Tag Archives: touch

CfP: TDPT Special Issue: Touch and Training

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Special issue: Touch and Training to be published June 2023

Call for contributions, ideas, proposals and dialogue with the editors

Guest editors
Dr Ha Young Hwang, Korea National University of Arts, School of Drama, Seoul, South Korea (hyhwang@karts.ac.kr)
Dr. Tara McAllister-Viel, East 15 Acting School, University of Essex, London, UK. (tamcal@essex.ac.uk)
Liz Mills, AFDA The School for the Creative Economy, Cape Town, SouthAfrica (LizM@afda.co.za).

Training Grounds editor
Dr Sara Reed, Independent researcher, writer and project manager (sbenhardreed@gmail.com) 

Touch and Training (Issue 14.2)
Global happenings throughout this past decade, such as ♯MeToo, ♯blacklivesmatter, Asian Spring, Arab Spring, the Marriage Act (2013 UK) and Russia’s “Gay Propaganda” law (2013), and COVID-19, have radically repositioned touch in performance and performer training. Touch is a socio-cultural event, a political act between two people as well as a network of power positions and layers of institutional infrastructure: who touches, how does/should one touch, why and when can/should touch occur? These questions when raised within performance traditions, theatre, film and television rehearsal and performance spaces and performer training studios ask creative artists to (re)consider the ways we think about, talk about and stage touch: for instance, the rise of the “intimacy coordinator” in response to concerns about the inequitability of touch during re-enactments of intimacy is only one of a number of recent developments in performance-related fields (re)considering the role of touch during the creative process.

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Haptic possibilities: practising physical contact as part of physically-distanced actor training

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Video still from the video documentation of the discussed introductory study of touch. It aims at suggesting movement through points of contact.

Introducing the project

This post offers a first glimpse to a wider practice-research project I started developing since the beginning of the pandemic in the UK in March 2020 and the Covid-19 implemented physical distancing guidelines. It is the first in an intended series of posts on the project, under the umbrella title ‘From haptic deprivation to haptic possibilities’. This research looks at how we can compensate for the current inability to experience haptic interrelations within and beyond actor-training environments, including the exploration of wearable haptics towards tactile ‘translations’.[1] Even though the specific investigations sprang out of the urgency of the current pandemic, it is already apparent that its findings and applications could have a clear impact post-pandemic as well.  

  

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