Touch as a feedback loop: exercising the leap from inertia to activation

Abstract

This article critically reflects on the facilitation of embodied practice in virtual spaces of teaching, learning and creation, specifically looking at ways of facilitating touch within the broader context of decolonising dance and movement practices in South Africa. When working without the touch of another (human)being, I explore how the affordances of environment and surfaces can offer a feedback loop for the sounding body in motion. The article draws from experiences of facilitating movement and physical theatre courses at the University of Pretoria to suggest how touch may become an embodied technique that structures practice in spaces of isolation and inertia and in times where notions of continuity and discontinuity are ruptured. I explore how walls, surfaces and objects become secondary affordances that offer an external force onto the body through tactility. Reading discourses of embodiment and decoloniality through one another, I further argue that using touch to re-initiate motion offers political possibilities to exercise the leap from inertia to activation, and trouble the colonially formed category of human.