Beyond the hands-touch : Queering intimacy through touch in contemporary dance

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to gain knowledge on what is particular to dancer-performers’ experiences of working with touch and intimacy in performative settings, and how the performers’ experiences of bodily boundaries become articulated in and through dance and movement practices that have to do with touch. Central to this research is how touch and the materiality of the body are understood in performative work with touch, as well as the power dynamics that become relevant within working groups and between performers and audiences, from the performers’ point of view. Further, the study examines the potentials of queering the logics of touch and intimacy through performative strategies. The performer’s embodied experience of working with choreographed touch is linked with feminist and queer theories of materiality and embodiment, drawing from new materialist, poststructuralist and phenomenological thinking. Additionally, touch and hapticity are approached through the lens of performance and media studies focusing on touch.

The research data consists of six semi-structured interviews. The interviews were conducted in January-March 2023 with professional dancer-performers who live and work in Europe as freelance performers and choreographers. The study was realized from the position of an insider researcher. Methods of reflexive thematic analysis, complemented with narrative analysis, were utilized to analyze what kinds of approaches and experiences the participants have related to work with touch in performative settings, what kinds of understandings of the body and touch they have and how vulnerability, trust and consent are present in intimate work.

Through the analysis the study proposes that work with touch in performative settings opens space for exploring intimacy in ways that contest normative social conduct. By focusing on relationality and the interconnectedness of the different senses, these spaces might generate senses of transformation, unknownness and merging together with someone or something, thus possibly widening the spectrum of everyday sensations. The participants used embodied and verbal rearticulations and imaginations of the concepts of the body and touch. Through these queered understandings sociality, responsibility and relationality could be practiced differently from the everyday normativity. However, the presence of gendered assumptions, heterosexist readings or lack of trust worked as limiting factors in the exploration.