TOUCH, FOR THE FIRST TIME
Connection across distance, between the physical and the virtual, existence and absence.
Category
Dance Performance
Motion Capture
Interactive Projection
Date
05/2025
Special Thanks
Collaborators
Sophia Schwaner (Dancer)
Irving Morris (Dancer)
Touch, For the First Time is a Multimedia Dance Theater Performance, harnessing Motion Capture to create interactive projections and soundscape.
A pair of self-designed hand trackers – one for the left hand, the other for the right hand – are given to two people separated by distance.
It could be physical distance, when we are apart from our loved ones.
It could be mental distance, when we first interact with a stranger.
It could be the uncrossable distance, when we miss those who reside in the other world.
Real-time projections of hands takes the form of sunlight -- filling the absence, and touching across space.
I've been fascinated by the sense of touch, the act of touching. It triggers demystification, closeness, a tangible relationship to something. Touch serves as a mechanism of calibration between us and others, us and the environment, us and ourselves.
As the digital realm is dominated by visual information, this performance explores possibilities of haptic relationship through an embodied multi-sensory experience.
Touch dwells in the liminal space between the tangible and the intangible, existence and absence.
