A Listening of the Flesh

Abstract

How do dancers and practitioners take proper care of one another as they engage in practices involving physical touch? In this article, I investigate this issue by analysing the practice of massa (mass) by Brazilian choreographer Marcelo Evelin and how this practice informs the movement aesthetics of two of Evelin’s works, De repente fica tudo preto de gente (2012-) and A Invenção da Maldade (2019-). In the practice of massa, a group of dancers move as closely as possible, forming a swirling mass of perceiving flesh. Within this haptic intensity, the dancers can experience an entangled state where their sense of separation decreases significantly. Whilst this desubjectification carries both joyous and transformative force, it also raises the question: How to navigate and respect each other’s boundaries in such deregulated and hyper-tactile states? By discussing Evelin’s practice, I aim to show that there is more to choreohaptics than simply dissolving individual agency in favour of relationality. With the help of Deleuze’s Spinozan ontology, in which beings are defined by their ability to affect and be affected (1988), I will argue that we can understand the practice of massa as a constant attunement towards co-composition, towards an attentive care for different bodies’ differing affective capacities – what we, in inspiration from Denise Ferreira da Silva (2014), could call affect-ability. Based on this, we can approach choreohaptic practices as a listening of the flesh to itself in/as alterity, or what Zun Lee, in resonance with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s notion of hapticality (2013), calls a ‘micro-climate of care’ (2021).