the experience of being hugged, and such focus placed upon you for that time, was extremely uplifting. On the other hand certain touches were unnerving for some unknown reason and I began to wonder how much of intimacy is just chemical, an unknowable instinct to be close to some and distant from others. In this way they became a simultaneous, genderless and multifarious collective: lover, stranger, friend, abuser, mother, and child, a communal entity who I almost miss now the performance has past….whose smell I can vividly recall. I marvel at how quickly intimacy can come about when you allow yourself to trust, and then how quickly the closeness that you shared can vanish.
[Alice Trueman]
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