Touch Praxis
Touch Praxis is a collaborative project exploring touch as a time-based medium and co-creative knowledge practice. Through workshops, reading groups, interviews and touch improvisation, we research and practice different dimensions of tactility, from the high stakes context of viral transmission and police violence, to the consent negotiations woven through every part of our lives.
What is touch performance?
Our R+D program was focused on developing a collaborative touch ensemble, and exploring what touch performance might be. In a month of focused work, we held paid one-on-one sessions with Zena Bibler, Vanessa Cruz, Jessica Hemingway, Khalia Frazier, Odeya Nini, Tyby Reddy, Jaklin Romine, and Kim Ye. Through demonstration, discussion, exercises and improvisation, we shared parts of our practice and learned from each guest’s touch knowledge and experience.
With 8 practitioners we touched, improvised and felt our way through access, inclusion, consent, subjectivity, power, entanglement and alterity.
R+ D has allowed us to develop relationships, scores, facilitation methods, choreographic material, and to start defining parameters for touch performance. The funding from LAPP was redistributed as compensation for these collaborators, which we consider both a service to our community and an establishment of the equity standards to be followed in a future ensemble. Each of our sessions was recorded, and we will continue to engage with the rich video documentation to highlight insights and publish public resources in the form of transcripts and video edits.
Below are details about each of our sessions.
Zena Bibler
Zena is a dancer, choreographer, sensory researcher pursuing a critical understanding of race and gender dynamics in movement spaces. 
We explore ways of moving toward or away from touch; modulating the amount of pressure we give; ways to make or respond to requests for modifications; rough-housing, mosh-pits, “boops and bops”; expanding the notion of touch to include shared space, especially where kinespheres overlap (i.e., areas of potential touch).
Vanessa Hernández Cruz
Vanessa is a Disabled Chicana Dance Artist, writer & Disability Justice* activist with an interest in developing dances that intersect with film & mixed media art. 
We consider what happens to touch in long duration; rubbing to create heat (or fire?); how we might dismantle ableist desires for perpetual improvement, achievement, newness; backs touching backs; whether touch can defy virtuosity by indulging in the small, the simple and the same.
*Vanessa uses the term Disability Justice borrowed from Sins Invalid.
Khalia Frazier
Khalia is a performer, improviser, somatic trainer and wellness instructor who also offers consultation for inclusive curriculum and lesson design. 
We explore the mechanics of passive vs. active touching; the indulgence of receiving touch without needing to create it oneself; touch illusions from elementary school science class; body parts without names; touch anticipation; falling and suspension.
Jessica Hemingway
Odeya Nini
Odeya is an experimental vocalist, composer, teacher and mother, with an interest in resonance, textural harmony, gesture, tonal animation, and the illumination of minute sounds. 
We explore sound as touch at a distance; how to let feeling drive performance; the touch of air passing through the body; how to take care of an audience during challenging material; singing to the pelvis; ways that touch moves us, shakes us and wakes us up.
Tyby Reddy
Tyby is a trans-masculine, neurodivergent, chronically ill educator with a focus on trauma-informed embodied consent practices. 
Tyby shares his thoughts on platonic physicality; growing up without a lot of family touch; touch with non-humans; aromatic plant touch; touch and autism; his full-body response to touching a slimy piece of bread in the sink; ways of dialing up and closing off sensory attention, intensity and play.
Jaklin Romine
Jaklin is a queer, disabled, Latinx artist, activist, performer and zine-maker. 
Jaklin discusses tactility in her photo and textile works; the danger of touch happening in places she can’t feel; how to shape pupusas by hand; her fierce nails, which function as both self-expression and touch interface.
Kim Ye
Kim is a performer, artist, writer, sex worker, activist, mother, whose work explores power in relationships of exchange and intimacy. 
We explore the soft tactility and strains of pregnancy and motherhood; ways of spanking; how words touch; BDSM practices of restraint, suspension, pain and stimulation.
Upcoming: Next Steps!
We will be hosting a monthly small group session, through which potential collaborators can test out working together in an informal, no-commitment setting.
We are also seeking support to compensate ensemble members for future short-term intensives and/or group residencies, as well as potential performance opportunities.
If you are interested in getting involved with the ensemble or supporting this work, please reach out to us <touchpraxis@gmail.com>
More information about our R+D Program HERE
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Zena Bibler, Vanessa Cruz, Dorothy Dubrule, Don Edler, Khalia Frazier, Patricia Garza, Kai Hazlewood, Jessica Hemingway, Odeya Nini, Tyby Reddy, Jaklin Romine, Miranda Wright and Kim Ye. Additional camera work by Don Edler.
This work was done on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Gabrielino-Tongva people. We take this opportunity to acknowledge the generations that have gone before as well as the present-day Gabrielino-Tongva people. We also recognize the Chumash, Tataviam, Serrano, Cahuilla, Juaneno, and Luiseno People for the land that we work on in Southern California. We pay respects to their past and present.
About Nina & Selwa:
Nina Sarnelle & Selwa Sweidan are artists based on Tongva/Kizh land often referred to as Los Angeles. Their independent practices have circulated around touch and haptics for a long time. They began working together on this collaborative touch praxis at the beginning of the pandemic in Spring 2020. Together they’ve developed a research methodology consisting of workshops, prompts, interviews, reading, discussion and collaborative writing. They are deeply engaged in the performance scene in LA, having worked with NAVEL, Pieter, Culture Hub, Human Resources, FCCW, HomeLA, the Getty Center, Virtual Care Lab and other local organizations as performers, workshop leaders and/or curators.
Nina Sarnelle is a founding member of the Institute for New Feeling, with degrees from Oberlin College and Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has been shown at New Museum (NY), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Black Cube (Denver), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), Fundacion PROA (Buenos Aires), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Mwoods (Beijing) and many others.
Selwa Sweidan is an artist and researcher of emerging technologies. She has co-curated exhibitions and symposia including Beyond Embodiment, Performative Computation, STACKED Expo, Super Radiance and Clustering. She’s been published in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Journal and the Design Research Society; and exhibited at Bevilacqua Gallery, Center Du Pompidou, HomeLA, Spring/Break LA and UC Irvine. She holds degrees from Smith College and ArtCenter College of Design, and is currently an Annenberg PhD Fellow at the University of Southern California.
