Touching across: Performing new dance ecologies through dialogical choreographies

Abstract

Postmodern dance and somatics have foregrounded the sense of touch via the skin as a subject of inquiry and a catalyst for change, nowhere more so than in Paxton’s Contact Improvisation (CI). Touch continues to be explored choreographically, beyond CI, in contemporary dance to increasingly stage more daring, excessive sensuality and erotics between performers and performers/audience for mainstream theatre. Such tactile strategies and displays, I suggest, raise timely questions about the politics of touch and what touch constitutes. This article is the second instalment of a wider research project that attempts to unsettle Global North and the dance discipline’s presuppositions about physical contact. Here, I build upon one of Paxton’s lesser-known theoretical influences that spurred the development of CI, namely his research into mother–child touch communication and ask: how might a feminist reassessment of maternal relationality – its haptics – generate new knowledge about touch and neo-liberal economy? How might such reconception move us towards different bodily practices and ethics grounded in the twenty-first century in dance and beyond?