haptomai

a haptic piece is inviting you to touch it as it touches you

touching-touched, dance emerges in the hyphen, carving out a temporary autonomous zone.

Project Video

Abstract

“haptomai” is an ancient Greek word for touch. Its “-omai” ending employs a middle voice, which illuminates the mutuality of touch, that one is simultaneously touching and being touched. Touching-touched, dance emerges in the hyphen, carving out a temporary autonomous zone that are not bounded by fixed identities, in which our emergent relations are possible, in which I am woven into and becoming with others.

This project primarily draws upon my curiosity and practice in Contact Improvisation (CI) – an improvised dance form that invites practitioners to attend to and moving-moved by the emergent shared sensory experience via touch. Yet the research question sprouts from a chance encounter with and continuing practice in CI-inspired online jam since 2021. An inquiry often arising in our online practice has been: (how) can we share sensory experiences, where actual physical touch is absent online? Yet the “CI-ness” truly felt in these online practices enables me to realize that: touch does not end at one’s skin sac; it permeates and transmits through our attention. The embodied attention that touches virtually allows us to tune in to the dance with each other inclusive of various states i/she/he/they/it is in (the zoom-lagging, frozen, disconnection, immobility, not ready, out of tune…).

In inviting touching beings and things alongside you, dancing with more-than-humans, this project also attempts to offer an embodied approach to delve into the post-human ponderation on intra-active agency and entangled intentionality.

This haptic piece invites you to touch it, with your skin physically, or with your attention virtually, and ask: where is the co-presence of other beings and things that are the co-subject of my dance in this very moment? may I notice in a subtle yet wondrous scale inclusive of beings and things alongside me, participating in their shimmering, wiggling, and murmuring?

Photos