Getting Things Off the Ground

Abstract

‘What would it mean’ asks Daniel Heller-Roazen ‘for touch to be the root of thinking and for thinking in turn, to be in its most elevated form a kind of touch’? This paper examines the significance to practical knowledge in performance of the touch between foot and floor. Although its footwork has a reputation for being fancy, the pedestrian labour of performance often goes unnoticed. Although training or performing barefoot offers a particularly piqued sense of the contact between foot and floor, to imagine that the performer's foot is otherwise unfeeling is mistaken. In manual touch, feeling is not restricted to the hand per se, and nor in pedestrian touch, should it be restricted to the foot. Not only does this limit feeling to a matter of ‘in-body’ experience, but also misses the extent to which prosthetic devices like shoes accentuate or afford certain kinds of feeling, as much as they might be said to restrict or blunt them. Understanding this feeling is not only a matter of uncovering how the foot – shod or otherwise – provides it a ground – but also of examining the manner by which that feeling can itself be considered a means of exploring, and an articulation of, the ‘world’ of the stage in which the foot inhabits both the solidity of the boards, and the airy fictions which exist above them. The thinking feelings elicited or articulated through the foot are thus, for practitioners, a matter of both environmental knowledge and embodiment.