Intro

NATURE OF THEATRES #23

Performing Arts Festival

TOUCH 2018-2020 <<< ND’T 2018 TENDER

The conceptual theme of the three-year period 2018-2020 And Touch. Inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy, with the Tenero tripartition in 2018, Smooth/Streaked in 2019 and Effort in 2020:

Tender presupposes touching, but also a moral predisposition. Touch is essential to the experience, to knowledge and emotional relationships, yet today we touch both things and people less and less. For Jean-Luc Nancy, existence is body, there is no other evidence than that of the body: “Our existence is touching: we touch each other as we exist. Our touch is what makes us us” (J.L.. Nancy, Being singular plural, 1996). The problem is: how the incorporeal of the word and the image touches the corporeal of the body and things? The touch that we are gradually taking away in everyday life returns to other aspects of our lives, particularly when we think, when we know, when we love. Knowing is touching. No longer with the hand but with the brain. A resonance of emotions, visions, memory. It comes from the relationship of bodies, the experience of one comes closer to the experience of the other when we share the ability to recognize ourselves as two bodies (“Already don't wait for your question / if I understood how you imagine yourself”, Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, IX-81). “The individual who empathizes is as if he were moving blindly towards the enigma of another's conscience. As an adventure of touching, of an impossible touching - as every touching is after all" (J. Derrida, Touch, Jean-Luc Nancy, 2000). In theater or dance the medium is always the body. The touch between words, thought, emotion becomes movement, rhythm, vibration, muscle tension. It's a light touch, tender as a Rilkian verse “Ce qui te rend présente,/it is the ardent detour/that a slow tenderness/describes in my own blood”, tender in the sense of the boundless strength of poetry that touches the stony heart of things.

Francesco Pititto and Maria Federica Maestri