Radical Touch
A collaborative practice as research with Florence Logan
Radical Touch is a movement-research project, in collaboration with contemporary performance practitioner Romi Sarfaty. Together, we form performance duo, Baby. This project consists of a performance duet titled It takes place in the Womb and a series of community workshops titled Touch Tales. Our performance duet has been supported through residencies with Co.Labs (Czech Republic) in 2023, CityMoves Dance Agency Aberdeen and Dance Base in 2024. ​We will be delivering our first series of Touch Tales ​workshops in collaboration with The Village Storytelling Centre and the Glasgow Women's Library in February and April 2025, supported by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's Make It Happen fund. ​​
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Inspired by female friendship and the phenomenon of mothering, specifically the way touch is used as a form of care and of communication, It takes place in the Womb works with platonic touch as its core choreographic principle – transforming ideas of feminine care into a distinct movement style. In a world that promotes efficiency in relationships, we choose to find all the ways to hug instead.
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This duet is antisocial and ‘aimless’ in its tenderness, pace and proximity, radical in its sweetness and drunk with hope. We hope our unconditional commitment to closeness encourages more unashamed acts of platonic affection, and pushes the audience to question their cynicism when faced with a performance void of conflict. It takes place in the Womb seeks to distill the human need for affection in its most extreme form by creating a world where only touch exists. This performance transforms every space into a womb, even if it doesn’t seem like one.
By experimenting with lifts and partner work, we work with the notion of real time/real effort by carrying and surrendering weight. The closeness in our duet is unconditional - we create images that embrace the inherent and endearing wonkiness, difficulty and desperateness of trying to be together, always.
Looking outside and seeing the violent disregard and carelessness of everyday touch, the loneliness crisis, the alienation and consequential aggression caused by insufficient and artificial forms of online connection, and the heightened fear of intimacy since the pandemic - it’s evident that we need to relearn how to care collectively, how to touch radically. We are communally failing to provide the touch and affection we need, failing to admit that we need it. According to the Mental Health Foundation, more than half of adults in Scotland hide their feelings of loneliness from other people. Our duet is in response to this.
This research is inspired by the notion of promiscuous care which, as the Care Collective writes, “does not mean caring casually or indifferently. It means caring more and in ways that remain experimental and extensive by current standards. They go on to write: "we have relied upon the ‘market' and the family to provide too many of our caring needs for too long. We need to create a more capacious notion of care”. We intend to practise promiscuous care in movement through the development of Radical Touch.
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Our Touch Tales workshops aim to create new care practices and principles of movement which put an emphasis on experimentation, community and inclusivity, inspired by the unblemished love of girlhood and profound yet practical care of mothering, in order to mitigate the current crisis of loneliness.​
In Radical Touch, we wish to deborder the body and to be unconditionally together in all its difficulties, against loneliness. Our work, sincerely melodramatic and desperately loving, is inspired by the following words of F.T Marinetti: “Intensify the communication and the fusion of human beings. Destroy the distances and the barriers that separate them in love and friendship. Give fullness and total beauty to these two essential manifestations of life: Love and Friendship.” We wish to explore platonic touch as a passionate, dramatic and unapologetic act and as a necessary way of communicating and living together.
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Although our research starting point was girlhood and mothering and working with people with experience of womanhood, we expand these thoughts around platonic care and connection into spaces for everyone, and believe it’s crucial to do so.