Embodiment and Social Distancing: Practices

Raffaele Rufo,Alice Owen,Deanna Borland-Sentinella,Catharine Anne Cary,Nathalie S Fari,Louise Gwenneth Phillips,Anat Ben-David

doi:10.16995/jer.66

Abstract

A collection of five video essays on embodiment and social distancing, with a focus on practices. RAFFAELE RUFO, “Dancing Together Alone: What Can Be Learnt About Connection When Touch is Forbidden?” (00:10): This video essay reengages the experience of leading a dance improvisation practice on Zoom during the Coronavirus lockdown. As a tango and contact improvisation dancer confined at home, I felt urged to ask: what can be learnt about embodied connection when we are not allowed to physically touch each other? ANAT BEN-DAVID AND CATHARINE ANNE CARY, “What’s the Matter?” (05:54): Performers, scenographers, musicians and wordsmiths Anat Ben-David and Catharine Cary improvised via ZOOM every Tuesday from March to May 2020. Embracing latency, zoom’s affordances, limitations and distortions, they show here excerpts of a transformed body of work. Separated by 5218 km, given the Covid-19 situation, it could have been 200 meters. DEANNA BORLAND-SENTINELLA, LOUISE GWENNETH PHILLIPS, AND ALICE OWEN, “Virtually Embodied: Remembering the Sensations of Connection” (12:04): This film is an exploration of the body: Being present to place and time; being aware of connection with others, whether that be in reality or through virtual connection and sensorial memory. NATHALIE S. FARI, “Notes from a zoom 5Rhythms® session” (17:10): By using a three-hour 5Rhythms® online workshop as basis, this video sheds light into the ways in which the practitioner interacts and engages with both one’s own bodily awareness and the new technology of zoom. AMBERBECKYCREATIVE, “Sheltering in Spacetimematterings: Audiovisual Considerations of Social Distancing” (22:42): Two socially distant authors glitch audiovisual intra-actions through embodied (dis)orientations of space, time, and matter in past/present/future collapsed to (re)present what it’s like to shelter in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Highlights

“..there is a virtual exploration of every possibility
“So much happens in a touch: an infinity of others—other beings, other spaces, other times—are aroused.” (Barad, 2012, p. 206)
Fari works across the fields of performative arts, artistic research and somatic education

Summary

Introduction

“..there is a virtual exploration of every possibility. And this infinite set of possibilities, or infinite sum of histories, entails a particle touching itself, and that touching touching itself, and so on, ad infinitum. Explore that feeling where you could contact someone else’s hand. “So much happens in a touch: an infinity of others—other beings, other spaces, other times—are aroused.” We come to sense the intimacy of touch and movement in other beings, other places, other times...

Results

Conclusion