Archiving the healing touch

Abstract

During my work as an actress in one-on-one performance, ‘Seek to Seek’ (2010), produced by Cantabile 2, and created by Nullo Facchini in Denmark, I created a scene that was repeated 240 times with 240 individual spectators. The central action of the scene was holding hands with the spectator. I consider this experience as a turning point in my craft as an actress and performance maker, a turning point based in training/developing my capacities for communication, expression and empathy via touch. The scene was written, choreographed and generally devised by me, and in collaboration with the director who is an expert of his own method in one-on-one performance. The scene was called ‘Empathy’. It was entirely based on autobiographical material, and basically using the re-enactment of the events of the last night that I spent with my husband a theatre director and professor of theatre studiesbefore he died in a fire at a theatre in the south of Egypt on 5 September 2005. The fire had killed 50 people, mainly artists and critics who were the audience of the theatre play ‘The Zoo’ (by Edward Albee). The event was traumatic, and produced a lasting and revolutionary grief within the theatre community in Egypt. Revisiting that event, re-enacting the actions of the night prior to the fire, triggered the trauma in me, even after five years of the actual happening. The training and process towards the creation of the scene included sessions of retrieving and reviving the sensorial memory of touch. This kind of memory was crucial to the scene as it sets not only the physical action to be executed with each single spectator, but also the emotional and sensorial field where the scene, ‘Empathy’, is supposed to take place. The work with touch, whether as a performative tool, a channel of communication, or as a source of knowledge for the actor, remains seldom visited. It is above all a place that is not welcomed in Egypt, as touch -especially between men and womenis a dangerous territory that might contradict with some morals and ethical beliefs. For me, also trained as a