The Strokes
For The Strokes, I invited cellist Stellan Veloce to add music and composed noise as further dimensions of touch to the “phantom massage”—a performative practice that I developed for my solo project limb limb limb. In the phantom massage, I recall my hand gestures and haptic memory from giving therapeutic touch to massage clients. With precise focus, I reproduce the investigating and caring gestures and project them towards the spectators’ bodies and towards the architecture of the space. Eventually I concentrate the focus towards an imaginary body that is taking shape between my hands. The imaginary body comes to act as an ever-morphing proxy, intersecting performer and spectator.
The cello is here approached as a material proxy. With a shape resembling a human torso, it is treated through touch by the player, releasing soundwaves that vibrate the bodies of the audience in pleasurable and painful affect. In an intimate dialogue, Stellan Veloce and I are co-creating a space filled with phantom touch: long sliding strokes, intense pressure, and quick manipulations.
The Strokes embraces the dynamic qualities made possible through touch without physical limits. It queers common gendered connotations with therapeutic touch, conveying that "care" goes beyond the feminized properties that we usually ascribe to it. Care is healing, creative, playful, rough, expressive, and highly transformative. Even if they were not touched physically in a concrete way, the audience members might leave the performance feeling as if they have had a treatment: with an altered perception of their own bodies.
At the end of the performance, I recite a self-written text that interweaves actual elements in the performance space with an imaginary care facility. This act creates both an intimate connection with the shared room, and lets us imagine it differently, as a space for collective sensory healing.
The Strokes is a commissioned work as part of the choreographic format FEMALE GAZE - curation and concept by Carolin Brandl, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
Premiered at Schinkel Pavillon Berlin 24.2.2024
Duration: flexible / 30 min
Concept, choreography, performance: Tyra Wigg Music, performance: Stellan Veloce Outside eye: Thea Reifler Additionally supported by Basel Stadt Kultur
Photo:
Monika Karczmarczyk