Touch (Sk)Interrupted?

Abstract

This article focuses on Dante or Die Theatre's socially distanced performance installation Skin Hunger (2021), an intimate one-on-one experience which explores the fundamental role that touch plays in our lives. The desire for contact is enduring in the social and sensorial imagination, particularly now during what Richard Kearney has termed the ‘pandemic eclipse of the tactile’. Elsewhere I have asked whether our tactile starvation will manifest in an increase of productions that satiate our need for touch? Or whether our anxieties over contact will predominate and result in an increased ‘sanitization’ of productions, a reduction in (sk)interactivity, and the proliferation of narratives which draw on our phobic responses? With this line of questioning in mind, this article will document my experience of Skin Hunger, as a ‘socially distanced spectator’, within this new framework of the socially distanced performance installation. It will consider the (skin)aesthetics used – the performers, for example, are swathed in plastic – to enable safe, intimate encounters between performers and the audience. It will also focus on the ways in which the absence of touch might increase the power of ‘the promise of touch [as] an explicit dramaturgical tool’ (Shearing 2015: 72). With reference to the health and safety documentation prepared by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, in consultation with representatives of the performing arts sector, this article will ultimately suggest how 'statecraft,' or the visible COVID safety measures in place, might become a form of 'stagecraft' in relation to the development of new (skin)aesthetics and, more broadly, the enhancement of touch – or, rather, the absence and anticipation of touch – as a dramaturgical tool.